'Soon had his crew
Opened into the hills a spacious wound
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in hell: that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.'
The term 'almighty dollar' is stereotyped in modern slang, and yet the idea could not but have existed under other words in the days of those flush individuals, Midas and Crœsus. The first of these moneyed gentlemen found gold too plenty for comfort, while the latter, by his unfortunate end, proved that even at that early time riches had learned to fly away. Gold entered very largely into the politics of antiquity, and by this means Crassus got a partnership in the grand triumvirate of which Mark Antony and Octavius formed the more active parties. Poor Crassus found, however, that to be a sleeping partner in a concern was quite a dangerous position.
The danger in which money involves its possessor, is shown with dramatic power by Scott, in his splendid medieval dream, Ivanhoe—in the torture-scene, where the Jew is racked to obtain his gold. In connection with this, it may be noted as a surprising fact that while poverty has always been dreaded, it has ever been exempt from one term of peculiar wretchedness. With all his privation, who ever heard a poor man designated as a miser?
Wealth is a matter of comparison. The original term applied by the New-England savages to the white was, knifeman; the possession of one implement making the latter rich in the view of the Indian. What a vast investment in wampum would such a weapon be? Carrying out the same comparative idea, it is reported as one of John Jacob Astor's sayings: 'That a man worth fifty thousand dollars is as well off as though he was rich.' So strong is this comparative aspect, that the money-hunter finds his mark continually receding, and when he has attained his hundred thousand, he is appalled by finding himself but a mere beginner compared with others. He is but at the foot of the mountain which others have climbed, and which towers above him in
'Many a fiery, many a frozen Alp.'
Hence, there is nothing more clearly proven in the psychology of man than that accumulation utterly fails to fulfil the idea attached to riches; that is, satiety or even satisfaction, and there is often a bitter poverty of soul gnawing the owner of millions. The organic thought crops out of great and small alike. It is said that the chief of Boston merchants of the olden time, William Gray, when asked what would satisfy him, replied, 'A little more;' while the Indian to whom the same inquiry was made, replied with aboriginal simplicity: 'All the whisky and all the tobacco in the world.' 'Nothing else?' added the inquirer. 'Yes,' replied the Indian in an anxious tone, 'a little more whisky.' The same insatiable craving is shown in poor Isaac K——, the half-witted boy, whose droll sayings of a half-century ago are still remembered about Boston. 'Father,' he one day exclaimed, 'I wish every body was dead but you and me.' 'Why so, my son?' 'Why, then, father, you and I would go out and buy all the world.'
The power of gold to inflict pain on its possessor suggests deep philosophical inquiry. Even at a superficial view, one can not but be struck by the fatal facility which it affords to vice on the one hand, while on the other, how many suffer untold distress from the miser's self-inflicted poverty? There are multitudes of ruined youth, who, had they been bound to labor instead of being reared to a life of affluent ease, would have become useful men. Indeed, by merely changing the costume of Hogarth's Rake's Progress, we may see it enacted by scores of young men in any of our leading cities. The writer once knew a worn-out debauchee of thirty, who, even at that early age, had got rid of an inheritance of a half-million.
The miseries of poverty are severe, and such men as Johnson and De Quincey have painted them in colors drawn from their own experience; but what scenes vastly more terrible might they not have sketched had they held that master-key which unlocks the abodes of pleasure and summons the dreadful crew of temptation?
One can not but pity the former of these, as he thinks of his wandering the live-long night through the streets of London, unable to buy a lodging, and eating each occasional meal, not knowing when he would get another. Yet, had as this might have been, how vastly more pitiable would his case have been, had he fulfilled the infernal career of some of his rich cotemporaries, such as Lord Lyttelton or Lord Euston, whose dying horrors Young has so thrillingly described in his Altamont. Horace, who had so thoroughly studied the philosophy of life, could refer to his lowly condition:
'Sæva paupertas et avitus apto
Cum lare fundus:'