y in, enough for the time to
come. He would devote his whole strength to that work, and so be
sooner done with it. Money, or place, or even power, was nothing but a
means to him: other men valued them because of their influence on
others. As his work in the world was only the development of himself,
it was different, of course. What would it matter to his soul the day
after death, if millions called his name aloud in blame or praise?
Would he hear or answer then? What would it matter to him then, if he
had starved with them, or ruled over them? People talked of
benevolence. What would it matter to him then, the misery or happiness
of those yet working in this paltry life of ours? In so far as the
exercise of kindly emotions or self-denial developed the higher part of
his nature, it was to be commended; as for its effect on others, that
he had nothing to do with. He practised self-denial constantly to
strengthen the benevolent instincts. That very morning he had given
his last dollar to Joe Byers, a half-starved cripple. "Chucked it at
me," Joe said, "like as he'd give a bone to a dog, and be damned to
him! Who thanks him?" To tell the truth, you will find no fairer
exponent than this Stephen Holmes of the great idea of American
sociology,--that the object of life is TO GROW. Circumstances had
forced it on him, partly. Sitting now in his room, where he was
counting the cost of becoming a merchant prince, he could look back to
the time of a boyhood passed in the depths of ignorance and vice. He
knew what this Self within him was; he knew how it had forced him to
grope his way up, to give this hungry, insatiate soul air and freedom
and knowledge. All men around him were doing the same,--thrusting and
jostling and struggling, up, up. It was the American motto, Go ahead;
mothers taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of
glittering prizes. He at least saw the higher meaning of the truth; he
had no low ambitions. To lift this self up into a higher range of
being when it had done with the uses of this,--that was his work.
Self-salvation, self-elevation,--the ideas that give birth to, and
destroy half of our Christianity, half of our philanthropy! Sometimes,
sleeping instincts in the man struggled up to assert a divinity more
terrible than this growing self-existent soul that he purified and
analyzed day by day: a depth of tender pity for outer pain; a fierce
longing for rest, on something,