I have shown, in the previous chapter, how and empty are most of the struggles toward charity and reform carried on by the wealthy class. This brings me, in my train of thought, to one of the most reflections that can be conceived. It has come to me very often, under all sorts of circumstances.  
The fact of the matter is that wealthy Society in America, as everywhere else, is pursued by a of . It does not matter what we do, whether we work like any other man or woman, whether we play like normal men, whether we study,198 whether we idle, or whether we work as other men, or fritter away our time in idleness; whether we spend our money on charity and reforms, or throw it away in the pursuit of pleasure; whether we study hard and seriously, or merely our minds and appetites with novels and salacious plays; whether we play or whether we don’t—nothing seems real, nothing seems earnest, nothing has any result. Too often our lives are empty of anything permanent, anything honest, anything simple and human.
 
We live in a world of dreams, peopled with passing phantoms—men and women that come and go and leave in our hearts no trace of real affection, no honest, sincere, and heart-felt impulse of friendship, no shadow of reality. It all seems and . It in time, and often in sheer desperation we into extremes for which we have no genuine taste, no real desire, no impulse at all.
 
But of all the futile things in the world none is more futile than wealth itself. If you rest on the things you have won, and set yourself down in idleness to enjoy them, they turn to ashes on your lips. They are flat, tasteless, like fruit picked long ago. I remember an incident in which I took a part, not very long ago, that showed me the opposite results in all its .
 
I was at a very brilliant social function in the London social world. I met at that reception a woman whose name I had heard as a household word in Society for many years. She was a brilliant woman; she was reckoned a leader in the most splendid Society of the world. She was wealthy beyond all human need. She occupied a powerful place in a political world where everything human had its part. She was a companion of princes and the equal of peers. We were talking alone, immediately after our introduction, when she said:
 
“Oh, Mr. Martin, you are an American. You are a Wall Street man. You could help me to get some of your American gold!”
 
I was , and I showed it in my answer:
 
“Why, my dear lady, surely you have gold enough. If I am not mistaken, you rank amongst the wealthiest women of the nation. Why should you want gold? Moreover, you have social and are famous throughout England. Of what possible use could more gold be to you?”
 
I can still see the haggard face, the quivering 201lips, the blazing eyes of this great Society woman as she answered me.
 
“Oh, Mr. Martin, you do not know me—I am almost ashamed to confess the truth. I dream night and day of gold. I want to have a room at the top of my house filled with it—filled with gold sovereigns. I would like to go into that room night after night, when every one else is asleep, and bury myself in yellow sovereigns up to my neck, and play with them, toss them about, to hear the music of the thing I love the best!”
 
Think of it! Picture a woman, wife of a man, mother of splendid children, born with the beautiful instincts in her sex, sinking to such a depth as that! Think of the awful shallow emptiness of a life and a training that bore such fruit as this!
 
Yet, it is all so very natural. Most men and women in this world are kept clean, , and normal in the pursuit of little things. The trivial household joys that fill so full the happy life of the normal woman, the little business triumphs that keep alive in the heart of the normal man the spirit of personal ambition, the human for a fight, the ever-changing, ever-interesting, ever-luring struggle for advantage—these are at once the burden and the safety of mankind. In them is true happiness; in them is true humanity.
 
The class of which I write has lost them in its very birth. The mother of a boy in the middle class looks forward with delight to the day when that boy will go into the world to battle against circumstances. From his earliest childhood he learns the necessity of labour, he comes to regard it as his birthright. With eagerness he prepares for it. The little triumphs of boyhood, the trivial victories of college days, are joy unbounded to his mind, because they are but steps in that long climb toward greatness, and wealth, that are his birthright; and when at last he goes forth from college halls, from labour on the farm, from some little clerical position that he has held in his , to strike out for himself into the great open world, to blaze out paths of his own choosing, his life is filled in its every moment with new thrills of excitement, of happiness, of accomplishment—of life, real life, not imitation.
 
Look at the other side. Think of the boy born, as they say, with a golden spoon in his mouth. Perhaps, in his , he does not know that he can have everything in the world for which he asks. Perhaps his parents are humanly wise—for many of the wealthy are; yet, even in his very tender boyhood, the truth will come home to him. He will learn before he is ten years old that there is a difference between him and other boys whom he sees at play in the park. He will discover that the difference is money. He will discover that his parents can get whatever they like, spend as much as they please, waste fortunes on their pleasures, throw gold away as though it were . He will learn, on the other hand, that the children of the poor can have no expensive toys like his, that they cannot be dressed as he is dressed, that their parents must win every dollar that they spend by some hard work, while his own parents, , receive as much as they want and more without any labour whatever.
 
That boy will be more than human if, 205by the time he is a young man, he has not passed the entrance to the paths where the true happiness of life is to be found. Either money will mean nothing to him, and he will have settled down to be one of the idle rich, simply taking what the gods send him and doing his best to enjoy it, or else a most unholy lust for gold will have taken possession of his soul. Eliminate the necessity for struggle, and you remove from money all its true value. It becomes either dross, to be thrown away for other things better worth while, or it becomes an , a god, the very sum and substance of the world’s desire.
 
I know, of course, that there are marked exceptions. I have in my mind as I write a young man of a Western city, born to an enormous fortune, married to another, and trained and in the lap of luxury. Almost everything to make him either an idler or a money worshipper. He is neither. It is an accident. In his early youth he became an , and was sent out by his father to live on a . The ranchman’s wife was a real woman, and instinct taught her how to handle that boy. He was put to work. At first, when his father learned through his letters that he was spending his time mending fences, feeding pigs, watering horses, and milking cows, he objected strongly. He wrote to the ranchman to this effect. The ranchman his wife, and set the boy to work at other gentler things.
 
A week later the boy wrote an indignant letter to his father to the effect that he was coming home if he couldn’t go back to real work. The father saw a great light; and free permission was given to the ranchman’s wife to do whatever she liked with the boy. When he went home a year and a half later he was the makings of a real man. To-day his father is dead, and he has succeeded to the command of a estate. He holds his place in the best Society of the land, but he holds, too, his place amongst the workers. At the age of twenty-eight he had twice refused political office, and............