hing: it is the
science of Wealth. All else is vanity and vexation of spirit." This is
the famous cry, the cry of a materialistic society:--"_Grow rich!_" The
economists of this school, now highly enlightened, legitimate children
of the materialists of the Eighteenth Century, see in humanity, only
matter and the things that belong to matter; in men, only consumers and
producers; in the social functions, only labor of the hands:--to labor,
to sow, to reap, to hew, to build, to forge, to weave, to barter, to
exchange, to sell, to buy, to acquire, to beget,--this is, according to
these disciples of Malthus, the whole of man! These are the Lycurguses
and the Moseses, the legislators of a trading People: the moral,
intellectual, spiritual, religious man does not exist for them. They
love liberty, not because it ennobles human nature; exercises free
will, the most sublime of man's vital functions; cultivates his highest
faculty,--conscience; purifies religion, the fundamental idea of
mankind, from the superstitions that debase and dishonor it; sanctifies
human society, by leading it to the knowledge and worship of God;--they
love it because it abolishes Custom House duties! All legislation, all
civilization, all religion, is reduced by them to a well-balanced
account! _To have_ and _to owe_, these are the only two words in their
language! What matter to them the spirit, the soul, virtue,
sentiment?--What the moral and consoling beliefs, the divine hopes, the
supernatural certainties, revealed or proved, or the immortal destiny,
of man?--What the present intellectual life, and the future immaterial
life of these harvests of human generations, which God sows that they
may bear fruit in his name, may adore his grandeur,--which Death cuts
down to bear them, ripe in faith and virtue, up to Heaven? All this can
neither be bought nor sold; all this has neither stated price nor net
revenue; all this is not current on the Exchange,--therefore it is
nothing!

Thus these men count for nothing the forms of worship and the forms of
government. They are neither followers of Brama, of Confucius, of
Mahomet, of Plato, or of Rousseau; neither absolute monarchists,
constitutional royalists, nor republicans. They are of the politics,
and of the religion, in which they can manufacture most, buy and sell
easiest, trade the best, multiply fastest! Their civilization is
traffic; their God is the dollar! This sect, useful in administering
intellige