“And here is another point:  Men work at first for a competence—­for enough to lift them above the reach of want in those days which they know to be rapidly approaching, when they can no longer toil.  But, having reached that point, they go on laboring for vanity—­one of the shallowest of the human passions.  The man who is worth $ 100,000 says to himself, ’There is Jones; he is worth $500,000; he lives with a display and extravagance I cannot equal.  I must increase my fortune to half a million.’  Jones, on the other hand, is measuring himself against Brown, who has a million.  He knows that men cringe lower to Brown than they do to him.  He must have a million—­half a million is nothing.  And Brown feels that he is overshadowed by Smith, with his ten millions; and so the childish emulation continues.  Men are valued, not for themselves, but for their bank account.  In the meantime these vast concentrations of capital are made at the expense of mankind.  If, in a community of a thousand persons, there are one hundred millions of wealth, and it is equally divided between them, all are comfortable and happy.  If, now, ten men, by cunning devices, grasp three-fourths of all this wealth, and put it in their pockets, there is but one-fourth left to divide among the nine hundred and ninety, and they are therefore poor and miserable.  Within certain limits accumulation in one place represents denudation elsewhere.

“And thus, under the stimulus of shallow vanity,” I continued, “a rivalry of barouches and bonnets—­an emulation of waste and extravagance—­all the powers of the minds of men are turned—­not to lift up the world, but to degrade it.  A crowd of little creatures—­men and women—­are displayed upon a high platform, in the face of mankind, parading and strutting about, with their noses in the air, as tickled as a monkey with a string of beads, and covered with a glory which is not their own, but which they have been able to purchase; crying aloud:  ‘Behold what I have got!’ not, ’Behold what I am!’

“And then the inexpressible servility of those below them!  The fools would not recognize Socrates if they fell over him in the street; but they can perceive Crœsus a mile off; they can smell him a block away; and they will dislocate their vertebrae abasing themselves before him.  It reminds one of the time of Louis XIV. in France, when millions of people were in the extremest misery—­even unto starvation; while great grandees thought it the acme of earthly bliss and honor to help put the king to bed, or take off his dirty socks.  And if a common man, by any chance, caught a glimpse of royalty changing its shirt, he felt as if he had looked into heaven and beheld Divinity creating worlds.  Oh, it is enough to make a man loathe his species.”

“Come, come,” said Maximilian, “you grow bitter.  Let us go to dinner before you abolish all the evils of the world, or I shall be disposed to quit New York and buy a corner lot in Utopia.”