hear or answer then? What would it matter to him then, if he had
starved with them, or ruled over them? People talked of
benevolence. What would it matter to him then, the misery or
happiness of those yet working in this paltry life of ours? In
so far as the exercise of kindly emotions or self-denial
developed the higher part of his nature, it was to be commended;
as for its effect on others, that he had nothing to do with. He
practised self-denial constantly to strengthen the benevolent
instincts. That very morning he had given his last dollar to Joe
Byers, a half-starved cripple. "Chucked it at me," Joe said,
"like as he'd give a bone to a dog, and be damned to him! Who
thanks him?" To tell the truth, you will find no fairer exponent
than this Stephen Holmes of the great idea of American
sociology,--that the object of life is TO GROW. Circumstances
had forced it on him, partly. Sitting now in his room, where he
was counting the cost of becoming a merchant prince, he could
look back to the time of a boyhood passed in the depths of
ignorance and vice. He knew what this Self within him was; he
knew how it had forced him to grope his way up, to give this
hungry, insatiate soul air and freedom and knowledge. All men
around him were doing the same,--thrusting and jostling and
struggling, up, up. It was the American motto, Go ahead; mothers
taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of
glittering prizes. He at least saw the higher meaning of the
truth; he had no low ambitions. To lift this self up into a
higher range of being when it had done with the uses of
this,--that was his work. Self-salvation, self-elevation,--the
ideas that give birth to, and destroy half of our Christianity,
half of our philanthropy! Sometimes, sleeping instincts in the
man struggled up to assert a divinity more terrible than this