great scale; they are organizing and
overseeing a great part of the life of the world. No wonder they are
captivated. Business is more interesting than pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot
said, and when once the mind has caught its zest, there's no disengaging
it. The world has reason to be grateful for the fact.

It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties of the man
whom the world was afterward to know, not as a prince among merchants--for
the world forgets merchant princes--but as a prince among benefactors; for
beneficence breeds gratitude, gratitude admiration, admiration fame, and
the world remembers its benefactors. Business, and business alone,
interested him, or seemed to him worth while. The first time he was asked
to subscribe money for a benevolent object he declined. Why _should_ he
subscribe? What affair would be set forward, what increase of efficiency
would the money buy, what return would it bring in? Was good money to be
simply given away, like water poured on a barren soil, to be sucked up and
yield nothing? It was not until men who understood benevolence on its
sensible, systematic, practical, and really helpful side explained it to
him as an investment that his mind took hold of it and turned to it for
satisfaction. He began to see that education was a thing of infinite usury;
that money devoted to it would yield a singular increase, to which there
was no calculable end, an increase in perpetuity--increase of knowledge,
and therefore of intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after
generation with new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world's
fitness for affairs--an invisible but intensely real spiritual usury beyond
reckoning, because compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age.
Henceforward beneficence was as interesting to him as business--was,
indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new forces in a
commerce which no man could bind or limit.

He had come to himself--to the full realization of his powers, the true and
clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its satisfaction. His
faculties were consciously stretched to their right measure, were at last
exercised at their best. He felt the keen zest, not of success merely, but
also of honor, and was raised to a sort of majesty among his fellow-men,
who attended him in death like a dead sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he
not broken the bonds of mere money-getting; would never have known him