its power, but this limit is quickly reached--first, because man's
ambitions and desires grow faster than his wealth, or reach out into
channels that wealth can never compass, or, and principally, because
wealth is an impersonal power and not a direct one. Give the earth to
a single man, and it would never enable him to change his appearance
or alter one of his mental characteristics, nor to do one single
thing he could not have accomplished before--it giving him the power
to make others do his will; and so long as his will is not beyond the
power of others to do, he is to that extent happy. But to be really
happy, a man must have _personal power_. Wealth is not power. Power
is lodged in the individuality."

"I don't know whether I quite understand you," said Paul.

Ah Ben looked at him searchingly with his luminous, deep-set eyes.

"Can gold restore an idiot's mind," he inquired, "or a cripple the
use of his limbs? Would a mountain of gold add one iota to the power
of your soul? And yet it is gold that men have labored for since the
earth was made. Could they once understand its real limitations? What
a different planet we should have!"

"That is all very well," answered Henley; "but this personal power of
which you speak is born in a man, and is not to be acquired by
anything he can do; whereas, the battle for wealth can be fought in a
field open to all."

"There again I must beg to differ from you," said Ah Ben. "There is a
law for the acquirement of this soul-power which is as fixed and
certain as the law of gravitation; and when a man has once gained it,