ce of them became habitual _would make me renounce all my
labors, all my philosophical projects, to end my days like an ass_."

There are a hundred rules for getting rich, but the instinct of
accumulation is worth all such rules put together. This instinct is
rarely found in combination with high intellectual gifts, and the reason
is evident. To advance from a hundred pounds to a thousand is not an
intellectual advance, and there is no intellectual interest in the
addition of a cipher at the bankers'. Simply to accumulate money that
you are never to use is, from the intellectual point of view, as stupid
an operation as can be imagined. We observe, too, that the great
accumulators, the men who are gifted by nature with the true instinct,
are not usually such persons as we feel any ambition to become. Their
faculties are concentrated on one point, and that point, as it seems to
us, of infinitely little importance. We cannot see that it signifies
much to the intellectual well-being of humanity that John Smith should
be worth his million when he dies, since we know quite well that John
Smith's mind will be just as ill-furnished then as it is now. In places
where much money is made we easily acquire a positive disgust for it,
and the curate seems the most distinguished gentleman in the community,
with his old black coat and his seventy pounds a year. We come to hate
money-matters when we find that they exclude all thoughtful and
disinterested conversation, and we fly to the society of people with
fixed incomes, not large enough for much saving, to escape the perpetual
talk about investments. Our happiest hours have been spent with poor
scholars, and artists, and men of science, whose words remain in the
memory and make us rich indeed. Then we dislike money because it rules
and restrains us, and because it is unintelligent and seems hostile, so
far as that which is unintelligent can be hostile. And yet the real
truth is that money is the strong protector of the intellectual life.
The student sits and studies, too often despising the power that
shelters him from the wintry night, that gives him roof and walls, and
lamp, and books, and fire. For money is simply the accumulated labor of
the past, guarding our peace as fleets and armies guard the industry of
England, or like some mighty fortress-wall within which men follow the
most peaceful avocations. The art is to use money so that it shall be
the protector and not the scattere