Money lust

“ This seems to be a calling that distorts much the moral perception, and engenders very confused ideas of right and wrong. The lust for money-making seems to have swallowed up all the finer feelings of the heart, and cut off all the amenities of society. ”

“ Was it not the women, with their insatiable appetite for luxury and splurge; was it not the women, with their incessant demands for money and ever more money; was it not the women, with their profound immorality of any and every class that earns nothing and simply spends; was it not the women, the ladies, who were edging on the men to get money, no matter how? For whom were the grand houses, the expensive hotels, the exorbitant flimsy clothing, the costly jewelry, the equipages, the opera boxes, the senseless, spendthrift squandering upon the degrading vanities of social position? ”

“ I purse-proud! I who am forced to feel with shame and pain every hour of the day that I myself am nothing, that with the exception of two or three friends every human being who comes near me values me for my money! And never was I so painfully conscious of this as at the present moment. For you, with your millions, my wealth is valueless. In your eyes I am simply an insignificant girl whom you regard with contempt, and whom you feel yourself justified in humiliating by offensive words of reproof. ”

“ Money hath ten heads to think out evil-doing;
Money hath twenty hands to mete out pain.
Money! money! money! money!
Money steals the heart's love from our life.
Money I have not--say! art thou hungry, wife?"
If anything was possessed of a devil it was that four-anna bit. It buzzed, and hummed, and jigged infernally, as the boy's finger on the strings struck more firmly.
"I'll tell you what it is, Râmchunderji," said I uneasily, "that vina is enough to ruin Orpheus. As you don't care for my money, I'll give you another instrument instead. ”

“ But the inward rage that consumed him to think that she—the patient, loving woman, who coined wealth by her own unassisted work, while her husband spent the money and amused himself with her earnings—should be publicly sneered at as a nothing, and her worser-half toadied and flattered as if he were a Yankee millionaire in his own right, was stronger than the personal passion he entertained for her, and his manful resentment of the position could not be repressed. ”

“ There the younger of the two spied the purse lying in the grass, and picked it up. But when he opened it and found it full of gold money, he was like one bereft of wits; he flung his arms, he danced, he shouted, he laughed, he acted like a madman; for never had he seen so much wealth in all of his life before—a hundred pieces of gold money!
Now the older of the two was by nature a merry wag, and though he had never had the chance to taste of pleasure, he thought that nothing in the world could be better worth spending money for than wine and music and dancing. ”

“ And all the time the glow and stir of that other woman's tempestuous, self-forgetting passion moved him; the love-thrilled voice, the impassioned gestures, the splendidly moulded figure, the transfiguring tenderness on the beautiful, though faded, face, dazzled and inebriated him, in spite of moments of repulsion and disgust.
"Money," he muttered, "money! when all that one hungers for is a little love. ”

“ I shall scheme and plot to make a big income that we may live like a couple of plump animals, that we may dress ourselves gaudily and parade our wealth. Nothing will satisfy her. Such women are leeches; their only cry is ‘give, give, give.’ So long as I can supply her with money she will tolerate me, and to get it for her I shall sell my heart, and my brain, and my soul. She will load herself with jewels, and go about from house to house, half naked, to leer at every man she comes across: that is ‘life’ to such women. ”

“ It had been her lot to be both player and onlooker in that melodrama where the possession of ample means and the development of critical and æsthetic faculties have frowned upon the expression of a direct and creative ambition; and yet, where all that is subtly ambitious, and all that is meanly jealous, and all that is secretly arrogant, deprived of a natural and healthy expression, underlie and taint the whole body of society. She had come to realize that, in that world in which money must not be mentioned, money is the most indispensable necessity ”

“ When a vicious young millionaire like Harry Thaw runs amuck through his crude and evil environment, we sigh and say, 'His money ruined him.' When a poor young woman abandons her weary frugalities for the questionable pleasures of prostitution, we sigh and say, 'Her poverty drove her to it.' Where then does goodness dwell? ”

“ So, once more, with redoubled energy, we resumed our tense, unremitting round of toil. Now, however, it was vastly different. Every bucket of dirt meant money in our pockets, every stroke of the pick a dollar. Not that it was all like the first rich pocket we had struck. It proved a most erratic and puzzling paystreak—one day rich beyond our dreams, another too poor to pay for the panning. We swung on a pendulum of hope and despair. ”

“ It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.
According to the jingle of the purses
The women mingle promises with curses;
A tranquil cynicism, a tired pleasure
Is meted duly to the money's measure.
The kiss grows weary, and the game grows tame. ”

“ This whole scramble for money's worth is based on a psychological illusion, not only because pleasure and displeasure are dependent upon relative conditions, but also because the elimination of one source of feeling intensifies the feelings from other sources. The vulgar display of wealth which cheapens our life so much, the desire to seek social distinction by a scale of expenditure which in itself gives no joy, have in our time accentuated the longing for wealth out of all proportion. ”

“ Will the trifles that you have purchased afford you such heart-felt delight, Caroline?
Selfish people save, to gratify their own caprices and appetites; the benevolent curb both, to give scope to the nobler feelings of the human heart. When we squander money idly, we defraud the poor, and deprive our own souls of their most exalted food. If you wish to be useful, govern your desires, and wait not till distress obtrudes itself—search it out. ”

“ The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment and pride and love—the love that tore itself in pieces because it had not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money gives— broke forth in him, fresh as he was from a brutal interview with the financial clique whom he had given the chance to make much money, and who were now, for a few thousand dollars, trying to cudgel him out of his one opportunity to regain his place in his lost world. ”

“ Let us, then, consider some of the forms which this struggle assumes in the streets and the dwellings around us. I remark, in the first place, that it inspires much of the effort for wealth. I believe there are but few, comparatively, who are anxious to make money merely for the sake of piling it up, and counting it out. There may be a mania of this kind, in which men become enamored of Mammon for his own sake, and hug him to their breasts, and kiss his golden lips, with all the ardor of lovers. ”

