But in social questions the laws of individual morality are often reversed.
It is _the social duty_ of every less prosperous class of citizens, their duty towards the whole of the coming generation as well as to their own children, to measure their own progress solely by a standard raised in accordance with the point in evolution that society has attained.

What would have been comparative luxury a hundred years ago it is our duty to view as nothing less than a degrading and life-destroying poverty to-day.
Opportunity is not becoming equal.

The tendency is in the opposite direction, and not all the reforms of "State Socialism" promise to counteract it.

The _citizen owes it to society_ to ask of every proposed program of change, "Will it, within a reasonable period, bring equality of opportunity ?" To rest satisfied with less--a so-called tendency of certain reforms in the right _direction_ may be wholly illusory--is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's children, but to rob society of the only possible assurance of the maximum of progress.
FOOTNOTES: [83] Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," Vol.

II, p.