And in this generation money has attained an extraordinary value. Since Dr. Johnson announced, in his Tour to the Hebrides, that the feudal system was giving way to wealth, most other social distinctions have yielded to it,—particularly in America, where there were few barriers to break down,—and money has become the chief good. Our standard of position in society is financial worth. Our patents of nobility are railway bonds, stock certificates, and mortgages. The income-return list of the United States Internal Revenue Department is the Libro d'Oro of the American Venice. In this age of scepticism, the excellence of accumulated capital is the one thing no man doubts; and when I take off my hat to a rich man, which I always do when I meet him, I feel that I cannot be mistaken in paying respect to something demonstrable, tangible, real.
Money furnishes all the blessings of life in this Western World,—health, beauty, wisdom, virtue, consideration; and some theologians have held that even the eye of the needle may expand to admit the camel who has dropped enough of his precious burden upon their premises.
If wealth cannot always give health, it can help to preserve it; it is the best of physicians.
There is nothing so becoming as property. "Handsome is who handsome has," is the accepted modern version of the old saw.
If a rich man does not pass for sensible and good, it is his own fault. Wisdom can be bought, generally at low prices; and virtue is always assumed to be an attribute of Fortune except in moral didactic treatises. A cubic ounce of gold can be beaten to cover fourteen hundred and sixty-six square feet; and a skilful capitalist can make it hide quite as large an area of meanness.
What weight an income adds to a man's sayings and doings! Your lucky broker, who has just turned a corner in stocks with a fortune, thinks Two Shillings has no right to an opinion when Half a Dollar is in the room. Although a man with a threadbare coat may say anything now-a-days, in spite of the Roman satirist, he can get no one to listen to him. Even genuine wit, like a good picture, shows better in a gilt frame with the varnish of success upon it.
It is not surprising that young men want money, and much of it, and quickly.
There is another stumbling-block in the path of steady work. Politically our progress in democracy is complete; but socially we hang back. The aristocracies of Europe despised trade; with us trade is an aristocracy that looks down upon manual labor,—an aristocracy with its gradations of rank and of titles, from merchant-prince to pedler. All who buy and sell consider themselves as belonging to the peerage of business. And as the petite noblesse of France liked to take a better title and gayer armorials than belonged to them, so our lesser nobility and gentry are fond of using a brevet business-title considerably above the position they really fill. They are ashamed of the old English words that have designated their callings for centuries. We all know that shops and shopkeepers are not to be found in the United States. Even thread-and-needle establishments and apple-stands are stores. Within sight of where I write, a maker of false calves, and other cotton or sawdust contrivances to supply the padding which careless Nature often forgets to furnish, calls his workshop a studio. If I were to use the word "slops" in a "ready-made clothing depot," the Sir Piercie Shafton who keeps it would summarily expel me for my lack of euphemism. As a general rule, everybody is above his business, and thinks manual labor mean, and only fit for emigrants.
It is said that our mechanics are nearly all foreigners, and that an American apprentice is an extinct species, like the cave bear or the dodo. Farmers' sons prefer any way of getting their bread to working with their hands. The pedler's caste ranks higher than the manly independence of the plough. A country store is an object of ambition, where the only toil is to deal out a glass of wretched tipple to the village sots who haunt those castles of indolence to drink, to smoke, and to twaddle over stale village news. Some young fellows solicit subscriptions for maps or for great American works, or drum for fruit nurseries, patent clothes-wringers, or baby-jumpers. Others aspire to enter the religious mendicant orders of America as paid brethren. They are too proud to work, but not ashamed to beg. Beg is perhaps a hard word; but solicitation is begging when the solicitor personally profits by it.
The sons of trading fathers despise the old tiresome roads to wealth of their class. Ledgers and law-books are too slow. All are in search of the short cut to fortune. They believe in the philosopher's stone as implicitly as the alchemists; they seek for it as earnestly. It is a jewel that will last forever, but its composition varies with each generation.