No sooner, however, does an established government give safe protection to individual property than prudence and forethought appear. The man who acquires property soon surrounds himself with comforts, and inspires in others the desire to follow his example. Social wealth accumulates, and energies are set free for further development. Some social units become complex, intellectual tastes and love of travel arise, and works of art—the treasure-trove of earlier civilizations—are impounded to lay the foundation of artistic life in the later civilization. Aesthetic culture now grows rapidly. Painting, poetry, music abound, and men may be lifted above the meaner cares of existence to an inward freedom, where sympathy expands through the exercise of elevated thought and feeling. Is not love of property, then, a sentiment to honour and conserve? Its genesis and history certainly command respect; but the already quoted case of the Podhalians proves that by no means is it an essential in human evolution. To that primitive people, as Dr. Le Bon has shown, riches have no charms; they are poor, living principally upon oats made into cakes and goat’s milk. They enjoy perfect health and live long. They are quick in apprehension, fond of dancing, singing, music and poetry. There is clearly no development here of the property-sense, yet the Podhalians have a very considerable development of that group of emotions we term aesthetic and regard as an evidence of high refinement and culture. We are not therefore logically entitled to claim that were British love of property and British cupidity greatly diminished, art as a consequence must needs decay and the race revert into barbarism. Herbert Spencer tells us “that in some established societies there has been a constant exercise of the feeling which is satisfied by a provision for the future, and a growth of this feeling so great that it now prompts accumulation to an extent beyond what is needful.” (1st vol. of _Essays_, 2nd series, p. 132.) That point has been overpassed by the British. What we have now to struggle against are varied evils arising from a glut of national wealth (but I do not mean by this term commodities of intrinsic value, only wealth representing an acknowledged claim on the labour of others) and a frightful inflation of the sentiments allied with wealth, which at one time were useful, but for generations have been producing outward vice and inward misery and corruption. The British merchant goes on accumulating long after he has amply provided for himself and family, and many a poor man feels towards that other’s wealth precisely as a savage feels towards his fetish. He is filled with reverence, admiration, desire and a sense of distance from the golden calf that makes him hopeless, abject, despairing.