Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/198

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does not find himself complete, however, as a god in a vacuum. His rule requires a realm. Things furnish that realm. The lordship of man over man occurs wherever force can assert it, and the sense of justice does not estop it. When men cannot or will not lord it over each other there still remains to them a means of partially completing the circuit of self-realization in the lordship over things. Things subject to personality is the for- mula of a second stage or phase of the completeness of the real individual. It is part of complete human personality to exercise lordship over things. The savagery of the savage is primarily his inability to lord it over things. In the midst cf limitless resources of ores and fibers and forces he commands nothing, he marshals nothing, he compels nothing to his service. His wealth is raw roots and flesh and pelts, and tools that the monkevs may have used, and used about as well. He begins to be a man in beginning to take completer possession of things, in ordering them about, in molding them to his will, in mastering them at the caprice of his imagination. The truth is, the modern vice is not too much devotion to wealth, but too little. Our materialism is too extensive, but not intensive enough. It puts up with quan- titative title instead of qualitative possession.

Perhaps there is a literal truth which we have overlooked in the dictum of St. Paul: "The love of money is the root of all evil." Money is the emptiest wealth which men possess. Money is the opium of industry. The vice of money is its insinuation into the place of wealth. Money debauches men by leading them to substitute for the exercise of the possessing function habitual purchase of personal service. Money is a subtle means of tempting men from normal lordship over things to abnormal lordship over persons. Money makes men veritable rois f aidants in the realm of things.

The Mosaic code contains the precept: "And thou shalt take no gift : for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous." 1 Money is a conventional disguise of gift- taking. This is not an estimate of the total function of money, but a statement of one of the forms of abuse to which money

r Exod. 23 :8.