instincts. He is not likely to be either a saint or a philosopher, but he is tolerably sure to be both an honourable and a useful man, with a fair measure of good sense and moderation, and with some disposition towards public duties. A crowd of out-of-door amusements and interests do much to dispel his peccant humours and to save him from the stagnation and the sensuality that have beset many foreign aristocracies. County business stimulates his activity; mitigates his class prejudices and forms his judgment and his standard of honour will keep him substantially right amid much fluctuation of opinions.

The reader, from his own experience of individual characters, will supply other illustrations of the lines of thought I am enforcing. Some temptations that beset us must be steadily faced and subdued. Others are best met by flight-by avoiding the thoughts or scenes that call them into activity; while other elements of character which we might wish to be away are often better treated in the way of marriage, that is by a judicious regulation and harmless application, than in the way of asceticism or attempted suppression. It is possible for men, if not in educating themselves at least in educating others, to pitch their standard and their ideal too high. What they have to do is to recognise their own qualities and the qualities of those whom they influence as they are, and endeavour to use these usually very imperfect materials to the best advantage, for the formation of useful, honourable and happy lives. According to the doctrine of this book, man comes into the world with a free will. But his free will, though a real thing, acts in a narrower circle and with more numerous limitations than he usually imagines. He can, however, do much so to dispose, regulate and modify the circumstances of his life as to

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diminish both his sufferings and his temptations, and to secure for himself the external conditions of a happy and upright life, and he can do something by judicious and persevering self-culture to improve those conditions of character on which more than on any external circumstances both happiness and virtue depend.

CHAPTER XIII

1

MONEY

I Do not think that I can better introduce the few pages which I propose to write on the relations of money to happiness and to character than by a pregnant passage from one of the essays of Sir Henry Taylor. 'So manifold are the bearings of money upon the lives and characters of mankind, that an insight which should search out the life of a man in his pecuniary relations would penetrate into almost every cranny of his nature. He who knows like St. Paul both how to spare and how to abound has a great knowledge; for if we take account of all the virtues with which money is mixed up—honesty, justice, generosity, charity, frugality, forethought, selfsacrifice, and of their correlative vices, it is a knowledge which goes near to cover the length and breadth of humanity, and a right measure in getting, saving, spending, giving, taking, lending, borrowing and bequeathing would almost argue a perfect man.'

There are few subjects on which the contrast between the professed and the real beliefs of men is greater than in the estimate of money. More than any other single thing it is the object and usually the life-long object of human effort, and any accession of wealth is hailed by the immense majority of mankind as an unquestionable blessing. Yet if we were to take literally much of the 1 Notes on Life.

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teaching we have all heard we should conclude that money, beyond what is required for the necessaries of life, is far more a danger than a good; that it is the preeminent source of evil and temptation; that one of the first duties of man is to emancipate himself from the love of it, which can only mean from any strong desire for its increase.

In this, as in so many other things, the question is largely one of degree. No one who knows what is meant by the abject poverty to which a great proportion of the human race is condemned will doubt that at least such an amount of money as raises them from this condition is one of the greatest of human blessings. Extreme poverty means a lifelong struggle for the bare means of living; it means a life spent in wretched hovels, with insufficient food, clothes and firing, in enforced and absolute ignorance; an existence almost purely animal, with nearly all the higher faculties of man undeveloped. There is a far greater real difference in the material elements of happiness between the condition of such men and that of a moderately prosperous artizan in a civilised country than there is between the latter and the millionaire.

Money, again, at least to such an amount as enables men to be in some considerable degree masters of their own course in life, is also on the whole a great good. In this second degree it has less influence on happiness than health, and probably than character and domestic relations, but its influence is at least very great. Money is a good thing because it can be transformed into many other things. It gives the power of education which in itself does much to regulate the character and opens out countless tastes and spheres of enjoyment. It saves its possessor from the fear of a destitute old age and of the

destitution of those he may leave behind, which is the harrowing care of multitudes who cannot be reckoned among the very poor. It enables him to intermit labour in times of sickness and sorrow and old age, and in those extremes of heat and cold during which active labour is little less than physical pain. It gives him and it gives those he loves increased chances of life and increased hope of recovery in sickness. Few of the pains of penury are more acute than those of a poor man who sees his wife or children withering away through disease, and who knows or believes that better food or medical attendance, or a surgical operation, or a change of climate, might have saved them. Money, too, even when it does not dispense with work, at least gives a choice of work and longer intervals of leisure. For the very poor this choice hardly exists, or exists only within very narrow limits, and from want of culture or want of leisure some of their most marked natural aptitudes are never called into exercise. With the comparatively rich this is not the case. Money enables them to select the course of life which is congenial to their tastes and most suited to their natural talents, or if their strongest taste cannot become their work, money at least gives them some leisure to cultivate it. The command of leisure, when it is fruitful leisure spent in congenial work, is to many, perhaps, the greatest boon it can bestow. Riches,' said Charles Lamb, are chiefly good because they give us Time.' 'All one's time to oneself! for which alone I rankle with envy at the rich. Books are good and pictures are good, and money to buy them is therefore good-but to buy time-in other words, life!'

To some men money is chiefly valuable because it makes it possible for them not to think of money.