d on trade. But it does make many people happy, like any
other hobby; and one is disposed to add that it does fill their
imaginations like any other delusion. For the true criticism of all this
commercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic phase of
commerce. These people are building on the sand, though it shines like
gold, and for them like fairy gold; but the world will remember the
legend about fairy gold. Half the financial operations they follow deal
with things that do not even exist; for in that sense all finance is a
fairy tale. Many of them are buying and selling things that do nothing
but harm; but it does them good to buy and sell them. The claim of the
romantic salesman is better justified than he realises. Business really
is romance; for it is not reality.

There is one real advantage that America has over England, largely due
to its livelier and more impressionable ideal. America does not think
that stupidity is practical. It does not think that ideas are merely
destructive things. It does not think that a genius is only a person to
be told to go away and blow his brains out; rather it would open all its
machinery to the genius and beg him to blow his brains in. It might
attempt to use a natural force like Blake or Shelley for very ignoble
purposes; it would be quite capable of asking Blake to take his tiger
and his golden lions round as a sort of Barnum's Show, or Shelley to
hang his stars and haloed clouds among the lights of Broadway. But it
would not assume that a natural force is useless, any more than that
Niagara is useless. And there is a very definite distinction here
touching the intelligence of the trader, whatever we may think of either
course touching the intelligence of the artist. It is one thing that
Apollo should be employed by Admetus, although he is a god. It is quite
another thing that Apollo should always be sacked by Admetus, because he
is a god. Now in England, largely owing to the accident of a rivalry and
therefore a comparison with France, there arose about the end of the
eighteenth century an extraordinary notion that there was some sort of
connection between dullness and success. What the Americans call a
bonehead became what the English call a hard-headed man. The merchants
of London evinced their contempt for the fantastic logicians of Paris by
living in a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set the
Thames on fire. In this as in much else it is much e