“All the rich and all the covetous men in the world,” said Jeremy Taylor, “will perceive, and all the world will perceive for them, that it is but an ill recompense for all their cares, that by this time all that shall be left will be this, that the neighbours shall say, He died a rich man: and yet his wealth will not profit him in the grave, but hugely swell the sad accounts of his doomsday.”

“One of the chief causes,” says Mrs. Gore, “which render the pursuit of wealth a bitterer as well as more pardonable struggle in England than on the Continent, is the unequal and capricious distribution of family property....  Country gentlemen and professional men,—­nay, men without the pretension of being gentlemen,—­are scarcely less smitten with the mania of creating ‘an eldest son’ to the exclusion and degradation of their younger children; and by the individuals thus defrauded by their nearest and dearest, is the idolatry of Mammon pursued without the least regard to self-respect, or the rights of their fellow-creatures.  Injured, they injure in their turn.  Their days are devoted to a campaign for the recovery of their birthright.  Interested marriages, shabby bargains, and political jobbery, may be traced to the vile system of things which converts the elder son into a Dives, and makes a Lazarus of his brother.”

But democrats have quite as great a love for riches as aristocrats; and many austere republicans are eager to be millionaires.  Forms of government do not influence the desire for wealth.  The elder Cato was a usurer.  One of his means of making money was by buying young half-fed slaves at a low price; then, by fattening them up, and training them to work, he sold them at an enhanced price.  Brutus, when in the Isle of Cyprus, lent his money at forty-eight per cent. interest,[1] and no one thought the worse of him for his Usury.  Washington, the hero of American freedom, bequeathed his slaves to his wife.  It did not occur to him to give them their liberty.  Municipal jobbery is not unknown in New York; and its influential citizens are said to be steeped to the lips in political corruption.  Mr. Mills says, that the people of the North-Eastern States have apparently got rid of all social injustices and inequalities; that the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance for every able-bodied man; that they enjoy the six points of the Charter, and need never complain of poverty.  Yet “all that these advantages have done for them is, that the life of the whole of our sex is devoted to dollar-hunting; and of the other, to breeding dollar-hunters.  This,” Mr. Mill adds, “is not a kind of social perfection which philanthropists to come will feel any very eager desire to assist in realizing."[2]

[Footnote 1:  Cicero’s Letters]

[Footnote 2:  Principles of Political Economy, Book iv., ch. vi.]