rom productive labor
to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns of its machinery, and a
generally debauching influence on mankind which had justified its
description, from ancient time, as the "root of all evil."

Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the
throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called "a
wonderful piece of mechanism" was an imperfect device to remedy an
unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.

After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business
quarter for an hour or two, and later sat a while on one of the benches
of the Common, finding an interest merely in watching the throngs that
passed, such as one has in studying the populace of a foreign city, so
strange since yesterday had my fellow citizens and their ways become to
me. For thirty years I had lived among them, and yet I seemed to have
never noted before how drawn and anxious were their faces, of the rich
as of the poor, the refined, acute faces of the educated as well as the
dull masks of the ignorant. And well it might be so, for I saw now, as
never before I had seen so plainly, that each as he walked constantly
turned to catch the whispers of a spectre at his ear, the spectre of
Uncertainty. "Do your work never so well," the spectre was
whispering--"rise early and toil till late, rob cunningly or serve
faithfully, you shall never know security. Rich you may be now and
still come to poverty at last. Leave never so much wealth to your
children, you cannot buy the assurance that your son may not be the
servant of your servant, or that your daughter will not have to sell
herself for bread."

A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which set forth
the merits of some new scheme of life insurance. The incident reminded
me of the only device, pathetic in its admission of the universal need
it so poorly supplied, which offered these tired and hunted men and
women even a partial protection from uncertainty. By this means, those
already well-to-do, I remembered, might purchase a precarious
confidence that after their death their loved ones would not, for a
while at least, be trampled under the feet of men. But this was all,
and this was only for those who could pay well for it. What idea was
possible to these wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael, where every
man's hand was against each and the hand of each against every other,
of true life