gratification fixed or regulated by--well, by a majority of these dough
men? That's the only way I know for the people to get rid of a
circulating medium, and live."

He paused for a moment, both in his locution, and in his walk back and
forward across the floor. Then he resumed both:

"I do not know of anything quite so idiotic as is this howl directed
against the possession of wealth. I myself am a poor man: if I do not
earn a living each year, I go hungry or go in debt. But I would not
trade off my chances of a competency and of wealth--a reasonable
ambition for every man in England and America--no, not to see every rich
man on earth starve--or even sent to hell. This howl is the mark of a
plebeian, or at least of a wickedly childish cast of intellect. I know
of nothing quite so foolish, and of nothing half so brutal. The
Jew-baiting folly is a phase of the same nonsense. It is foolish,
because if the possession of capital is denied to the men who can best
acquire and hence best continue to employ it, then commercial
civilization must take a back seat--in fact, go, and go to stay; and
this means abject poverty for everybody but a handful of state and
church aristocrats. It is brutal, because it is unreasoning and
mistakenly vindictive. It is the howl of the mentally weak--of the mob;
and the mob is always brutal.

"If we are to suppress those whose possessions evidence a past or a
present performance of some service that the world demanded and paid
for, we cast aside the useful of the earth: we know that their
possessions were gained, not from the pauper, but from those who held
material wealth; and I know, and can most solemnly swear, from personal
experience, that in this world nobody gets anything for nothing.