“ A smash like that isn't over in a day or a night. But I'm afraid you've been spending too much money, Ben. Is your wife extravagant?"
"No, it's my own fault. I've never liked her to consider the value of money."
"It's a bad way to begin. Women have got it in their blood, and I remember my poor mother used to say she never felt that a dollar was worth anything until she spent it. If I were you, I'd pull up and go slowly, but it's mighty hard to do after you've once started at a gallop."
"I don't think I'll have any trouble, but I hate like the deuce to speak of it to Sally." ”

“ She had heard her father say once that the only value money had, outside of one's immediate requirements, was to be able to relieve other people's misery: and that if we just spent it on ourselves money became a monster that stripped life of all happiness, all illusion, all love—and made it just a selfish mockery of a world! ”

“ I tried them all—horse-racing, athletic events, roulette, faro, poker and even craps. As often happens with tyros, I was fortunate to begin with. But I became useless as a citizen, as a father and husband, made Muriel [Pg 99] thoroughly miserable, and did not increase my own happiness or satisfaction with life. But, strange to say, I made money. The more we love, and are loved, the more power we have to aggravate those who love us.
In seventeen months my commission of twelve hundred dollars had grown to the wonderful sum of twenty-one thousand dollars. ”

“ If we don’t know how to get any happiness out of five dollars, we won’t know how to get it out of five hundred, or five thousand, or five hundred thousand, Mr. Smith. I don’t mean that we’ll get the same amount out of five dollars, of course,—though I’ve seen even that happen sometimes!—but I mean that we’ve got to know how to spend five dollars—and to make the most of it.”
“I reckon—you’re right, Miss Maggie.”
“I know I’m right, and ’tisn’t the money’s fault when things go wrong. Money’s all right. I love money. Oh, yes, I know—we’re taught that the love of money is the root of all evil. ”

“ Then, careless of the future, greedy of pleasure, counting on their right arm as the painter on his palette, lords for one day, they throw their money on Mondays to the cabarets which gird the town like a belt of mud, haunts of the most shameless of the daughters of Venus, in which the periodical money of this people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at work, is squandered as it had been at play. ”

“ Only children, wives—in short, all around him—hold in his mind a second place to money. Oh! let us understand each other; he doesn't love money like a miser, for the sake of having a huge pile of it and hiding it in his cellar. No; if he wishes to make it gush forth on every side, if he draws it from no matter what sources, it is to see it flow around him in torrents; it is for the sake of all the enjoyments he derives from it—luxury, pleasure, power. ”

“ I do not wish my sister to see much of one who, for money--mere money--is content to do that which is wrong. The love of money is the root of all evil."
"And you think," exclaimed Doris, "you think I love money? You think that for money I am content to do wrong?" ”

“ These criminals are far seldomer influenced by the love of money than by the want of it. If instead of being without a dollar, they had had sufficient for their necessities, would they have run such risks, incurred such guilt, staked life on one desperate chance, flung it away in despairing misery? ”

“ The millionaire repeated the wry face of a moment before.
“I’m not a marrying man. I never did care much for women; and—I’m not fool enough to think that a woman would be apt to fall in love with my bald head. Nor am I obliging enough to care to hand the millions over to the woman that falls in love with them, taking me along as the necessary sack that holds the gold. If it comes to that, I’d rather risk the cousins. They, at least, are of my own blood, and they didn’t angle to get the money.” ”

“ Because your money, your millions, have changed you from a man into a monster. This wealth has injured us all—yes, even mother, noble though she is. But you—it has made you a fiend. Well, I wished to be independent of you. You have brought me up so that I could not live without luxury. But you haven’t destroyed in me the last spark of self-respect. And I decided to make a play for a fortune of my own. ”

“ Now this tendency to hoard is not essentially miserliness, for the chief purpose of miserliness is to bring together and to own money; to enjoy merely the look of it. This tendency is an unintelligent attitude toward money, a failure to judge its value and properties. Now this failure is one of the principal reasons for numerous crimes. A woman needing money for her thousand several objects, demands it from her husband, and the latter has to provide it without her asking whether he honestly can or not. A wife is said to be uncurious only with regard to the source of her husband’s money. ”

“ My wife and daughters get one view of life, and I another. They see the romance, I the hard reality. It is impossible for me to get money as fast as they wish to spend it. It was my fault in the beginning, I suppose. Ah! how difficult it is to correct an error when once made. I tell them that I am a poor man, but they smile in my face, and ask me for a hundred dollars to shop with in the next breath. ”

“ But what does he care for a quiet life—a life free of anxiety?—what does he care for wife and child? Money, ready-money, and large quantities, is what he will have, that he may squander it in infamous folly. Some demon has made him acquainted with the secret of the hundred and fifty thousand thalers, half of which he in his mad way demands, maintaining that this money is movable property and quite apart from the entailed portion. ”

“ He dares not ask a soul to see how he spends his gold; he has shrunk into a mean and niggardly expenditure, and complains of reverse and poverty, in order to excuse himself to his wife for debarring her the enjoyments which she anticipated from the Money Bags she had married. A vague consciousness of retribution has awakened remorse, to add to his other stings. ”

“ The miser represents a subtler form of desire, but his greed for gold may be quite as intense as that of the glutton for sensual gratification. The accumulation of money has been the dominant thought of his life. He has created in his mind a wholly false value for money and it gives him real pain to part with a dollar of it. ”

“ Even his sexual fancies translate themselves instantly into concepts of dollars and cents; the thing that confines him so miserably to one wife, and to one, alas, so unappetizing and depressing, is simply his lack of money ”