wealth, but an opportunity of service; not money, but honest work.
If he has some strong propensity, some calling of nature, some
over-weening interest in any special field of industry, inquiry, or
art, he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for two
reasons: the first external, because there he will render the best
services; the second personal, because a demand of his own nature
is to him without appeal whenever it can be satisfied with the
consent of his other faculties and appetites. If he has no such
elective taste, by the very principle on which he chooses any
pursuit at all he must choose the most honest and serviceable, and
not the most highly remunerated. We have here an external problem,
not from or to ourself, but flowing from the constitution of
society; and we have our own soul with its fixed design of
righteousness. All that can be done is to present the problem in
proper terms, and leave it to the soul of the individual. Now, the
problem to the poor is one of necessity: to earn wherewithal to
live, they must find remunerative labour. But the problem to the
rich is one of honour: having the wherewithal, they must find
serviceable labour. Each has to earn his daily bread: the one,
because he has not yet got it to eat; the other, who has already
eaten it, because he has not yet earned it.

Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts,
whether for the body or the mind. But the consideration of
luxuries leads us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a
second proposition no less true, and maybe no less startling, than
the last.

At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of
surfeit and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us with