On

by Hilaire Belloc

But to be able to purchase the services of men thus (I am only speaking of my own trade, but all other trades are equally purchasable, and the lawyers actually advertise that they are purchasable!)—to be able, I say, to purchase services thus is a category ridiculously neglected by those who pretend that money brings nothing but material enjoyment.

It brings, for instance, immunity from the criminal law. At least it does to-day. It did not until modern times even here, but it does to-day. If you doubt it, take a little bit of paper and mark the men who have been sent to prison during your own lifetime while possessed (not after having been possessed) of five thousand a year. It is an instructive winter game.

But if money can purchase services it can also, with less certitude, but on a very large scale, purchase those other little things we noted—the souls of men. Here there is a distinction.

When you purchase a service you do not necessarily purchase a soul. You only purchase a soul when, by the action of your money, you corrupt the individual. I do not say "corrupt him beyond all salvation," but, at any rate, beyond any remaining desire for salvation. When, for instance, by the possession of money, you acquire the respect of a man, you are, to a small extent, purchasing his soul. When by the action of money you make a man fall into certain habits which at last become his character, you are purchasing a soul.

I keep on saying "you," though I know well enough, wretched reader, that you are in no position to do all this. In fact, you find it the devil and all to purchase what is necessary for your household. If you are a man with a thousand a year, for instance (there have just passed my window three men with a good deal less, not judged by their clothes but by my knowledge of them in a countryside), then you are worth what was called before the war about four hundred pounds a year. Taxation and Inflation, the twin gods that rhyme, have done for the rest.

If you are what they called before the war a rich man (you will excuse me, but random essays are read by all sorts of people), if you were, say, a squire with six thousand a year, you are now worth what your local scribbler at two thousand a year was worth before the war. Horrible but true. So when I say "you," I only do so by way of rhetoric and of shorthand. I cannot be pestered to know what each of you is exactly worth, and, upon my soul, as things now are, I do not think any one of you exactly knows.

To return. I say that money, acting thus, purchases souls. It purchases souls not only in regardant, but in gross. In regardant, I may explain, means "as regards the particular relation between one soul and its purchaser," while in gross means "of the world in general."

Thus a man may be a serf regardant when he is a serf to a particular lord, but not a serf in his general status. Or he may be a serf in gross, that is, a serf to anybody who comes across him. And in the same way, there is a cad regardant and a cad in gross, and still more is there a coward regardant and a coward in gross. For instance, a man may be a general coward, and that is being a coward in gross, or he may be a particular coward in the matter of riding a particular horse, and then he is only a coward regardant.

I say, then, that the power of your money to purchase souls may be in gross or regardant. It may purchase a particular soul, in which case, God help you! Or it may have a general effect upon All Souls (I mean not the College but the generality of mankind, for whom I postulate souls), and in this case you are not perhaps very much to blame. It is rather their fault than yours.

When your money has purchased souls in gross—gross souls in gross and grossly purchased by the gross—it means that you are worshipped for your money, and this is as common a worship as the worship men give to their country.