The upper story is a public assembly chamber for occasions of rejoicing and pleasure, and is adorned with statuary, fountains, and blooming plants. This grand apartment is so tempered in warmth by the cheap appliances of our municipality, that it becomes a winter garden during our long, inclement seasons, when the parks are sere and icy. One of these establishments would suggest to your view an exaggerated estimate of its founder’s wealth. In most cases his income extends but little beyond the support of this enterprise. In his dream of wealth he has achieved the hope of his ambition, and he stops there. Your passion of hoarding beyond a competency, without purpose except the lust for hoarding, is the offshoot of that instinct in the carnivorous brute, which impels him to refuse to his hungry fellows any portion of his captured carcass, one-tenth of which he cannot consume. This low and brute-born heritage of greed only fails of a better suppression in your society, because you have neglected to entirely remedy, by your political methods, the generally precarious way in which your animal and intellectual wants are supplied. Suffering now follows just as close to a miss in your struggles for sustenance, as it did when your skin-clad hunters failed of their game. Your passion to get and hold is intensified and brutalized in its lack of regard for the consequences to others, by the large number of artificial necessities only attainable in your society by a considerable accumulation of money, the want of which implies degradation, and a sacrifice of many things that have grown to be dear to life. Every addition to the savings removes to a greater distance that dreaded condition of your civilization, known as poverty. The insatiable character of the hoarding is not unlike the motive of overcaution in a wanderer, who, terrorized by the appearance of a dreaded animal in his path, increases his distance by flight far beyond all possible approach of the dangerous presence. Your breathless pursuit of wealth, beyond all reasonable limit of obtaining the objects of desire, is induced also by the remarkable opportunities its possession affords to appropriate the earnings of industry. The capacity of your wealth to absorb and control the fruits of toil exists in a geometrical ratio of increase with the greater wealth employed, and the taste of power once felt is seldom appeased, but increases with every money addition. Under your favorable laws, it may extend to the privilege of a single individual exacting the whole surplus earnings of an army of busy workers.