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The curious thing about this expectation is that it has survived innumerable disappointments without apparently losing any of its vigor. It was strong after 1837, and strong after 1857, and stronger than ever after 1861. The war was surely, people said, to bring back the golden age, when all the men were prudent, sober, and industrious, and all the women simple, modest, and homekeeping. The war did nothing of the kind. In fact, it left us more extravagant and lavish and self-indulgent than ever; yet the ancient and tough belief in the purifying influence of a stringent money market still lasts, and is at this moment cropping out in the moral department of a thousand newspapers.

The belief belongs to what may be called the cataclysmal theory of progress, which improves the world by sudden starts, and clings so fondly to liquor-laws, and has profound faith in specific remedies for moral and political diseases. What commercial panics and great national misfortunes do not do, particular bits of legislation are sure to do. You put something in the Constitution, or forbid something, or lose a battle, or have a “shrinkage of values,” or have a cholera season, and forthwith the community turns over a new leaf, and becomes moral, economical, and sober-minded. We doubt whether this theory will ever die out, however much philosophers may preach against it, or however often facts may refute it, because it gratifies, or promises to gratify, one of the deepest longings of the human heart–the desire which each man feels to have a great deal of history crowded into his own little day. None of us can bear to quit the scene without witnessing the solution of the problems by which his own life has been vexed or over which he has long labored. Indeed a great many men would find it impossible to work with any zeal to bring about results which would probably not be witnessed until they had been centuries in the tomb.

We accordingly find that the most eager reformers are apt to be those who look for the triumph of virtue by the close of the current year. Of all dreams of eager reformers, however, there is probably none more substantial than that which looks for a restoration of that vague thing called “simplicity of manners.” Simplicity and economy are, of course, relative terms. The luxurious gentleman in the fourteenth century lived in a way which the well-to-do artisan in our own time would not tolerate; and when we undertake to carry people back to ancient ways of living we find that there is hardly a point short of barbarism at which we can consistently stop. A country in which money is easily made and abounds, will be one in which money will always be freely spent, and in which personal comfort and even display will occupy men’s and women’s thoughts a great deal. We can no more prevent this than we can prevent the growth of wealth itself; and our duty is, instead of wasting our breath in denouncing extravagance, or hailing panics as purging fires, to do what in us lies to give rich people more taste, more conscience, more sense of responsibility for curable ills, and a keener relish of the higher forms of pleasure. Extravagance–or, in other words, the waste of money on sensual enjoyment, the production of hideous furniture or jewelry, or of barbarous display–has to be checked not by the preaching of poor people, but by the rich man’s own superiority to these things, and his own repugnance for them. This repugnance can only be inspired by education, whether that of school and college, or that of a refined and cultivated social atmosphere. Much would be done in this direction if public opinion exacted of the owners of large fortunes that they should give their sons the best education the country affords; or, in other words, send them to college, instead of setting them up in the dry-goods business or the grocery business. A man who has made a large fortune in honest trade or industry has not contributed his share to moral and intellectual interests by merely making donations. It is his duty, also, if he leaves children behind him, to see to it, as far as he can, that they are men who will be an addition to the general culture and taste of the nation, and who will stimulate its nobler ambition, raise its intellectual standard, quicken its love of excellence in all fields, and deepen its faith in the value of things not seen.