Your fields are not wanting in your attentions. You bring profit to yourselves by the thorough tillage of your acres. You multiply by your manipulation under nature’s hints the life-supporting and pleasure-giving properties of the fruits and flowers of the Earth to the extremest blossoming and abundance. And yet in such a state of general crudity is your own divine essence of reason and thought, that to this day no superstition is too absurd, no sophistry too transparent, and no pretended reform too ill digested to take root and flourish, even to the disintegration of large patches of your social life. So that while no fault can be found with your progress in the handling of the material agents under your control, the opinion is irresistible, from our point of view, that you are assiduously cultivating everything but yourselves. CHAPTER XV. We have, like you, wealth with its self-rewarding luxuries, but its character is very different. Its chosen pleasures and inclinations are unlike yours. Acquisitiveness has no such controlling motives as with you. The hope of social elevation, the anxiety to place the sufferings of poverty beyond reach, and the love of power, are not elements in our desire for gain. As an inducement to the accumulation of wealth, all these motives are supplanted by the one overweening passion for distinguishment which its possession affords, by contributing to the well-being and happiness of others. The even opportunities of life, and the entire absence of poverty as you have it, with its miseries, do away with the most fertile stimulus to individual greed among you; and the strong passion to hoard, which you call avarice, becomes with us, from the singleness of its motives, one of the noblest of our religious aspirations. Whatever luxuries wealth provides for itself are shared by all; and since the nature and form of our society precludes the necessity of alms-giving, charity, as you understand it, is unknown. The general dissemination of self-pride and independence, as much the result of our religious beliefs as of our political and educational methods, secures us against those evils of indiscriminate charity which are found to paralyze industry everywhere upon the Earth, in its present stage of development. In our political system we have provided so well for the even and sufficient reward of toil, that our animal requirements, so easily supplied, are never wanting in individual cases to the extent of suffering. In the extremity of invalidism or other misfortune, assistance comes, not in the form of charity as you know it, but as the anxious and sympathetic support of a family to one of its members in distress. The field of benevolence in wealth is, therefore, entirely within the province of education and art; which in accordance with our religious aspirations and beliefs, takes the same form in their furtherance of the purposes of the Deity as your devotional enterprises of promulgating your religious faiths.