At the silken shrine stands a Minerva who imparts her wisdom and guides my choice.  The silk thread she tells me is equivalent to five cents.  Now, I have not five cents, but only a five-dollar bill.  She does not act on the principle of taking all that the traffic will bear.  She sends the five-dollar bill through space, and in a minute or two she gives me the skein and four dollars and ninety-five cents, and I go out of the store a free man.  I have no misgivings and no remorse because I did not buy all the things I might have bought.  No one reproached me because I did not buy a four-hundred-dollar pianola.  Thanks to the great invention, the transaction was complete in itself.  Five cents represented one choice, and I had in my pocket ninety-nine choices which I might reserve for other occasions.

But there are some things which, as we say, money cannot buy.  In all these things of the higher life we have no recognized medium of exchange.  We are still in the stage of primitive barter.  We must bring all our moral goods with us, and every transaction involves endless dickering.  If we express an appreciation for one good thing, we are at once reproached by all the traffickers in similar articles for not taking over bodily their whole stock in trade.

For example, you have a desire for culture.  You haven’t the means to indulge in very much, but you would like a little.  You are immediately beset by all the eager Matthew Arnolds who have heard of your desire, and they insist that you should at once devote yourself to the knowledge of the best that has been known and said in the world.  All this is very fine, but you don’t see how you can afford it.  Isn’t there a little of a cheaper quality that they could show you?  Perhaps the second best would serve your purpose.  At once you are covered with reproaches for your philistinism.

You had been living a rather prosaic life and would like to brighten it up with a little poetry.  What you would really like would be a modest James Whitcomb Riley’s worth of poetry.  But the moment you express the desire the University Extension lecturer insists that what you should take is a course of lectures on Dante.  No wonder that you conclude that a person in your circumstances will have to go without any poetry at all.

It is the same way with efforts at social righteousness.  You find it difficult to engage in one transaction without being involved in others that you are not ready for.  You are interested in a social reform that involves collective action.  At once you are told that it is socialistic.  You do not feel that it is any worse for that, and you are quite willing to go on.  But at once your socialistic friends present you with the whole programme of their party.  It is all or nothing.  When it is presented in that way you are likely to become discouraged and fall back on nothing.