Apart from the manner in which certain rich men spend their wealth, there is something in an overplus of riches which is distinctly “out of drawing,” and lop-sided. It is a false note in the musical scale. Just as a woman, by wearing too great a number of jewels, vulgarizes whatever personal beauty she may possess by the flagrant exhibition of valuables and bad taste together, so does a man who has no other claim upon society than that of mere wealth, appear as a kind of monstrosity and deformity in the general equality and equilibrium of Nature. When such a man’s career is daily seen to be nothing more than a constant pursuit of his own selfish ends, regardless of truth, honour, high principle, and consideration for his fellow-men, he becomes even more than a man-camel with a golden hump--he is an offence and a danger to the community. If, by mere dint of cash, he is allowed to force his way everywhere--if no ruling sovereign on the face of the earth has sufficient wisdom or strength of character to draw a line against the entrance into society and politics of Money, for mere Money’s sake, then the close of our circle of civilisation is nearly reached, and the old story of Tyre and Sidon and Babylon will be re-told again for us with the same fatal conclusion to which Volney, in his _Ruins of Empires_ impressively calls attention, in the following passage: “Cupidity, the daughter and companion of ignorance, has produced all the mischiefs that have desolated the globe. Ignorance and the love of accumulation, these are the two sources of all the plagues that infest the life of man. They have inspired him with false ideas of his happiness, and prompted him to misconstrue and infringe the laws of nature, as they related to the connection between him and exterior objects. Through them his conduct has been injurious to his own existence, and he has thus violated the duty he owes to himself; they have fortified his heart against compassion, and his mind against the dictates of justice, and he has thus violated the duty he owes to others. By ignorant and inordinate desire, man has armed himself against man, family against family, tribe against tribe, and the earth is converted into a bloody theatre of discord and robbery. They have sown the seeds of secret war in the bosom of every state, divided the citizens from each other, and the same society is constituted of oppressors and oppressed, of masters and slaves. They have taught the heads of nations, with audacious insolence, to turn the arms of society against itself, and _to build upon mercenary avidity the fabric of political despotism_, or they have a _more hypocritical and deep-laid project, that imposes, as the dictate of heaven, lying sanctions and a sacrilegious yoke, thus rendering avarice the source of credulity_. In fine, they have corrupted every idea of good and evil, just and unjust, virtue and vice; they have misled nations in a _labyrinth of calamity and mistake_.