The Struggle For Wealth

No one can settle down in a European city or village for a month, and observe the laboring classes, without noticing a great difference between their aspirations, ainbitions, and habits, and those of corresponding classes in this country. He may see great poverty in a continental town, and men and women laboring severely and faring meanly, and 8 hopeless gap existing between classes ; he may see the poor virtually the slaves of the rich ; but he will witness a measure of content ment and a daily participation in humble pleasures to which nis eyes have been strangers a't home. There is a sad side to this pleasant picture. Much of this apparent contentment .and enjoyment undoubtedly come trom the hopelessness of the struggle for anything better. An impassable gulf exists between them and the educated and aristocratio classes - a gulf which they have recognized i'rom their birth ; and, having recognized this, they have recognized their own litnitations, and adapted themselves to them. Seeing just what they can do and cannot do, they very rationally undertake to get out of lifejust what their condition renders attainable. There is no far-off, crowning good for them to aim at, so they try to get what they can on the way. They make much of fete-days, and social gatherings, and music, and do what they can to sweeten their daily toil, which they know must be continued while the power to labor lasts." In America it is very different. A humble back-woodsman sits in the presidential chair, or did sit there but recently ; a tailor takes the highest honors of the nation ; a canal-driver becomes a powerful millionaire ; a humble clerk grows into a merchant prince, absorbing the labor and supplying the wants of tens of thousands. In city, state, and national politics, hundreds and thousands may be counted of those who, by enterprise and self-culture and self-assertion, have raised themselves from the humblest positions to influence and place. There is no irapassable gulf botween the low and the high. E very man holds the ballot, and, therefore, every man is a person of political power and importance. The ways of business enterprise are many, and the rewards of success are muniiioent. Not a year, nor, indeed, a month, passes by, that does not illustrate the compara tive oase with which poor men win wealth or acquire power. The consequence is that all but the wholly brutal are after some great good that lies beyond their year of toil. The European expects al ways to be a tenant ; the American intends before he dies to own the house he lives in. If city prices f orbid this, he goes to the suburbs for his home. The European knows that life and labor are cheap, and that he cannot hope to win by them the wealth which will realize for him the dream of future easb ; the American finds his labor dear, and its rewards comparatively bountiful, so that that his dream of wealth is a rational one. He, therefore, denies himself, works early and late, and bends his energies, and directs thoseof his fsmily, into profitable ohannels, all for the great good that beckons him on from the faroff, golden future. The typical American never lives in the present. If he indulge in a recreation it is purely for health's sake, and at long intervals, or in great emergencies. He does not waste money on pleasure, and does not approve of those who do so. He lives in a constant fever of hope and expectation, or grows sour with hope deferred or blank disappointment. Out of it all grows the worship of wealth and that demoralization which results in unscrupuloueness concerning the methode of its acquirement. So America presents the anomaly of a laboring olass with uni precedented prosperity and privileges, and unexampled disoontent and discomfort. Thero is surely soniothing better than this. There is something better than a life-long sucrifice ot' content and enjoyment tor a possible weulth, which, however, may never be acquired, and which has not the power, when won, to yield its holder the boon which he expects it to purchase. To withold from the frugal wife the gown she desires, to deny hor the journey which would do so much to break up the monotony of her home-life, to rear children in mean ways, to shut away from the f'ainily Ufe a thousand social pleasures, to relinquish all amuseraents which have a cost atta'ched to them, for wealth which may or may not come wben the family life is broken up forever - surely this is neither sound entorprise nor wise eooromy. We would not have the American laborer, farmer and inechanic become impiovident, but we would very much like to see them happier than they are, by resort to the daily social enjoyments which are always ready to their hand. Nature ia strong in the young, and they will have society and play of some sort. It should remain strong in the old, and does reïnain strong in them, until it is expelled by the alsorbing and subordinating passion for gain. Something of the Ol( World fondness for play, and daily or weekly indulgence in it should become habitual among our workers. Toil WouU be sweeter if there were are ward at the end of it ; work would be gentier whei used as a ineana for securing a pleasure which stands closer than an old age o oase ; character would be softer and richer and more childlike, wlien acquiree among genial, every day deiights. The all-subordinating strife for wealth, carried on with fearful struggles and constant self-denials, makes us petty, irritable and hard. When the whole American people have learned that a dollar's worth of' pure pleasure is worth more than a dollar's worth of anything else under the iun ; that working is not living, but only the means by which we win a living ; that money is good for nothing except for what it brings of coro fort and culture ; and that we live not in the future, but the present, they will be a happy people - happier and better than they have been. " The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself," may not be an accepted maxiin in political econoiny, but it was uttered by the wisest boing that ever lived in the world, whose mi8sion it was to tnako men both good