the most universal of
all human enjoyments. But in all such cases the enjoyment involves one
thing--namely, a certain similarity, underlying individual differences,
between those persons who take part in it. Intimate social intercourse
is, as a rule, possible only between those who are similar in their
tastes and ideas with regard to the minute details which for most of us
make up the tesserae of life's daily mosaic--similar in their manners,
in their standards of beauty and comfort, in their memories, their
prospects, or (to be brief) in what we may call their class
habituations. This is true of all men, be their social position what it
may. It is true, of course, that the quality of a man's life, as a
whole, depends on other things also, of a wider kind than these. It
depends not only on the fact, but also on his consciousness of the fact,
that he is a citizen of a certain state or country, though with most of
its inhabitants he will never exchange a word; or that he is a member of
a certain church; or that, being a man and not a monkey, his destiny is
identified with that of the human species. But, so far as his enjoyment
of private wealth is concerned, each man as a rule, though to this there
are individual exceptions, enjoys it mainly through the life of his own
_de facto_ class--the people whose manners and habits are more or less
similar to his own, because they result from the possession of more or
less similar means. He is, therefore, not interested in the permanence
of his own wealth only. He is equally interested in the permanence of
the wealth of a body of men, the life of which must, like that of all
corporations, be continuous.

There is in this fact much more than at first appears. Let us go back to
a point insisted on in the previous chapter. It was there shown, in
connection with the question of abstract justice, that those who attack
interest on the ground that it is essentially income for which its
recipients give nothing in return, fall into the error of ignoring the
element of time, without reference to which the whole process of life is
unintelligible. It was shown, by various examples, that in a large
number of cases the efforts which ultimately result in the production of
great wealth do not produce it till after, often till long after, the
original effort has come altogether to an end. Let us now take this
point in connection, not with abstract theories, but with the concrete
facts of conduct.