THE FASCINATION OF MONEY.

Tuapeka Times, Volume VI, Issue 269, 27 March 1873, Page 9

THE FASCINATION OF MONEY.

(From the l ' Spectator.") The struggling professional man looks on a quarter million as Aladdin's lamp,Jbut if he had it Jie would in ten years wonder why he could do so little. His first emotion would be a desire to make his money quite safe.; his next, unless he was abnormally un- x English, to possess a " place ;" and his next, to be rid of the worry of careful supervision. When he lias obeyed these three instincts, he would find that he had invested his money — the purchase of laud included — at about 3^ per cent, that he had two establishments to keep up, that he had lost his old scale of calculation about all expenses, and tbat the £9,000. a year he was receiving was a very moderate income, out of which if he gave away a tenth he would be very liberal indeed. The idea of giving on a great scale would frighten him. as it frightens Vice- Chan eel lor Malms, who on Tuesday decided, no doubt wisely in the case before him, that great gifts were so improper that a solicitor who drew up the deeds conveying them ought to be soundly fined for -lending his skill to assist in such .deplorable acts of weakness. Until he reached a xorj high figure indeed, tho sense of wealth would not come to him, and even when he had reached that figure there would remain the reluctance to part with capital, and a new sen?e of the difficulty of doing anything great, that is ascenically groat, out of the surplus income. Two millions will accomplish much, but a year's surplus, say of £40,000 will do but. very little. The interests of ordinary life being gone — for after 'all, it is difficult to work at anything but politics when the money payment for the work has lost all meaning — he would have to discover a new one, and would find it either in accumulation, or in building, or in buying, the latter a taste which can become a sovereign pasrion. The Medicean hab.it of mind would come upon him li!:o a cloud, and he would find that erf all his dreams not one could be realised without immense self-sacrifice, which he would have rather less energy to make than in days when he dreamed of making it. And yet he would not be changed, but would only feel the old fascination of money in a n:w and slightly less imaginative form.

We aro inclined to believe that this fascination of money, this des-ire. for b a 1 * an instrument of power, increases immensely with the spmirl of culture and of what we call civil iz\tion — that so far from it being felt mainly by vulgar minds, it is afTucling* powerful and liberal minds far more deeply. They realise the might of cash much more strongly than their inferiors.

You can 'mark the truth of that sentence in the writings of men like Beckford, of " Anastasius " Hope, of Edgar Poe — a born millionaire who never had a shilling — of Ben Jonson, of the heaps of modern writers who use wealth as the instrument of bliss. This spirit is not sordid, it is not even mean ; but it is earthly, and it begins to be injurious. Tell a group of state servants, all of the higher and more intellectual class, that the modern hunger for salaries is all wrong, that honorable poverty, real poverty, is the best condition for the servants of the people, and they look at you and answer you as if you were teaching that an officer or an official should be debarred from all righteous enjoyments — are, in fact, not so much disaffected to the theory as hurt and chargined at its production. It hits them like an insult. Yet when Gibbon first made the remark ii was welcomed as being wise and with a ring in it of true nobility. So strong is the fascination, tbat it is positively discrediting the learned professions, which, as the knowing men will remark, in a grave monitorial tone, are " now-a-days traps for the inexperienced." Caste feeling is still strong, and professional men hesitate to bring up their sons " to-business," and resort to the whimsical compromise of encouraging them' to adopt any profession except their own, — "because that you see, John, is quite full," — but the class most enfranchised from caste bondage, the higher aristocracy, stretches out its bands for the glittering prize with a somewhat repulsive avidity,. It is the fashion to hail the announcement that a Duke's son deals in tea as a sign of progress — we have hailed it as such ourselves — and no doubt it is a sign of increasing clearness of social perception," of a disposition to be more realistic in judging of the gains of life. But that obsolete old prejudice which compelled a noble to serve the State, and the State only, to take reward only "from the King, to be a poor officer, or a poorer clergyman, or a shivering aitachtf, rather than a wealthy trader, hrfd in it something of nobility too, something ia many oases higher, though also in many cases lower, than our modern hardness of realism. The man who, having to earn his living, is ashamed to earn it in a shop is an ass ; but the mar. who prefers £3000 a year iv the Civil Service, say, or the Army, to £5,030 a year in trade, may olten make a choice far more inspiring for his own higher nature. The gradual decline of the professions in the social scala will not be an unmixed good, tending as it must to the development of that fascination of money which is already pulverizing prejudice and will end by overbearing intellectual conviction.

The change of manners under which an aristocrat will be thought to lower himself by turning physician, or barrister, or journalist, but not to lower himself by selling goods, because the goods may yield a fortune, and the profession can only \ield an income, will not, we suspect, be unmixed with evil, and it is immediately at hand. It will certainly injure the state, which will be driven to rely, year by year, more on the "competition wallah," the esurient man of new culture thirsting for money ; and it may injure che community, which must fall every day more under the influence of money-makers — that is, of the men who need only have the faculties necessary for business success, invaluable faculties, no doubt, but not those which made of two petty Mediterranean States two sources of perpetual light to succeeding mankind. Sir A. Helps, with all his worship of Mr. Brassey — a most favorable specimen of the character — would hardly aver that he could have made Athens or turned back the Jews from the worship of any but the one God, feats accomplished for mankind, the one by a minute caste of pleasure-loving slaveholders, the other by an Arab aristocrat bred a courtier in the most tyrannical and dissolute of Oriental Courts. That seems to us the worst of the fascination of money.