always in a state of flurried concern and violent interference with
morality, whereas they throw their money into the street to be scrambled
for, and presently find that their cash reserves are not in their own
hands, but in the pockets of a few millionaires who, bewildered by their
luck, and unspeakably incapable of making any truly economic use of it,
endeavor to "do good" with it by letting themselves be fleeced by
philanthropic committee men, building contractors, librarians and
professors, in the name of education, science, art and what not; so that
sensible people exhale relievedly when the pious millionaire dies, and
his heirs, demoralized by being brought up on his outrageous income,
begin the socially beneficent work of scattering his fortune through the
channels of the trades that flourish by riotous living.

This, as I have said, I did not then understand; for I knew money only
by the want of it. Ireland is a poor country; and my father was a poor
man in a poor country. By this I do not mean that he was hungry and
homeless, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. My friend Mr. James
Huneker, a man of gorgeous imagination and incorrigible romanticism, has
described me to the American public as a peasant lad who has raised
himself, as all American presidents are assumed to have raised
themselves, from the humblest departments of manual labor to the
loftiest eminence. James flatters me. Had I been born a peasant, I
should now be a tramp. My notion of my father's income is even vaguer
than his own was--and that is saying a good deal--but he always had an
income of at least three figures (four, if you count in dollars instead
of pounds); and what made him poor was that he conceived himself as born
to a social position which even in Ireland could have been maintained in
dignified comfort only on twice or thrice what he had. And he married on
that assumption. Fortunately for me, social opportunity is not always to
be measured by income. There is an important economic factor, first