uction if my
friends the creditors would accept a similar reduction in their little
accounts. Alas! it is no use making such a proposal to them; I must grin
and bear it. One consolation is that my wife--bless her!--is away
holiday-making and does not need to ask me for cash. On the third day we
begin to fear that we may not get ten shillings in the pound, and the
post brings me back another cheque with a modest request for cash by
return. All over the country there is weeping and wailing. One would
bear it better a month hence. Christmas is coming! Already the bells
are preparing to ring it in. I must put on the conventional smile.
Christmas cards are coming in, wishing me a Merry Christmas and a Happy
New Year! and, oh dear! I must say, Thank you! Alas! alas! troubles are
like babies--the more you nurse them, the bigger they grow.

And now it is time for me to make my bow and retire. Having said that my
bank was smashed up, I cannot expect any one to be subsequently
interested in my proceedings. We live in a commercial country and a
commercial age, and the men whom the society journals reverence are the
men who have made large fortunes, either by their own industry and
forethought and self-denial, or by the devil's aid. And I am inclined to
think that he has a good deal to do with the matter. If ever we are to
have plain living and high thinking, we shall have to give up this
wonderful worship of worldly wealth and show. Douglas Jerrold makes one
of his heroes exclaim, "Every man has within him a bit of a swindler."
When Madame Roland died on the scaffold, whither she had been led by the
so-called champions of liberty and equality and the rights of man, she
exclaimed, as every school-boy knows, or ought to know, "Oh, Liberty,
what crimes are done in thy name!" So say I, Oh, wealth, which means
peace and happiness, and health and joy (Sydney Smith used to say that he
felt happier for every extra guinea he had in his pocket, and most of us
can testify the same), what crimes are done in thy name; not alone in the
starvation of the poor, in the underpaying of the wage-earning class who
help to make it, but in the way in which sharks and company promoters
seek to defraud the few who have saved money of all their store. You
recollect Douglas Jerrold makes the hero already referred to say, "You
recollect Glass, the retired merchant? What an excellent man was Glass!
A pattern man to make a whole generation by.