instruments of culture, such as microscopes or natural history specimens, by which his future improvement will be assisted. But this is the smallest part of his gain. He has accustomed himself, day by day, to use his judgment in buying or in refusing to buy; in considering what was needful and judicious expenditure; his will has gained firmness; his moral sense has been educated in resisting temptation; in every way his character has been solidified and broadened. The value of this kind of discipline is quite beyond estimation. It is by just such a regimen that the sturdy virtues are nourished and confirmed.

Give another young man one thousand dollars a year to spend, and he will lose heavily by the expenditure. At the end of the year he will have nothing left to show for his money except a few partly worn garments, swiftly going out of fashion, and a few valueless trinkets; his money has gone for livery bills and suppers and cigars and theater tickets and all sorts of fooleries; he has been ruled, in all this outlay, not by his reason and his judgment, but by his appetites, his vanities, his lower cravings; every day he has known that the money was going foolishly, and he has cursed himself for making such improvident and unproductive use of it; and these weak selfindulgences have steadily lowered his self-respect and confused his judgment and enfeebled his will. Let me tell you, young men, that there is a great deal of manhood to be gained or lost in the spending of your money!

The duty and discipline of saving is a more familiar theme to you; you get well lectured about that, and some of you need all you get, and more. The importance of keeping your expenses within your income and of accumulating thus, by your prudence, some capital for business and some reserves for a rainy day—all this is not to be gainsaid. You ought to be saving something every year; and if you do not begin now there is danger that you never will begin. The habit of living up to and beyond his income is a habit that grows on a man; and it makes little difference whether his income is one dollar a day or ten dollars a day; the man who spends the whole of the

smaller sum will, in nine cases out of ten, spend the whole of the larger sum when he gets it, and run in debt in the bargain. The habit of saving is one that you ought to form at once; and there is good discipline in that, as you have often been told.

But I want you to see that there is also good discipline to be gained in spending money; in wisely using it, as well as in keeping it. You can buy with a small income, if you know how to handle it, something better than rubies, something more precious than fine gold,-yea, durable riches and righteousness.

There is only one word to add. The right use of money implies not only prudence and economy, but also benevolence. No man in this world rightly liveth unto himself. Money is power, and all power is for service. Every man is under obligation to use his money not only productively but also beneficently. Some of your best gains will come through giving. No man gets more money's worth for what he spends than he who knows that his outlay has gone to relieve suffering, or to give help and comfort and happiness to his fellow men. If you never spend any money except for your own benefit-unless you can see that it is coming back to yourself in some form of personal satisfaction-your money will be a curse to you, I care not how you get it. So far as your own soul is concerned, you might just as well be a miser and hoard it all, as to spend it all, no matter how shrewdly, and put no love into the spending.

Dangers of Riches.

PROF. A. S. WRIGHT, A. M., School of Applied Science, Cleveland, Ohio.

T would be interesting to know just what our over-sea visitors of last summer now think of us. Are we still I parvenus? Is Dives, proud of his bank account and his showily furnished house, still the typical American citizen? Possibly our friends have gleaned some new facts during their summer outing. They may have learned that there are more than five thousand public libraries in the United States, that the best English works are more widely read here in proportion to the population than in the mother country, that our average citizen is more intelligent than the average Englishman, Frenchman, or German. As they gazed upon that dream of the ages by the lake-side, they may have realized that æsthetic taste, nobility of conception, poetry of soul, were qualities not alien to the American spirit; at the meetings of the Congress of Religions, they may have perceived that other divinities than Mammon claim some measure of our homage.

And yet, in the seclusion of our homes, we will admit to our foreign friend that our rapid acquisition of wealth has not exercised an altogether salutary influence upon individual or national character.

That simplicity which was the proud distinction of New England life is no more. Walthen Fürst, the type of the true Swiss nobleman, naïvely remarks: "Why, soon we shall need to put lock and bolt upon our doors." Few of us would care to return to the time when there was nothing in the house worth stealing; many of us regret that so many burglar alarms are necessary. We with modest incomes are quite willing to change the style of our hats,-the hats we now buy wear out,—but

furniture, no! Wealth has created false standards, false tastes. Many a youth of the avenue wastes enough annually on his shoes to add a fine section to his library, a fine collection to his natural history museum :-alack! this youth has neither library nor museum. The Harvard student spends five times as much as the Leipsic student; the latter is fivefold more enthusiastic in his search of knowledge. Books rather than rugs is his principle; ours, rugs first, books if the money lasts. Moneyworship destroys the scientific spirit. Science like religion will have none but pure devotees. The American boy's first question is: "What will it cost?" his second: "What will it sell for?" The study for which his natural gifts best fit him, which will broaden his mind, stimulate his emotional nature, quicken his spiritual faculties, is spurned for one which is practical, which has a market value. Scientific research demanding self-sacrifice, the study of the humanities which liberalize and strengthen, are abandoned for cash and trash studies. The business college supplants the college of liberal arts. Such students, called possibly, later, men of science, are in fact bookkeepers. The skill they possess, they sell as their butcher sells meat.

The criticism of Buckle in his "History of Civilization," that while "the average intelligence of the American people is above that of any other people, America has fewer first-rate scholars than any other nation," is a just one, and the reason therefor is the utilitarian spirit of our land and time. Inventors, it is said, seldom reap the financial fruit of their labors. Let us hope that the time may come when they will not care to do so, when great humanitarian purpose may be the motive spring of intellectual effort, when the joy of noble thought and noble accomplishment may seem reward that richly rewards.

It is to be feared, too, that the greed for riches is gradually destroying those finer emotional and spiritual qualities which are our best gifts. Mr. Sydney G. Fisher in a recent number of the Forum has pointed to the fact that nearly all of our great writers-Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Irving, Prescott, Motley, Lowell, Holmes, Channing, Tay

lor-were born before 1825. He has sought an explanation in the decline of a national spirit caused by immigration. Doubtless immigration has been hostile to the growth of literature. But literature-certainly that of poetry, romance, oratory, philosophy-is a child of nature. It must breathe pure air; that of the mart stifles it. Wall street furnishes no inspiration to the poet. Poetry and spirituality are freeborn. They bear their own reward. Goethe has beautifully expressed the thought in his poem, "The Bard." The bard, who has just sung his most soulful melody in presence of king and courtier, refuses the chain of gold offered by the king. Handing back the precious gift he exclaims:

"I sing as sings the bird

That in the branches dwelleth,
The song itself, its own reward,
From deepest soul it welleth."

No nation can afford to lose its ideals. Our republic was born of a noble thought, was cradled in an atmosphere of liberty and religion, gained the strength of youth through deeds of self-sacrifice. The best heritage of our people is its love of truth. Truth sits enthroned in man and nature; back of both is the Divine. Science, literature, music, sculpture, painting, are the outward expression of an inner soul. In touch with the Divine man grows divine. Our best gifts are intellect and soul-both divine. If we cultivate them, we receive the best rewards. The aesthetic grows only in contact with nature, the intellectual in contact with men of thought and books of thought, the spiritual in contact with God.

To barter the music and poetry of the soul for a chain of gold is ignoble. The chain will fetter to earth. Mammon is a mundane spirit. Listen to the poet:

"Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell

From heaven; for even in heaven his look and thoughts

Were always downward bent, admiring more

The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold,

Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed

In vision beatific."