To maintain the supremacy of money as a standard, as a test, as a reward, and as an incentive, we have a whole body of professions exclusively devoted to the making of it for themselves and for us without our having the exertion of working for it. And yet they and their army of clerks have to slave in their offices, lending, borrowing, broking, speculating, gambling, company-promoting, constructing syndicates, creating trusts and combines, occupied with all the complicated and involved tricks of a trade which of all trades is the most tricky. They must not be too nice or too scrupulous. They must suppress any inclination they might naturally have to be sensitive or particular. They are occupied largely in trying secretly to get the better of someone else or sometimes in manipulations of a dubious, or perhaps we ought to say mysterious nature, and their profession, which is avowedly and exclusively to make money at all costs, must of necessity cast some blight on their lives and characters. An increasingly large share of the wealth of the modern world falls into the hands of stock-brokers, company-promoters, and other financiers, who are the high priests of money. Such is their power in controlling the money market, manipulating prices, and directing gambling operations on the stock exchange that they gradually come to occupy the place of government not only in the world of finance, but in the industrial world and even to some extent in the world of politics. The large body of ordinary investors and speculators are completely at their mercy, for only a very few can pretend to master or follow the intricacies of this highly elaborated system which the large financiers have set up like a huge web to catch all contributions coming from the investments and savings of the general public. But the general business of private finance is the immediate concern of every man, and it is certainly the subject about which most people think they know something and many people know a good deal. Mystery pervades it. A man will tell you his professional experiences, he will even confide to you his domestic cares and his moral delinquencies, his religious views he is ready to lay bare before you. But on his financial affairs he will be silent, and no one would dream of committing the indiscretion of questioning him on so delicate and sacred a topic. Little or nothing is known of how a man comes by his money. The industry or ability he has displayed in making his fortune is not what is admired, but his actual riches. It never occurs to people to inquire if or how a man has earned his money, all they want to know is if he has actually got it.