Regarding money-value we may say, in general, that it is one expression of the conventional or institutional phase of society, and exhibits all that mixture of grandeur and confusion with which nature usually presents herself to our understanding. I mean that its appraisal of men and things is partly expressive of great principles, and partly, so far as we can see, unjust, trivial or accidental. Some gains are vital or organic, springing from the very nature of life and justified as we come to understand that life; some are fanciful, springing from the tastes or whims of the rich, like the value of diamonds or first editions, and some parasitical, like those of the legally-protected swindler. In general the values of the market are those of the habitual world in all its grossness; spiritual values, except those that have become conventional, being little felt in it. These appeal to the future. The detailed working of market value has no ascertainable connection with moral worth, and we must not expect it to have. If a man’s work is moral, in the higher sense, it is in its nature an attack upon the habitual world which the latter is more likely to resent than reward. One can only take up that useful work that seems best suited to him, trying to be content if its value is small, and, if large, to feel that the power over money it gives him is rightly his only in so far as he uses it for the general good. The more tangible kind of social power—so far as it is intrinsic to the man and not adventitious like inherited wealth—depends chiefly upon organizing capacity, which may be described as the ability to build and operate human machinery. It has its roots in tact and skill in dealing with men, in tenacity, and in a certain instinct for construction. One who possesses it sees a new person as social material, and is likely to know what can be made of him better than he knows himself.[122] Of all kinds of leadership this has the readiest recognition and the highest market value; and naturally so, since it is essential to every sort of coöperative achievement. Its possessors understand the immediate control of the world, which they will exercise no matter what the apparent forms of organization may be. In all ages they have gained and held the grosser forms of power, whenever these were at all open to competition. Thus, during the early Middle Age, men of energy and management, more or less favored by situation, built up for themselves local authority and estate, or perhaps exploited the opportunities for still wider organization, like the founders of Burgundy and Brittany and the early kings of France; very much in the same manner as men of our own day build up commercial and industrial systems and become senators and railway presidents.