On the other hand, extreme poverty has very much the same effect, killing the too sensitive and fragile spirit in its exertions to be free, wasting what might be a useful and perhaps remarkable life, and forcing men of high powers to stoop to the prostitution of their talents in order to gain enough for their very subsistence. But in the latter case, anyhow, the fight is a great and vigorous combat for existence which a man must take up or perish, and which, if he succeeds, equips him with strengthened faculties and a richer experience for the further stages on his life’s journey. Poverty is merciless and cruel, but it cannot be denied that it is a far better teacher than riches. The contest with money has no stimulating effects, it weakens and paralyses a man’s moral and intellectual fibre, stunts and smothers his finer ambitions, and if he has the unusual strength of character to free himself, it can only be done by casting from him deliberately and finally his self-imposed burden. Art, literature, and music are all suffering severely from the financial taint known as commercialism, which tends to popularise second-rate work, degrade the public taste, and steepen the already stiff path chosen by those who are aiming at a high standard of workmanship rather than popular recognition. “Will it pay?” is a colloquialism as general in use as remarks about the weather. When compared with other nations, it would seem that we in England are more deeply infected with this belief in money than they are elsewhere. Our very prosperity, generally described in figures of material expansion, may account for this. The more money there is in circulation, the more chance there is for larger quantities of it to get lodged in a single pocket, the keener becomes the competition to acquire it, the stronger is the power, the influence, and the example of rich men. America cannot be very far behind, where comment is now being made on cases of insanity and the suicidal mania among the children and descendants of very rich people, brought about by the mental and nervous strain and exhaustion to which multi-millionaires are subjected in their mad race for wealth. It produces in the children what they call over there “the money twist” in the brain. Nevertheless, in his survey of English life the American writer already quoted says, “The struggle to get it (money) is unparalleled anywhere else in the world.”[16] And this was also the verdict of one who wrote a few years ago with an intimate knowledge of Continental life: