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This levelling of everything to its cash value is so ingrained in us that we are unconscious of it, as we are of using slang or local expressions until our attention is called to them. I was present once at a farce played in a London theatre, where the audience went into roars of laughter every time the stage American said, “Why, certainly.” I was indignant, and began explaining to my English friend that we never used such an absurd phrase. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Why, certainly,” I said, and stopped, catching the twinkle in his eye.

It is very much the same thing with money. We do not notice how often it slips into the conversation. “Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh.” Talk to an American of a painter and the charm of his work. He will be sure to ask, “Do his pictures sell well?” and will lose all interest if you say he can’t sell them at all. As if that had anything to do with it!

Remembering the well-known anecdote of Schopenhauer and the gold piece which he used to put beside his plate at the table d’hote, where he ate, surrounded by the young officers of the German army, and which was to be given to the poor the first time he heard any conversation that was not about promotion or women, I have been tempted to try the experiment in our clubs, changing the subjects to stocks and sport, and feel confident that my contributions to charity would not ruin me.

All this has had the result of making our men dull companions; after dinner, or at a country house, if the subject they love is tabooed, they talk of nothing! It is sad for a rich man (unless his mind has remained entirely between the leaves of his ledger) to realize that money really buys very little, and above a certain amount can give no satisfaction in proportion to its bulk, beyond that delight which comes from a sense of possession. Croesus often discovers as he grows old that he has neglected to provide himself with the only thing that “is a joy for ever”–a cultivated intellect–in order to amass a fortune that turns to ashes, when he has time to ask of it any of the pleasures and resources he fondly imagined it would afford him. Like Talleyrand’s young man who would not learn whist, he finds that he has prepared for himself a dreadful old age!