In America, even literary men, if they have luck, make money. It is reported of “Josh Billings” (Henry W. Shaw) that he made more money than almost any American author by persistent working of his peculiar vein of humour. Some years he got as much as 4,000 dollars from a weekly newspaper for exclusive contributions: he made 5,000 or 6,000 dollars by lecturing, and had a profit from his almanack of 8,000 or 9,000 dollars more—18,000 to 20,000 dollars per annum. That is five or six times as much as Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, or Holmes had ever made. One of the most marvellous careers in London is that of Baron Grant, who commenced his city life as a clerk in a wine-merchant’s office in Mark Lane, and whose capacity in the way of “financing” and “promoting public companies” appears to have been unrivalled. Of course he made himself many enemies; but that is the way of the world. The men who are the first to fling stones at a successful rival, and to call him hard names, are the men who morally have no claim to be censors on the ground of higher principle or superior virtue. It is thus the unlucky ones revenge themselves on their luckier rivals. They are prone to hit a man when he is risen in the world. Nowhere is there more lack of charity, or more evil speaking of one another, than in the circles where Mammon is king, and where the great object of life is held to be the art of money-getting and money-making. CHAPTER IX. MORE MONEY-MAKING M.P.’S. LET me, in this chapter, give the first place to Samuel Plimsoll, a man who, if he made money, spent it nobly, and deserved the peerage far more than many who have been elected to that honour—at any rate, from the time the Earl of Beaconsfield became Premier. He was down very low in the social scale, and it is thus he writes of his noble poverty and of his companions in misfortune, in that appeal on behalf of our seamen, which stirred up the community as with the voice of a trumpet, and actually forced parliament to legislate. “I don’t wish,” he writes, “to disparage the rich; but I think it may reasonably be doubted whether these qualities are so fully developed in them” (he had been writing of the honesty, of the strong aversion to idleness, of the generosity to one another in adversity, and of the splendid courage of the working classes); “for notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims, reasonable and unreasonable, of poor relations, these qualities are not in such constant exercise, and riches seem, in so many cases, to smother the manliness of their possessors, that their sympathies become not so much narrowed as, so to speak, stratified; they are reserved for the sufferings of their own class, and also the woes of those above them. They seldom tend downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of high courage, like that of the engine-driver who saved his passengers lately from an awful collision