What affair would be set forward, what increase of efficiency would
the money buy, what return would it bring in? Was good money to be
simply given away, like water poured on a barren soil, to be sucked
up and yield nothing? It was not until men who understood
benevolence on its sensible, systematic, practical, and really
helpful side explained it to him as an investment that his mind took
hold of it and turned to it for satisfaction. He began to see that
education was a thing of infinite usury; that money devoted to it
would yield a singular increase to which there was no calculable
end, an increase in perpetuity--increase of knowledge, and therefore
of intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after generation
with new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world's fitness
for affairs--an invisible but intensely real spiritual usury beyond
reckoning, because compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age.
Henceforward beneficence was as interesting to him as business--was,
indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new
forces in a commerce which no man could bind or limit.

He had come to himself--to the full realization of his powers, the
true and clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its
satisfaction. His faculties were consciously stretched to their
right measure, were at last exercised at their best. He felt the
keen zest, not of success merely, but also of honor, and was raised
to a sort of majesty among his fellow-men, who attended him in death
like a dead sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he not broken the
bonds of mere money-getting; would never have known himself had he
not learned how to spend it; and ambition itself could not have
shown him a straighter road to fame.

This is the positive side of a man's discovery of the way in which