"Not very likely—certain. It's one of the few things a man may be dogmatic about. It ought to be the prime article of faith. Now, you're a rich man, and you say you're going into politics—you're going to help prescribe for this sick old world. Very good. You have the more need to mark well how man's oppression of his brother recoils upon himself. It is accounted prosperity—'getting on in the world'—to be able to have a horde of grown-up, hardy men and women about you in your hot-house homes to wait upon you, to prevent you from doing any part of that work which alone will keep you whole. Why, as I think of it"—he tossed back his lion's mane with a fine contempt—"it sounds incredible this should be the rich man's own desire. It's like some cunning artifice practised by a nimble-witted slave upon an imbecile and cruel master, a slow but certain process of undoing. You not only pay another man to take away your means of health, you usually maltreat him. Think of it from the point of view of economy, you who are going into politics. The precious contrivance spoils two constitutions, not to speak of possible heirs. One man dying for lack of physical exercise, another killing himself by doing two men's—ten men's—share. You don't believe me. You are sitting there hugging some mental reservation."
"No, no," said Ethan, "I was only turning it over."
"I assure you I know whereof I speak. These men who grind the faces of the poor; these railroad magnates, manufacturers, corn kings, bankers, toiling day and night in stuffy offices—oh, I saw them in New York; I lived among them; I see them still"—his eyes blazed—"toiling, oppressing, cheating, to lay up riches. What have they in reality left to their children—a hoard of yellow gold? More than that; more than an inheritance of strained nerves and bending backs. They have left them the means of gratifying their sloth and their gluttony."
He took a turn up and down the room, shaking his head. He stopped suddenly before his nephew with a look of grim pleasure.
"It's poor comfort, but let the beggar in the street know himself revenged. The rich man, who has just refused him a dime to buy a dinner, goes home, and what he overeats and overdrinks, that would feed and revive the beggar, provides your rich man with his gout and fifty fine disorders unknown among the poor. When he refuses to share his dinner with the hungry, your Dives gets not only curses, but diseases of the digestive organs."
Ethan burst out laughing at the vindictive satisfaction of the climax.
"Come, can you deny it?" his uncle urged. "Drugs, kurs, baths—these are needed only to repair the waste of stupid living; they are substitutes for the right kind of labor and of fare, but they only patch the breach that simpler living would make whole."
"You make me think of James Benton. You know him by reputation?"
"Specialist?—nerves? Yes, very good man."
"Well, he'd been attending a fashionable woman in New York—for about ten years, he told me. She'd paid him enormous fees to run over from Boston and 'keep her going.' He was rather sick of it, and one day he said: 'Oh yes, I can vary the tonic and bolster you up for the season; but I could cure you, you know.' 'Brute!' she screamed, 'then why haven't you in all these years?' 'You won't take my medicine.' 'Which medicine?' 'Six months' service as housemaid in a farm-house in the White Mountains.'"