warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living,
the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be
speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases
for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx. Neither the great
merchant, nor the judge, nor the pleader preserves his sense of right;
they feel no more, they apply set rules that leave cases out of count.
Borne along by their headlong course, they are neither husbands nor
fathers nor lovers; they glide on sledges over the facts of life, and
live at all times at the high pressure conduced by business and the vast
city. When they return to their homes they are required to go to a ball,
to the opera, into society, where they can make clients, acquaintances,
protectors. They all eat to excess, play and keep vigil, and their faces
become bloated, flushed, and emaciated.

To this terrific expenditure of intellectual strength, to such multifold
moral contradictions, they oppose--not, indeed pleasure, it would be too
pale a contrast--but debauchery, a debauchery both secret and alarming,
for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the morality of
society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They
know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside
it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are
crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in
reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments.
Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices,
to do away with the need of having opinions, just as they adapt their
conscience to the standard of the Code or the Tribunal of Commerce.
Having started early to become men of note, they turn into mediocrities,
and crawl over the high places of the world. So, too, their faces
present the harsh pallor, the deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished
eyes, and garrulous, sensual mouths, in which the observer recognizes
the symptoms of the degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the
circle of a special idea which destroys the creative faculties of the
brain and the gift of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. No
man who has allowed himself to be caught in the revolutions of the gear
of these huge machines can ever become great. If he is a doctor, either
he has practised little or he is an exception--a Bichat who dies young.
If a great merchant, someth