work digging gold.

'Soon had his crew
Opened into the hills a spacious wound
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in hell: that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.'

The term 'almighty dollar' is stereotyped in modern slang, and yet the
idea could not but have existed under other words in the days of those
flush individuals, Midas and Croesus. The first of these moneyed
gentlemen found gold too plenty for comfort, while the latter, by his
unfortunate end, proved that even at that early time riches had learned
to fly away. Gold entered very largely into the politics of antiquity,
and by this means Crassus got a partnership in the grand triumvirate of
which Mark Antony and Octavius formed the more active parties. Poor
Crassus found, however, that to be a sleeping partner in a concern was
quite a dangerous position.

The danger in which money involves its possessor, is shown with dramatic
power by Scott, in his splendid medieval dream, _Ivanhoe_--in the
torture-scene, where the Jew is racked to obtain his gold. In connection
with this, it may be noted as a surprising fact that while poverty has
always been dreaded, it has ever been exempt from one term of peculiar
wretchedness. With all his privation, who ever heard a poor man
designated as a _miser_?

Wealth is a matter of comparison. The original term applied by the
New-England savages to the white was, _knifeman_; the possession of one
implement making the latter rich in the view of the Indian. What a vast
investment in wampum would such a weapon be? Carrying out the same
comparative idea, it is reported as one of John Jacob Astor's sayings:
'That a man worth fifty thousand dollars is as well off as though he was
rich.' So strong is this comparative aspect, that the money-hunter finds
his mark continually receding, and when he has attained his hundred
thousand, he is appalled by finding himself but a mere beginner compared
with others. He is but at the foot of the mountain which others have
climbed, and which towers above him in

'Many a fiery, many a frozen Alp.'

Hence, there is nothing more clearly proven in the psychology of man
than that accumulation utterly fails to fulfil the idea attached to
riches; that is, satiety or even satisfaction, and there is often a
bitter poverty of soul gnawing the owner of millions. The organic
thought crops out of great and small alike. It is said that the chief of
B