I know, of course, that there are marked exceptions. I have in my mind as I write a young man of a Western city, born to an enormous fortune, married to another, and trained and nurtured in the lap of luxury. Almost everything conspired to make him either an idler or a money worshipper. He is neither. It is an accident. In his early youth he became an invalid, and was sent out by his father to live on a ranch. The ranchman’s wife was a real woman, and instinct taught her how to handle that boy. He was put to work. At first, when his father learned through his letters that he was spending his time mending fences, feeding pigs, watering horses, and milking cows, he objected strongly. He wrote to the ranchman to this effect. The ranchman rebuked his wife, and set the boy to work at other gentler things. A week later the boy wrote an indignant letter to his father to the effect that he was coming home if he couldn’t go back to real work. The father saw a great light; and free permission was given to the ranchman’s wife to do whatever she liked with the boy. When he went home a year and a half later he was the makings of a real man. To-day his father is dead, and he has succeeded to the command of a mighty estate. He holds his place in the best Society of the land, but he holds, too, his place amongst the workers. At the age of twenty-eight he had twice refused political office, and has refused also the presidency of a bank which he controls and of which he is a director, on the ground that as a director he will not vote for the appointment of a dummy officer. He is a deep, clear-headed student of events, and money, to him, has been but the lever to move the world. The same is true to a certain extent of the daughters of the rich. Some of them, in spite of their wealth, are splendid women, but too often wealth has destroyed in them the clear and beautiful springs of life. Either they worship it as a god or they despise it, throwing it away like water. Of the two vices, I do not know which is the worse. I do not know, in sane and sober judgment, whether I, as a man of wealth and fashion (and yet a man of business and of some knowledge), despise more deeply the outright worshipper of Mammon, or the reckless, extravagant, and foolish idle rich. Thank God, I am not obliged to choose my friends from either, for still within the barriers of gold there lies a little leaven of the old Society.