we see, indeed, less—­of the public buildings, the people’s parks, the public libraries and public institutions, and other civilizing agencies.  Fifteen months ago, when we were in the highest tide of prosperity, I said all this, and no notice was taken of it.  Why should any notice be taken of a preaching parson or a Christian minister of any kind, when sovereigns fly about like snowflakes in winter, or may be gathered like blackberries in summer?"[1]

[Footnote 1:  Sermon preached at Merthyr during the South Wales strike.]

Men go on toiling and moiling, eager to be richer; desperately struggling, as if against poverty, at the same time that they are surrounded with abundance.  They scrape and scrape, add shilling to shilling, and sometimes do shabby things in order to make a little more profit; though they may have accumulated far more than they can actually enjoy.  And still they go on, worrying themselves incessantly in the endeavour to grasp at an additional increase of superfluity.  Perhaps such men have not enjoyed the advantages of education in early life.  They have no literary pleasures to fall back upon; they have no taste for books; sometimes they can scarcely write their own names.  They have nothing to think of but money,—­and of what will make money.  They have no faith, but in riches!  They keep their children under restriction and bring them up with a servile education.

At length, an accumulation of money comes into the children’s hands.  They have before been restricted in their expenditure; now they become lavish.  They have been educated in no better tastes.  They spend extravagantly.  They will not be drudges in business as their father was.  They will be “gentlemen,” and spend their money “like gentlemen.”  And very soon the money takes wings and flies away.  Many are the instances in which families have been raised to wealth in the first generation, launched into ruinous expense in the second, and disappeared in the third,—­being again reduced to poverty.  Hence the Lancashire proverb, “Twice clogs, once boots.”  The first man wore clogs, and accumulated a “a power o’ money;” his rich son spent it; and the third generation took up the clogs again.  A candidate for parliamentary honours, when speaking from the hustings, was asked if he had plenty brass.  “Plenty brass?” said he; “ay, I’ve lots o’ brass!—­I stink o’ brass!”

The same social transformations are known in Scotland.  The proverb there is, “The grandsire digs, the father bigs, the son thigs,"[1]—­that is, the grandfather worked hard and made a fortune, the father built a fine house, and the son, “an unthrifty son of Linne,” when land and goods were gone and spent, took to thieving.  Merchants are sometimes princes to-day and beggars to-morrow; and so long as the genius for speculation is exercised by a mercantile family, the talent which gave them landed property may eventually deprive them of it.

[Footnote 1:  Dublin University Magazine.]