THE ENORMOUSLY RICH MEN OF THE WORLD

have lived in the apprehension of having the bulk of their possessions seized by envious rulers or fellow citizens.  Not many years ago Vanderbilt suddenly bought fifty million dollars of four per cent Government bonds, simply, it is believed, for the purpose of shifting the enormous risk of active employment upon shoulders which would be less apt to excite popular manifestations of greed should the Commune bring about its foolish and chaotic reign.  The cares of great wealth are a class of the most serious burdens borne by humanity.

THEY SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN

in making up the account between the citizen who has all he needs and the citizen who has to spare for others who will pay him a profit.  Men who have lived in constant dread of poverty have been astonished, upon being stranded on that shore of ill-repute to find the sun shining more brightly and the birds singing more cheerily than when, driven with the ever multiplying engagements of business, they had no slumber which was not an imaginary hurrying into a bank-president’s parlor, and no conversation which was not distressing some impatient caller in an ante-room.

BUT ACTUAL, HARSH, GRINDING WANT

is a nightmare, a delirium of misfortune.  It lowers the human being at once to the condition of a brute somewhat of the order of the cats.  Men on board a ship, driven to despair by hunger, enter the most wretched state conceivable.  The qualities of faith and mercy disappear at once.  No man trusts anybody else.  Each expects the others to pounce upon him to eat him, and none of them would dare to sleep if he could, owing to the certainty of his peril should his vigilance be relaxed.  From this baleful picture of the lowest depths of poverty we may rise to comparatively stupendous heights, and yet be relatively poor as to the consideration of other conditions of life still above us.  Let us, then, view poverty as

A REAL, ACTIVE, “INCONVENIENCE,”

as the French wit has put it.  “One solitary philosopher maybe great, virtuous and happy in the depth of poverty,” says Isaac Iselin, “but not a whole people.”  “Poverty” says Lucian, “persuades a man to do and suffer everything that he may escape from it.”  “It requires a great deal of poetry to gild the pill of poverty,” says Madame Deluzy; “and then it will pass for a pleasant dose only in theory; the reality is a failure.”  “A generous and noble spirit” says Dionysius, “cannot be expected to dwell in the breast of men who are struggling for their daily bread.”

“HOW LIKE A RAILWAY TUNNEL

is the poor man’s life,” says Bovee, “with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!” “Poverty,” says Euripides, “possesses this disease—­through want it teaches a man evil.”  “Poverty,” says Saadi, “snatches the reins out of the hands of pity,” which is true only in one sense.