least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a better opinion of our scholarship.”(191) Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Mohammedan dervishes unite with Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds for such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie closest to common human nature. The opposition between the men who _have_ and the men who _are_ is immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old‐fashioned sense of the man who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these possessions, but rather with the personal superiorities, the courage, generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To certain huckstering kinds of consideration he thanked God he was forever inaccessible, and if in life’s vicissitudes he should become destitute through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was all the freer to work out his salvation. “Wer nur selbst was hätte,” says Lessing’s Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, “mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe nichts!” This ideal of the well‐born man without possessions was embodied in knight‐errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the man absolutely unencumbered. Owning nothing but his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, he is the representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future, offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and athletic attitude of observation, the property‐owner seems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, “wading in straw and rubbish to his knees.” The claims which _things_ make are corrupters of manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards the empyrean. “Everything I meet with,” writes Whitefield, “seems to carry this voice with it,—‘Go thou and preach the Gospel; be a pilgrim on earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.’ My heart echoes back, ‘Lord Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou seest me in danger of _nestling_,—in pity—in tender pity,—put a _thorn_ in my nest to prevent me from it.’ ”(192) The loathing of “capital” with which our laboring classes to‐day are growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist poet writes:— “Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you have, “Shall you become beautiful;