It was not always thus.  Though there have been previous ages as lustful for wealth and ostentation as our own, there have also been ages when money-getting and millionaire-envying were not the sole preoccupations of the average man.  And such an age will undoubtedly succeed to ours.  Few things would surprise me less, in social life, than the upspringing of some anti-luxury movement, the formation of some league or guild among the middling classes (where alone intellect is to be found in quantity), the members of which would bind themselves to stand aloof from all the great, silly, banal, ugly, and tedious luxe-activities of the time and not to spend more than a certain sum per annum on eating, drinking, covering their bodies, and being moved about like parcels from one spot of the earth’s surface to another.  Such a movement would, and will, help towards the formation of an opinion which would condemn lavish expenditure on personal satisfactions as bad form.  However, the shareholders of grand hotels, restaurants, and race-courses of all sorts, together with popular singers and barristers, etc., need feel no immediate alarm.  The movement is not yet.

As touching the effect of money on the efficient ordering of the human machine, there is happily no necessity to inform those who have begun to interest themselves in the conduct of their own brains that money counts for very little in that paramount affair.  Nothing that really helps towards perfection costs more than is within the means of every person who reads these pages.  The expenses connected with daily meditation, with the building-up of mental habits, with the practice of self-control and of cheerfulness, with the enthronement of reason over the rabble of primeval instincts—­these expenses are really, you know, trifling.  And whether you get that well-deserved rise of a pound a week or whether you don’t, you may anyhow go ahead with the machine; it isn’t a motor-car, though I started by comparing it to one.  And even when, having to a certain extent mastered, through sensible management of the machine, the art of achieving a daily content and dignity, you come to the embroidery of life—­even the best embroidery of life is not absolutely ruinous.  Meat may go up in price—­it has done—­but books won’t.  Admission to picture galleries and concerts and so forth will remain quite low.  The views from Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along Pall Mall at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and of kisses—­these things are unaffected by the machinations of trusts and the hysteria of stock exchanges.  Travel, which after books is the finest of all embroideries (and which is not to be valued by the mile but by the quality), is decidedly cheaper than ever it was.  All that is required is ingenuity in one’s expenditure.  And much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.