filled with a more burning fanaticism than those of the old Spanish
monks, these multimillionaires gave themselves up with inextinguishable
ardour to the austerities of banking and industry. Several, denying
themselves all happiness, all pleasure, and all rest, spent their
miserable lives in rooms without light or air, furnished only with
electrical apparatus, living on eggs and milk, and sleeping on camp
beds. By doing nothing except pressing nickel buttons with their
fingers, these mystics heaped up riches of which they never even saw the
signs, and acquired the vain possibility of gratifying desires that they
never experienced.

The worship of wealth had its martyrs. One of these multi-millionaires,
the famous Samuel Box, preferred to die rather than surrender the
smallest atom of his property. One of his workmen, the victim of an
accident while at work, being refused any indemnity by his employer,
obtained a verdict in the courts, but repelled by innumerable obstacles
of procedure, he fell into the direst poverty. Being thus reduced to
despair, he succeeded by dint of cunning and audacity in confronting his
employer with a loaded revolver in his hand, and threatened to blow
out his brains if he did not give him some assistance. Samuel Box gave
nothing, and let himself be killed for the sake of principle.

Examples that come from high quarters are followed. Those who possessed
some small capital (and they were necessarily the greater number),
affected the ideas and habits of the multi-millionaires, in order
that they might be classed among them. All passions which injured the
increase or the preservation of wealth, were regarded as dishonourable;
neither indolence, nor idleness, nor the taste for disinterested study,
nor love of the arts, nor, above all, extravagance, was ever forgiven;
pity was condemned as a dangerous weakness. Whilst every inclination