speaker added complacently, "that agriculture is the most honest, the
most sincere, the most interesting, the most secure and the most
profitable calling."

"Very often," he went on, "good people are not sufficiently
precautious"--I give the excellent word coined by my interpreter.
"They spend for the public good, and in the end they are left poor.
Renowned, rich families have come to a miserable condition by such
action. What they have done may have been good. But they are reduced
to pauperism and they are laughed at by many persons. People jeer that
they pretended to do good, yet they could not do good to themselves.
If all people who work for the public benefit are laughed at at
last--and many are--it will come to be thought that to work for the
public benefit is not good. Therefore I think that the man who would
work for the public good must be careful in his own affairs. He must
not be a poor man if he is to help public business. However
philanthropic he may be, if his financial position is not strong he
cannot go on long. He will be stopped on his good way. He cannot help
other people. Therefore I am now gathering wealth for strengthening
my financial position as a means to attain the higher end."

As the speaker awaited my judgment on his career, I ventured to
suggest that gifts, qualities and inspiration which made a man a
public man did not necessarily equip him for being a great success in
business life. The question was, perhaps, whether the type of man who
was pre-eminently successful in promoting his own pecuniary interests
was necessarily the best type of public man. Was the average character
equal to the strain of many years of concentration on money-making to
the exclusion of public interests? When men emerged from the sphere of
concentrated money-making, were they worth so very much as public men?