We speak of people being independently rich. That is a mistake; they
are dependently rich. The richer a man is the more dependent he is--the
more people he depends upon to help him collect his income, and the more
people he depends upon to help him spend his income. Sometimes a couple
will start out doing their own work--the wife doing the work inside the
house and the man outside; but they prosper, and after a while they are
able to afford help. They get a girl to help the wife inside and a man
to help the husband outside; then they prosper more--and they get two
girls to help inside and two men to help outside, then three girls
inside and three men outside. Finally they have so many girls helping
inside and so many men helping outside that they can not leave the
house--they have to stay at home and look after the establishment.
And this is not a new condition. One of the Latin poets complained of
"the cares that hover about the fretted ceilings of the rich," and it
was this condition that inspired Charles Wagner to write his little
book entitled "The Simple Life," in which he entered an eloquent
protest against the materialism which makes man the slave of his
possessions and presented an earnest plea for the raising of the
spiritual above the purely physical. I repeat, there is a limit
to the amount a man can wisely spend upon a home.
But a man can give his money away. Yes, and no one who has ever tried
it will deny that more pleasure is to be derived from the giving
of money to a cause in which one's heart is interested, than can
be obtained from the expenditure of the same amount in selfish
indulgence. But if one is going to give largely he must spend a great
deal of time in investigating and in comparing the merits of the
different enterprises, and I am persuaded that there is a better life
than the life led by those who spend nearly all the time accumulating
beyond their needs and then employ the last few days in giving it
away. What the world needs is not a few men of great wealth, doling
out their money in anticipation of death--what the world needs is
that these men shall link themselves in sympathetic interest with
struggling humanity and help to solve the problems of to-day, instead
of creating problems for the next generation to solve.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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