Business is a way of living by proxy; money is society’s proxy for every sort of implement and tool. To produce something, however--some actual wealth, a pennyweight of gold-dust, a pound of honey, a dozen eggs, a book, a boy, a bunch of beets; some real wealth out of the soil, out of my loins, out of my brains, out of my muscles and the sap of the maple, the rains and sunshine and the soil, out of the rich veins of the earth or the swarming waters of the sea--this is to be; and to be myself, and not a proxy, is to lose my life and save it, and to justify my existence. I have to buy a multitude of things--transportation, coal, dentistry, news, flour, and clothes. I have paid in money for them. I have also paid in real wealth, having given, to balance my charge on society, an equivalent in raw cabbage, pure honey, fresh eggs, and the like, from my own created store. I am doubtless in debt to society, but I have tried to give wealth for wealth, not the symbol of it merely; and last year, as I balanced my books, I think the world was in debt to me by several bunches of beets. I do not boast of the beets, though they take me out of the debtor’s prison where most of us live. I can face the world, however, with those beets; I have gone over the top, have done my bit, with beets. The oldest duty on the human conscience is the duty to dig. I am a college teacher, and that is an honorable, if futile, profession. The Scriptures say: “He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers”; but, before there were any such multifarious and highly specialized needs, it was said unto our first father: “Replenish the earth and subdue it”--a universal human need, a call to duty, from which no Draft Board of civilization can rightly exempt us. Wealth is not created, not even increased, in trade. When was one pennyweight of gold on ’change by any magic metallurgy of trade made two pennyweight? The magic of the second pennyweight is the metallurgy of the pick and shovel and cradle rocking the shining sands of the Yukon. Real wealth is only circulated in trade. It comes from primal sources--from the gold-fields, the cotton-fields, the corn-fields, the fir-clad sides of Katahdin, the wide gray waters of the Grand Banks, the high valleys of the sheeped Sierras, and from back yards, like mine, that bring forth thirty- and sixty- and an hundred-fold. And this is as profoundly true of life and literature as it is of cotton and lumber and gold.