en; bought a seat in Parliament from
a poor and corrupt constituency, and helped to preserve the laws by
which he had thriven. Afterwards, when his wealth grew famous, he had
less need to bribe; for modern men worship the rich as gods, and will
elect a man as one of their rulers for no other reason than that he is
a millionaire. He aped gentility, lived in a palace at Kensington, and
bought a part of Scotland to make a deer forest of. It is easy enough to
make a deer forest, as trees are not necessary there. You simply drive
off the peasants, destroy their houses, and make a desert of the land.
However, my father did not shoot much himself; he generally let the
forest out by the season to those who did. He purchased a wife of gentle
blood too, with the unsatisfactory result now before you. That is
how Jesse Trefusis, a poor Manchester bagman, contrived to be come a
plutocrat and gentleman of landed estate. And also how I, who never did
a stroke of work in my life, am overburdened with wealth; whilst the
children of the men who made that wealth are slaving as their fathers
slaved, or starving, or in the workhouse, or on the streets, or the
deuce knows where. What do you think of that, my love?"

"What is the use of worrying about it, Sidney? It cannot be helped now.
Besides, if your father saved money, and the others were improvident, he
deserved to make a fortune."

"Granted; but he didn't make a fortune. He took a fortune that others
made. At Cambridge they taught me that his profits were the reward of
abstinence--the abstinence which enabled him to save. That quieted my
conscience until I began to wonder why one man should make another pay
him for exercising one of the virtues. Then came the question: what did
my father abstain from? The workmen abstained from meat, drink, fresh
air, good clothes, decent lodging, holidays, money, the society of their
families, and pretty nearly everything that makes life worth living,
which was perhaps the reason why they usually died twenty years or so
sooner than people in our circumstances. Yet no one rewarded them for
their abstinence. The reward came to my father, who abstained from
none of these things, but indulged in them all to his heart's content.
Besides, if the money was the reward of abstinence, it seemed logical to
infer that he must abstain ten times as much when he had fifty thousand
a year as when he had only five thousand. Here was a problem for my
young mind. Requi