THE FASCINATION OF MONEY.

Waikato Times, Volume III, Issue 158, 13 May 1873, Page 2

THE FASCINATION OF MONEY.

A bkcint English eisay on the »übject above noted will be found, applicable, in some of its particulars, to the American, disposition. The struggling professional man, says the writer, looks on a quarter of & million as Aladdin's lamp,, but if he had it he would, in ten yean, wonder why he could do with bo little. His first emotion would be s desire to make hit money quite safe ; hit next, unless he was abnormally un-English, to possess a " place ; " and his next, to be rid of the worry of eawful superrision. When he had obeyed these three iastincts) he would find that he had inrested his money — the purchase of land included — at about 3£ per cent., that he had two establishments to keep up, that he had lost hi*, old scale of calculation about all expenses, and that the £8000 > a year be was receiving was a very moderate income, out of whicbif 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-chancellor Malms, who decided, no doubt wissly in the case before him, that great gifts were so improper that a solicitor who drew up deeds conveying thorn ought to be soundly fined for lending his skill to/assist in such deplorable acts of weakness. Until he received a very high figure indeed the Mnse 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 sense, of the difficulty of doing anything great, that is scientifically great, out of the surplus income. Two milions will accom- I plish much, but a- year's surplus, say £40,000, will do bu I very little. The interests of ordinary life being gone — for! after afT it is difficult to work anything except politics wh«|ffll the money payment for the work has lost all meaning— he^ would have to discover a new one, and would find it either I in accumulation^or in building, or in buying, the latter a I taste which can become a sovereign passion. The Medicean I habit of mind would come upon him like a cloud, and he I would find that of all his dreams not one could be realized I w ithout immense self-sacrifice, which he would have rather less energy to mate them imdays when he dreamed of making it. And yet he would not b« changed, but would only feel tht old fascination of money in » new and slightly Ins imaginative form. We are inclined to believe that thin fascination of money, this desire for it as an instrument of power, increases immensely with the spread of culture and of what we call civilisation — that so far from its beiag felt mainly by vulg»r I minds, it is affecting powerful and liberal minds far more I deeply. They realise the might of cash much more strongly I than their .inferiors. Yoa can mark the truth of that ■ sentence in the writings of men like Beckford, of " AnßSta-fl sius" Hope— of Edgar Poe— a born millionaire who never* had a shilling— of Ben Johnson— of the heaps of modern! writers who us« wealth as an uistrumeat of bliss. This spirit le 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 honourable poverty, real poverty, is the best condition for the servants of the people, and they look at you and answer you as if they were teaching that an officer or an official should be debarred from all righteous enjoyment*,— are, in fact, not so much disaffected to the theory as hurt *nd chagrined at its production. It is then like an insult. Bnt when Gibbon first made the remark, it was welcomed as being wise and wiW^B ring in it of true nobility. r*fl

The other day a fanner raiding at Duck Ponds went to purchase some stores in Geelong, and on his return homo, opening a bag of sugar, he was surprised and delighted to fiud a massive gold ring containing a handsome gero of unknown value. The tinder has since been offered £5 for it, but tefuses to part with it on account of its exceptional value as a prcteut from Mauritius. — Qulgong Advertiser.