1

and Mill, but through experience of protested notes and ruinous speculations; and economic principles of the most elementary character are frequently purchased at the expense of whole fortunes. It costs some men a hundred thousand dollars to learn the relations which subsist between supply and demand. Indeed, principles level to trade are clearly perceived only by minds which survey them from a higher level. Pure selfishness never generalizes. Its guiding idea is best expressed in the imperfect English of the French coxcomb, "Every man for myself."

We therefore are reluctantly compelled to believe that the notorious abuses of our credit system, the frightful commercial revulsions they occasion, and the 、 agrarian laws they practically inaugurate, will continue to afflict the country as long as so much absurd and mischievous importance is attached to the idea of wealth, and as long as it is pursued with such ravenous intensity. The desire of wealth is the dominant desire of the larger portion of our population, a desire not so much to create wealth by industrial genius as to get it by speculative ingenuity. The morbid phenomena presented in our world of business only embody in palpable facts qualities of our national character. The intellect of the country is under the dominion of a low order of motives, which prevent it from exercising the higher functions of intellect. Smart men push themselves into the places of able men; and their only notion of progress is speed which trusts in luck, with no discernment of paths, and no foresight

of the goal. Now, business cannot be honestly and intelligently conducted when it is conducted under the simple impulse of getting money at any rate. That honesty is the best policy is a principle too large and general to influence the bargain or speculation of the hour; and so flashy and superficial is much of the mind engaged in trade, that it lacks thought sharply to discriminate between acuteness and knavery, a wise reticence and direct falsehood. Half of the light. and airy swindlers whose schemes of business rapine end in failure are unconscious of the true nature of their misdeeds, and are really surprised at the hard names sputtered out by the gruff honesty of the old fogies of commerce when their equivocal modes of obtaining money are brought to light. At the worst, they probably conceived their creditors would indulge in language no harsher than that in which little. Isaac, in "The Duenna," chuckles over his sharp practice: "Roguish, perhaps, but keen-devilish keen!"

And if wealth and poverty are respectively the heaven and hell of our concrete religion, why wonder that men will do anything to obtain the one and escape from the other? "Worth makes the man," says a character in one of Bulwer's plays; "and the more a man is worth the worthier he is." Sydney Smith once declared that in England "poverty is infamous;" and in the United States, where man was supposed to have achieved some victory "over his accidents," the accident of property domineers in the

sor.

public mind over the substance of mind and virtue. To be poor is to be a "poor devil." It is pathetic to observe the moral prostration of our free and independent citizens before some affluent boor or wellinvested booby; or to watch the complacent simper that comes over the face of scornful beauty as she listens to the imbecilities chattered by some weak stripling of fortune who presents to the eye of science nothing but " a watery smile and educated whisker." These follies proceed from no respect for what the rich are, but from a worship of what they possess. Indeed, the worship of the wealth is often combined with a secret contempt, hatred, or envy, of the possesProperty makes a distinction between man and man as arbitrary and artificial as aristocratic privilege; and our people feel that the doctrine of equality the doctrine that one man is as good as another can only be realized by striving to make one man as rich as another. For one person who pursues wealth as an end, from the impulse of avarice, there are hundreds who pursue it as a means, from the impulses of vanity, sensuality, egotism, and the desire to make a good appearance. If the capitalist asserts himself socially as an aristocrat, the democrat trades recklessly on what he borrows from the capitalist in order to be as good an aristocrat as he. A few affluent families, composed miscellaneously of millionnaires vulgar and millionnaires refined, of millionnaires intelligent and millionnaires stupid, combine together, and impudently attempt to confine the meaning of "good

society" to the possession of a splendid establishment in a fashionable street, with a large income to support it; and it is curious to see with what ludicrous simplicity their pretensions are admitted, and with what wear and tear of brain and conscience, with what sacrifices of health, comfort, and honor, thousands aim to qualify themselves for entrance into that terrestrial paradise. Under this system the style of living quickly becomes of more importance than the pleasure of living or the object of living. Life means the appearances of life. It means houses, equipages, dress, dinners, a crowd of servants, reception into the awful company of fops and belles, everything but human souls. A higher life-slightly changed from the definition of the idealist - means a life exalted from West Broadway to the Fifth Avenue. Without ten thousand a year it is impossible to be and know ladies and gentlemen. Existence is fretted away in desperate attempts to make it splendid, conspicuous, and uncomfortable; and after the object is reached, it is found to be a stupendous imposture. As regards any satisfaction in life, it is much better to adopt the theory of that unsophisticated mechanic who asserted that he was as rich as the richest man in town, and supported his assertion by this train of argument. The rich man, he said, had only what he wanted, and he had the same. In regard to luxuries, he doubted if the rich man could claim any superiority; "for at his house they had doughnuts for dinner every day, whether they had company or not." The ideal of

good living may not have been high, but there was something sublime in the content.

Now one great result of such a panic as we have lately witnessed is, that it disenchants the mind of the illusions created by the hope of wealth, and the vanities created by the ambition for social position. People, at least sensible people, learn what substances they are and what "shadows they pursue." Events preach to them truths which the most persuasive preachers would fail to convey. And among these truths there is none more important, or more fertile of sobering reflections, than the truth that what a man invests in trade and industry, in railroads and manufactures, is not merely his labor, or talent, or money, but himself; and that property, resting as it does on a deceitful basis of fluctuating values, is among the least solid and permanent of all the things in which a man can invest himself. This proposition would have been scouted as transcendental a year ago; but within a few months the most practical of men have been compelled to admit that wealth, with all its bullying solidity of appearance, has proved the most visionary, elusive, and transcendental of abstractions. The idealists have convicted the materialists of mistaking the shifting sand for the immovable rock, and it is now their turn to dogmatize from the throne of common sense. Facts have demonstrated two of their propositions, which are most repugnant to selfishness and evident to reason: first, that the commercial world being a unit, shocks in one quarter are felt