in "good society,"
has to pay for his house and the furniture contained in it, would have
enabled an Athenian to live in princely leisure from youth to old age.
The sum which he has to pay out each year, to meet the complicated
expense of living in such a house, would have more than sufficed to
bring up an Athenian family. If worthy Strepsiades could have got an
Asmodean glimpse of Fifth Avenue, or even of some unpretending street in
Cambridge, he might have gone back to his aristocratic wife a sadder but
a more contented man.

Wealth--or at least what would until lately have been called wealth--has
become essential to comfort; while the opportunities for acquiring
it have in recent times been immensely multiplied. To get money is,
therefore, the chief end of life in our time and country. "Success
in life" has become synonymous with "becoming wealthy." A man who is
successful in what he undertakes is a man who makes his employment
pay him in money. Our normal type of character is that of the shrewd,
circumspect business man; as in the Middle Ages it was that of the hardy
warrior. And as in those days when fighting was a constant necessity,
and when the only honourable way for a gentleman of high rank to
make money was by freebooting, fighting came to be regarded as an end
desirable in itself; so in these days the mere effort to accumulate has
become a source of enjoyment rather than a means to it. The same truth
is to be witnessed in aberrant types of character. The infatuated
speculator and the close-fisted millionaire are our substitutes for the
mediaeval berserkir,--the man who loved the pell-mell of a contest so
well that he would make war on his neighbour, just to keep his hand in.
In like manner, while such crimes as murder and violent robbery have
diminished in frequency during the past century, on the other hand such
crimes as embezzlement, gambling in stocks, adulteration of goods, and
using of false weights and measures, have probably increased. If Dick
Turpin were now to be brought back to life, he would find the New York
Custom-House a more congenial and profitable working-place than the
king's highway.

The result of this universal quest for money is that we are always in a
hurry. Our lives pass by in a whirl. It is all labour and no fruition.
We work till we are weary; we carry our work home with us; it haunts our
evenings, and disturbs our sleep as well as our digestion. Our minds are
so burdened with i