Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/724

704 key to the limitless satisfaction of desire, as the great emancipator from the otherwise hard conditions of life. In the days when wealth was associated with political power and responsibility, there was a kind of mute feeling in the multitude that such a combination required special qualities of mind and character which were not within the compass of all. To-day wealth stands by itself, wholly divorced in the popular mind from the notion of responsibility; and there is none so poor as not to consider himself fully qualified for the possession of any amount of it. It is not too much to say that many desire wealth, whether they are distinctly conscious of it or not, on account of the irresponsibility which they think or feel goes with it.

That this is not a healthful condition of the popular mind need hardly be insisted on. Yet it not only exists, but it is fed and ministered to in a thousand ways, and combated but in few. The rich, for the most part, justify by their mode of living and the education they give their children the popular idea of the irresponsibility of wealth. Their "pile" is made: henceforth let others labor for them. In their relations with the laboring classes they too often show a masterfulness bordering on tyranny. The conditions of business, they will perhaps say, if for a moment anything in the way of an excuse seems needed, make it necessary to be very authoritative and absolute in dealing with those whom they employ. Perhaps so, but all the same the situation is not a good one; for, just in proportion as relations of sympathy cease to exist between employer and employed, does the rich man rely more and more upon the power of his wealth, and the poor man look upon wealth as the one thing that counts in differentiating human beings from one another. In his idea it is not the "boss" who makes the wealth, it is the wealth that makes the "boss."

That the daily press greatly tends to intensify the all but universal worship of wealth is obvious to every reader. Everything is measured and discussed in terms of money. Other things, such as literature, art, science, and religion, are treated as the non-essentials: money is the essential. To express it otherwise, the former are all partial—some of them very partial—interests; money is the universal interest. The Armenian atrocities awoke much apparent and some real indignation; but how much action did they set in motion compared with the discovery of gold on the Klondike? The whole political movement of the country is based on money considerations. The offices which still remain within the politician's grasp are the mainspring of all his efforts, while those which the civil-service law has removed from his control give him the feelings which a bird seen through a closed window gives to the necessary cat. Popular education, too, is laid out upon lines which point to the supremacy of money as an object of human desire. Not first the health of the body or the health of the mind, or the harmony of the human faculties, or the right ordering of the affections, but first the preparation for grasping money. And so our schools turn out into the world annually vast multitudes of would-be money-graspers—though many of them are none too well prepared even for that function—and an extremely limited number of individuals who have imbibed any true mental or moral culture as the result of from five to ten years' alleged education.

The extraordinary amount of attention bestowed upon sport and other forms of amusement in the