ether form the medium of by far the
larger part of our satisfactions. In spite of the selfishness which
distinguishes so much of human action, a man's desire to secure for his
family such wealth as he can is one of the strongest motives of human
activity known; and the fact that it operates in the case of many who
are notoriously selfish otherwise, shows how deeply it is ingrained in
the human character. One of the first uses to which a man who has
produced great wealth puts it is in most cases to build a house more or
less proportionate to his means; and it is his pride and pleasure to see
his wife and children acclimatise themselves to their new environment.
But such a house would lose most of its charm and meaning for him if the
fortune which enabled him to live in it were to dwindle with each day's
expenditure, and his family after his death were to be turned into the
street, beggars. If each individual were a unit whose interests ended
with himself; if generations were like stratified rocks, superposed one
on another but not interconnected; if--to quote a pithy phrase, I do not
know from whom--"if all men were born orphans and died bachelors," then
the right to draw income from the products of permanently productive
capital would for most men lose much of what now makes it desirable.

But since individuals and generations are not thus separated actually,
but are, on the contrary, not merely as a scientific fact, but as a fact
which is vivid to every one within the limits of his daily consciousness
dovetailed into one another, and could not exist otherwise, a man's own
fortune, with the kind of life that is dependent on it, is similarly
dovetailed into fortunes of other people, and his present and theirs is
dovetailed into a general future.

We have seen how this is the case with regard to his own family; but the
matter does not end there. Individual households do not live in
isolation; and there are for this fact two closely allied reasons. If
they did there could be no marriage; there could also be nothing like
social intercourse. It is social intercourse of a more or less extended
kind that alone makes possible, not only love and marriage, but most of
the pleasures that give colour to life. We see this in all ranks and in
all stages of civilisation. Savages meet together in numerous groups to
dance, like civilised men and women in New York or in London. The feast,
or the meal eaten by a large gathering, is one of