can such virtue as I possess find
scope. More than half a century of existence has taught me that most of
the wrong and folly which darken earth is due to those who cannot possess
their souls in quiet; that most of the good which saves mankind from
destruction comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness. Every day
the world grows noisier; I, for one, will have no part in that increasing
clamour, and, were it only by my silence, I confer a boon on all.

How well would the revenues of a country be expended, if, by mere
pensioning, one-fifth of its population could be induced to live as I do!

V.

"Sir," said Johnson, "all the arguments which are brought to represent
poverty as no evil, show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find
people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a
plentiful fortune."

He knew what he was talking of, that rugged old master of common sense.
Poverty is of course a relative thing; the term has reference, above all,
to one's standing as an intellectual being. If I am to believe the
newspapers, there are title-bearing men and women in England who, had
they an assured income of five-and-twenty, shillings per week, would have
no right to call themselves poor, for their intellectual needs are those
of a stable-boy or scullery wench. Give me the same income and I can
live, but I am poor indeed.

You tell me that money cannot buy the things most precious. Your
commonplace proves that you have never known the lack of it. When I
think of all the sorrow and the barrenness that has been wrought in my
life by want of a few more pounds per annum than I was able to earn, I
stand aghast at money's significance. What kindly joys have I lost,
those simple forms of happiness to which every heart has claim, because
of poverty! Meetings with those I loved made impossible year after year;
sadness, misunderstanding, nay, cruel alienation, arising from inability
to do the things I wished, and which I might have done had a little money
helped me; endless instances of homely pleasure and contentment curtailed
or forbidden by narrow means. I have lost friends merely through the
constraints of my position; friends I might have made have remained
strangers to me; solitude of the bitter kind, the solitude which is
enforced at times when mind or heart longs for companionship, often
cursed my life solely because I was poor. I think it would scarce be an
exaggeration t