oducers of it on
the greatest scale. Socialists and similar reformers--the people who
principally busy themselves with discussing what this attraction is--are
the people who are least capable of forming any true opinion about it.
They not only have, as a rule, no experience of wealth themselves, but
they are further generically distinguished by a deficiency of those
powers that create it. They are like men with no muscles, who reason
about the temperament of a prize-fighter; and their conception of what
wealth means for those who produce and possess it is apt, in
consequence, to be of the most puerile kind. It is founded, apparently,
on their conception of what a greedy boy, without pocket-money, feels
when he stares at the tarts lying in a pastry-cook's window. To them it
seems that the desire for great wealth means simply the desire for
purely sensual self-indulgence--especially for the eating and drinking
of expensive food and wine. Consequently, whenever they wish to
caricature a capitalist they invariably represent him as a man with a
huge, protuberant stomach. The folly of this conception is sufficiently
shown by the fact that many of the greatest of fortune-makers have, in
their personal habits, been abstemious and even niggardly to a degree
which has made them proverbial; and that, even in the case of those who
value personal luxury, the maximum of self-indulgence which any single
human organism can appreciate, is obtainable by a hundredth part of the
fortunes for the production of which such men work. The real secret of
the attraction which wealth has for those who create it lies in the fact
that wealth is simply a form of power. These men are made conscious by
experience, as less gifted men are not, that they can, by the exercise
of their own mental energies, add indefinitely to the wealth-producing
forces of the community. They feel the machine respond to their own
exceptional management of it; they see the output of wealth varied and
multiplied at their will; and thus the results of their specialised
power as producers are neither more nor less than this same internal
power converted into an external, an indeterminate and universalised
form; and the reason why they will never produce wealth merely in order
to be deprived of it is that no one will exercise power merely in order
to lose it, and allow it to pass into the hands of other people. These
men, as experience, especially in America, shows us, are constan