rtified them, and made
everyone who passed below pay toll. Well, capital now is exactly what
crags were then. Men fight fairly (we will, at least, grant so much,
though it is more than we ought) for their money; but, once having got
it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who passes below pay
toll to his million, and build another tower of his money castle. And I
can tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as much
from the bag-baron, as ever they did from the crag-baron. Bags and crags
have just the same result on rags. I have not time, however, to-night to
show you in how many ways the power of capital is unjust; but this one
great principle I have to assert--you will find it quite indisputably
true--that whenever money is the principal object of life with either
man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill; and does harm both in
the getting and spending; but when it is not the principal object, it
and all other things will be well got, and well spent. And here is the
test, with every man, of whether money is the principal object with him,
or not. If in mid-life he could pause and say, "Now I have enough to
live upon, I'll live upon it; and having well earned it, I will also
well spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I came into it," then
money is not principal with him; but if, having enough to live upon in
the manner befitting his character and rank, he still wants to make
more, and to _die_ rich, then money is the principal object with him,
and it becomes a curse to himself, and generally to those who spend it
after him. For you know it _must_ be spent some day; the only question
is whether the man who makes it shall spend it, or some one else. And
generally it is better for the maker to spend it, for he will know best
its value and use. This is the true law of life. And if a man does not
choose thus to spend his money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and
the worst thing he can generally do is to lend it; for borrowers are
nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is
mainly done, and all unjust war protracted.

For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to foreign military
governments, and how strange it is. If your little boy came to you to
ask for money to spend in squibs and crackers, you would think twice
before you gave it him; and you would have some idea that it was wasted,
when you saw it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no