a continual shower of soot and cinders. It was
the most industrial of all the cities in the world and the richest.
Its organisation seemed perfect. None of the ancient aristocratic or
democratic forms remained; everything was subordinated to the interests
of the trusts. This environment gave rise to what anthropologists called
the multi-millionaire type. The men of this type were at once energetic
and frail, capable of great activity in forming mental combinations
and of prolonged labour in offices, but men whose nervous irritability
suffered from hereditary troubles which increased as time went on.

Like all true aristocrats, like the patricians of republican Rome or the
squires of old England, these powerful men affected a great severity
in their habits and customs. They were the ascetics of wealth. At the
meetings of the trusts an observer would have noticed their smooth and
puffy faces, their lantern cheeks, their sunken eyes and wrinkled brows.
With bodies more withered, complexions yellower, lips drier, and eyes
filled with a more burning fanaticism than those of the old Spanish
monks, these multimillionaires gave themselves up with inextinguishable
ardour to the austerities of banking and industry. Several, denying
themselves all happiness, all pleasure, and all rest, spent their
miserable lives in rooms without light or air, furnished only with
electrical apparatus, living on eggs and milk, and sleeping on camp
beds. By doing nothing except pressing nickel buttons with their
fingers, these mystics heaped up riches of which they never even saw the
signs, and acquired the vain possibility of gratifying desires that they
never experienced.

The worship of wealth had its martyrs. One of these multi-millionaires,
the famous Samuel Box, preferred to die rather than surrender the
smallest atom of his property. One of his workmen, the victim of an
accident while at work, being refused any indemnity by his employer,
obtained a verdict in the courts, but repelled by innumerable obstacles
of procedure, he fell into the direst poverty. Being thus reduced to
despair, he succeeded by dint of cunning and audacity in confronting his
employer with a loaded revolver in his hand, and threatened to blow
out his brains if he did not give him some assistance. Samuel Box gave
nothing, and let himself be killed for the sake of principle.

Examples that come from high quarters are followed. Those who possessed
some small capital (and