And again, in the matter of his ideas, which have been thrust upon him, and which he has been busily garnering from the great world ever since the day when his eyes first focussed and he drew, startled, against the warm breast of his mother—­the tyranny of these he cannot shake off.  Servants of his will, they at the same time master him.  They may not coerce genius, but they dictate and sway every action of the clay-born.  If he hesitate on the verge of a new departure, they whip him back into the well-greased groove; if he pause, bewildered, at sight of some unexplored domain, they rise like ubiquitous finger-posts and direct him by the village path to the communal meadow.  And he permits these things, and continues to permit them, for he cannot help them, and he is a slave.  Out of his ideas he may weave cunning theories, beautiful ideals; but he is working with ropes of sand.  At the slightest stress, the last least bit of cohesion flits away, and each idea flies apart from its fellows, while all clamour that he do this thing, or think this thing, in the ancient and time-honoured way.  He is only a clay-born; so he bends his neck.  He knows further that the clay-born are a pitiful, pitiless majority, and that he may do nothing which they do not do.

It is only in some way such as this that we may understand and explain the dignity which attaches itself to dollars.  In the watches of the night, we may assure ourselves that there is no such dignity; but jostling with our fellows in the white light of day, we find that it does exist, and that we ourselves measure ourselves by the dollars we happen to possess.  They give us confidence and carriage and dignity—­ay, a personal dignity which goes down deeper than the garments with which we hide our nakedness.  The world, when it knows nothing else of him, measures a man by his clothes; but the man himself, if he be neither a genius nor a philosopher, but merely a clay-born, measures himself by his pocket-book.  He cannot help it, and can no more fling it from him than can the bashful young man his self-consciousness when crossing a ballroom floor.

I remember once absenting myself from civilization for weary months.  When I returned, it was to a strange city in another country.  The people were but slightly removed from my own breed, and they spoke the same tongue, barring a certain barbarous accent which I learned was far older than the one imbibed by me with my mother’s milk.  A fur cap, soiled and singed by many camp-fires, half sheltered the shaggy tendrils of my uncut hair.  My foot-gear was of walrus hide, cunningly blended with seal gut.  The remainder of my dress was as primal and uncouth.  I was a sight to give merriment to gods and men.  Olympus must have roared at my coming.  The world, knowing me not, could judge me by my clothes alone.  But I refused to be so judged.  My spiritual backbone stiffened, and I held my head high, looking all men in the eyes.