Before all days are made holidays, all men should become heroes.
II. Money-making, its Laws and its Limits.
There are some prayers which belong to the universal Religion of Humanity, and none more so than this, which is found in the oldest prayer-book of the Aryan race, the Rig Veda,—“O Lord, prosper us in the getting and the keeping!” “To make money” is certainly the “soul’s sincere desire” of most citizens of the world at the present day, and nowhere is it more fervently uttered than in this country.
This is no discredit. So far as we can trace the history of man from the Old Stone Age upward, the one efficient motive to his progress has been the acquisition and preservation of property. This has been the immediate aim of all his arts and institutions and the chief incentive to individual exertion. The time may come—indeed, there are signs of its approach—when nations will consciously aim at some other than a property career, and individuals will perceive that the purpose of riches is something else than to offer facilities for their further increase or for inglorious ease.
In this devotion to the accumulation of property men have not been led astray by what Shakespeare so magnificently calls—
“The prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.”
Material resources are the indispensable requisites to progress. The miseries of poverty are manifest, and there are none greater. The utterly poor man is condemned to servitude and suffering, the woman to degradation. The imperative demands of the animal wants quench the finer elements of character, and the brutal stamps out the human in the desperate struggle for existence.
What wonder that the pauper turns in bestial fury against the rich, who flaunt before him a superfluous luxury? But his passion springs from his ignorance.