a year before the transaction; perhaps you have two thousand five hundred after it.  That represents your gain in the one case.  But in the other, you have thrown down a barrier which concealed significance and beauty.  The blind man has learned to see.  The prisoner has opened up a window in his cell and beholds enchanting prospects; he will never again be a prisoner as he was; he can watch clouds and changing seasons, ships on the river, travellers on the road, and the stars at night; happy prisoner! his eyes have broken jail!  And again he who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches; if prosperity come, he will not enter poor into his inheritance; he will not slumber and forget himself in the lap of money, or spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but be up and briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which is not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into living delight and satisfaction.  Etre et pas avoir—­to be, not to possess—­that is the problem of life.  To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second.  To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honourable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness—­these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy and without which money can buy nothing.  For what can a man possess, or what can he enjoy, except himself?  If he enlarge his nature, it is then that he enlarges his estates.  If his nature be happy and valiant, he will enjoy the universe as if it were his park and orchard.

But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned.  It is not merely a convenience or a necessary in social life; but it is the coin in which mankind pays his wages to the individual man.  And from this side, the question of money has a very different scope and application.  For no man can be honest who does not work.  Service for service.  If the farmer buys corn, and the labourer ploughs and reaps, and the baker sweats in his hot bakery, plainly you who eat must do something in your turn.  It is not enough to take off your hat, or to thank God upon your knees for the admirable constitution of society and your own convenient situation in its upper and more ornamental stories.  Neither is it enough to buy the loaf with a sixpence; for then you are only changing the point of the inquiry; and you must first have bought the sixpence.  Service for service:  how have you bought your sixpences?  A man of spirit desires certainty in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is some reciprocity between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in service; that he has not a lion’s share in profit and a drone’s in labour; and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile concern of mankind.