Page:Bierce - Collected Works - Volume 09.djvu/45

Rh inaccessible through lack of efficiency; and from envy to revenge and revolution the transition is natural and easy.

In the youth of a nation there is virtual equality of fortunes — all are poor. Sixty years ago there were probably not a half dozen millionaires in America; the number now is not definitely known, but it runs into thousands; that of persons of less but considerable wealth — enough to take attention — into the hundreds of thousands. Poverty used to be rather proud of our millionaires ; they were so few that the poor man seldom or never saw them, to mark the contrast between their abundance and his privation. Now the two are everywhere neighbors. The poor man sees " the idle rich " (who mostly work like beavers) in their carriages, while himself walks and, if it please him so to do, "takes their dust." He looks into the windows of ballrooms and erroneously believes that the gorgeous creatures within are happier than he. If he happen to be so intellectual as to be distinguished in letters, art or some other profitless pursuit as to be sought by them, all the keener is his sense of the difference; all the more humiliating his inability to suffer their particular kind of disillusion. Partly because