nd
has a great knowledge; for if we take account of all the virtues with
which money is mixed up--honesty, justice, generosity, charity,
frugality, forethought, self-sacrifice, and of their correlative vices,
it is a knowledge which goes near to cover the length and breadth of
humanity, and a right measure in getting, saving, spending, giving,
taking, lending, borrowing and bequeathing would almost argue a perfect
man.'

There are few subjects on which the contrast between the professed and
the real beliefs of men is greater than in the estimate of money. More
than any other single thing it is the object and usually the lifelong
object of human effort, and any accession of wealth is hailed by the
immense majority of mankind as an unquestionable blessing. Yet if we
were to take literally much of the teaching we have all heard we should
conclude that money, beyond what is required for the necessaries of
life, is far more a danger than a good; that it is the pre-eminent
source of evil and temptation; that one of the first duties of man is to
emancipate himself from the love of it, which can only mean from any
strong desire for its increase.

In this, as in so many other things, the question is largely one of
degree. No one who knows what is meant by the abject poverty to which a
great proportion of the human race is condemned will doubt that at least
such an amount of money as raises them from this condition is one of the
greatest of human blessings. Extreme poverty means a lifelong struggle
for the bare means of living; it means a life spent in wretched hovels,
with insufficient food, clothes and firing, in enforced and absolute
ignorance; an existence almost purely animal, with nearly all the higher
faculties of man undeveloped. There is a far greater real difference in
the material elements of happiness between the condition of such men and
that of a moderately prosperous artizan in a civilised country than
there is between the latter and the millionaire.

Money, again, at least to such an amount as enables men to be in some
considerable degree masters of their own course in life, is also on the
whole a great good. In this second degree it has less influence on
happiness than health, and probably than character and domestic
relations, but its influence is at least very great. Money is a good
thing because it can be transformed into many other things. It gives
the power of education which in itself does much to regula