their
interests in order to meet future contingencies. So most of them
maintain their position. These few remarks about capital and interest
are not applicable to commercial life, for merchants look upon money
only as a means of further gain, just as a workman regards his tools;
so even if their capital has been entirely the result of their
own efforts, they try to preserve and increase it by using it.
Accordingly, wealth is nowhere so much at home as in the merchant
class.

It will generally be found that those who know what it is to have
been in need and destitution are very much less afraid of it, and
consequently more inclined to extravagance, than those who know
poverty only by hearsay. People who have been born and bred in good
circumstances are as a rule much more careful about the future, more
economical, in fact, than those who, by a piece of good luck, have
suddenly passed from poverty to wealth. This looks as if poverty were
not really such a very wretched thing as it appears from a distance.
The true reason, however, is rather the fact that the man who has been
born into a position of wealth comes to look upon it as something
without which he could no more live than he could live without air; he
guards it as he does his very life; and so he is generally a lover of
order, prudent and economical. But the man who has been born into a
poor position looks upon it as the natural one, and if by any chance
he comes in for a fortune, he regards it as a superfluity, something
to be enjoyed or wasted, because, if it comes to an end, he can get on
just as well as before, with one anxiety the less; or, as Shakespeare
says in Henry VI.,[1]

.... _the adage must be verified
That beggars mounted run their horse to death_.

[Footnote 1: Part III., Act 1., Sc. 4.]

But it should be said that people of this kind have a firm and
excessive trust, partly in fate, partly in the peculiar means which
have already raised them out of need and poverty,--a trust not only of
the head, but of the heart also; and so they do not, like the man born
rich, look upon the shallows of poverty as bottomless, but console
themselves with the thought that once they have touched ground again,
they can take another upward flight. It is this trait in human
character which explains the fact that women who were poor before
their marriage often make greater claims, and are more extravagant,
than those who have brought their husbands a rich