man who retires from business when he has money enough to drink
his wine and eat his omelette in peace might much more plausibly be
called a materialist by those who do not prefer to call him a man of
sense. But Americans do worship success in the abstract, as a sort of
ideal vision. They follow success rather than money; they follow money
rather than meat and drink. If their national life in one sense is a
perpetual game of poker, they are playing excitedly for chips or
counters as well as for coins. And by the ultimate test of material
enjoyment, like the enjoyment of an omelette, even a coin is itself a
counter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as the Frenchman can eat chipped
potatoes; but neither can he swallow red cents as the Frenchman swallows
red wine. Thus when people say of a Yankee that he worships the dollar,
they pay a compliment to his fine spirituality more true and delicate
than they imagine. The dollar is an idol because it is an image; but it
is an image of success and not of enjoyment.

That this romance is also a religion is shown in the fact that there is
a queer sort of morality attached to it. The nearest parallel to it is
something like the sense of honour in the old duelling days. There is
not a material but a distinctly moral savour about the implied
obligation to collect dollars or to collect chips. We hear too much in
England of the phrase about 'making good'; for no sensible Englishman
favours the needless interlarding of English with scraps of foreign
languages. But though it means nothing in English, it means something
very particular in American. There is a fine shade of distinction
between succeeding and making good, precisely because there must always
be a sort of ethical echo in the word good. America does vaguely feel a
man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man
doing good. It is connected with his serious self-respect and his sense
of being worthy of those he loves. Nor is this curious crude idealism
wholly insincere even when it drives him to what some of us would call
stealing; any more than the duellist's honour was insincere when it
drove him to what some would call murder. A very clever American play
which I once saw acted contained a complete working model of this
morality. A girl was loyal to, but distressed by, her engagement to a
young man on whom there was a sort of cloud of humiliation. The
atmosphere was exactly what it would have been in England if he