It is Hawthorne, I think, who tells us that when he was a boy he used once in a while to go down to the wharves in Salem, and lay his hand on the rail of some great East India merchantman, redolent of spices, and thus bring himself in actual touch with the mysterious orient. But there is nothing strange in this: almost anything that we can feel or see may start the flight of fancy, and open to us prophetic visions. This is even true of such dry symbols as figures, for our journalists would never publish statistics as they do, unless they knew that their readers liked to see them. Travellers from other parts of the world have often laughed at our fondness for revelling in the marvellous accounts of our material dimensions, but they should remember that people who do not have a taste for poetry may yet have a taste for romance, and that big figures do appeal to the imagination. It is true that there may be something portentous in bigness. "Tom" Reed, as he was affectionately called, said many wise things in a jesting way. At a certain crisis in our history he exclaimed: "I don't want Cuba and Hawaii; I've got more country now than I can love." A foreigner might suppose that our politicians had similarly become terror-stricken at the extent of our wealth and the rate at which it was growing. They may well give the impression that there has been created in the "money power," a Frankenstein monster, the control of whose murderous propensities has put them at their wit's end. Figures are notorious liars; they may arouse emotion if looked at in any light, but they must be looked at in many lights if we would get an emotional effect that is truly worth while. Some very large figures relating to Savings Banks have lately been published. The deposits in these banks amount to over four and two-thirds billions of dollars, and the number of separate accounts is about ten and two-thirds millions. Savings deposits in all banks are about $7,000,000,000, the number of accounts being 17,600,000. Probably the interest paid on the savings banks deposits is 160 millions of dollars a year. I confess that these figures give me much pleasure. I like to think that so many men have taken pains to guard their wives and children against miserable want; that so many women have to some extent made sure of their independence. It would not be surprising to find that twelve millions of families, possibly half the people of the country, were in this way protected against extreme penury. Viewed in this light, the growth of wealth does not seem so terrible. One might paraphrase Burke and say that such wealth as this loses half its evil through losing all its grossness. Indeed one might go further and say that if there were twice as much of this wealth, and every person in the country had an interest in it, it would lose all of its evil.