What distinguishes this age from others, and our own country from others is that here and now wealth is acquired more easily and more rapidly than at other times and places. This being the very obvious fact, it shakes our confidence in the whole fraternity of prophets that they should, one and all, attribute the larger fortunes made here and now to the greater love of money, or its more assiduous pursuit. The rich man is more successful in amassing wealth than the poor man, but he is not more mercenary. Two men try equally hard to get rich; one succeeds, and the other fails; the man who failed is quite likely to be more eager for money than the man who succeeded.
The industrial system never meets the approval of the prophet. An occasional prediction is that the war will destroy our deplorable economic life, in which every man is trying to get as high wages or as large a salary or as ample profits as possible, and will usher in the golden age, in which such base considerations as pecuniary compensation will have a very secondary place in every man's mind. Before this war came, the most eminent educator in America assured the workingman that he ought to work for the pleasure of it, and not for the contents of his Saturday night envelope. Such admonitions have occurred, in one form or another, in the literature of the sages, for centuries and millenniums. But it was never evolved by a man who was digging postholes, and a noble ambition to mine the very best coal cannot carry a miner far when he is obliged to cut such coal as there is in front of him.
It is barely possible that by devoting some weeks to the task, a man could produce a pair of shoes notably superior to the ordinary run of shoes, and his professional pride as a devout follower of St. Crispin might take keen delight in the work of his hands; in the fact that he had made the very finest pair of shoes in the world. But, after all, he needs food, and possibly he is obliged to pay rent, and he ought to have a wife to make comfortable, and children to send to school in presentable form: so something besides pride in his work is necessary. If he is to be adequately compensated for his labor on that pair of shoes, their price will be such that only the rich--if the rich are to be permitted to survive--can buy them; and if such shoemakers prevail, the greater part of mankind will go barefoot. For does not the prophet who has poured out the phials of his wrath upon an economic system that makes quantity and cheapness, instead of real excellence, its ideals, recognize that the purpose of quantity is to supply the wants of a greater number of human beings, and the purpose of cheapness is to enable human beings to supply more of their needs? For certainly if the shoes which are the very best shoes in the whole world, and whose excellence affords the keenest satisfaction to the soul of the shoemaker, cost $50, then it is quite certain that the customer who carries them home will go without many other things that he ought to have. If the shoes are made by machinery and sold for $3, they may not be quite so beautiful or durable as the artistic product of hand labor, regardless of time, and yet be in the interest of the customer and the community.