of wealth for its own sake”.  And within good limits the feeling is quite right.  So long as we play the game of industry vigorously and eagerly (and I hope we shall long play it, for we must be very different from what we are if we do anything better), we shall of necessity respect and admire those who play successfully, and a little despise those who play unsuccessfully.  Whether this feeling be right or wrong, it is useless to discuss; to a certain degree, it is involuntary; it is not for mortals to settle whether we will have it or not; nature settles for us that, within moderate limits, we must have it.  But the admiration of wealth in many countries goes far beyond this; it ceases to regard in any degree the skill of acquisition; it respects wealth in the hands of the inheritor just as much as in the hands of the maker; it is a simple envy and love of a heap of gold as a heap of gold.  From this our aristocracy preserves us.  There is no country where a “poor devil of a millionaire is so ill off as in England”.  The experiment is tried every day, and every day it is proved that money alone—­money pur et simple—­will not buy “London Society”.  Money is kept down, and, so to say, cowed by the predominant authority of a different power.

But it may be said that this is no gain; that worship for worship, the worship of money is as good as the worship of rank.  Even granting that it were so, it is a great gain to society to have two idols:  in the competition of idolatries the true worship gets a chance.  But it is not true that the reverence for rank—­at least, for hereditary rank—­is as base as the reverence for money.  As the world has gone, manner has been half-hereditary in certain castes, and manner is one of the fine arts.  It is the style of society; it is in the daily-spoken intercourse of human beings what the art of literary expression is in their occasional written intercourse.  In reverencing wealth we reverence not a man, but an appendix to a man; in reverencing inherited nobility, we reverence the probable possession of a great faculty—­the faculty of bringing out what is in one.  The unconscious grace of life may be in the middle classes:  finely-mannered persons are born everywhere; but it ought to be in the aristocracy:  and a man must be born with a hitch in his nerves if he has not some of it.  It is a physiological possession of the race, though it is sometimes wanting in the individual.

There is a third idolatry from which that of rank preserves us, and perhaps it is the worst of any—­that of office.  The basest deity is a subordinate employee, and yet just now in civilised Governments it is the commonest.  In France and all the best of the Continent it rules like a superstition.  It is to no purpose that you prove that the pay of petty officials is smaller than mercantile pay; that their work is more monotonous than mercantile work; that their mind is less useful and their life more