e only decisive factor in such
situations. The trust magnate and the factory foreman have equal
chances to feel happiness in the standard of life in which they live.
If they compare themselves with those who are richer, and if their
hearts hang on the external satisfactions, they both may feel
wretched; and yet with another turn of mind they both may be content.
Optimism and pessimism, contentment and envy, self-dependence and
dependence upon the judgment of the world, joyfulness and despondency,
are more decisive contrasts for the budget of happiness than the
difference between fifteen dollars a week and fifteen dollars a
minute. Some of my best friends have to live from hand to mouth, and
some are multimillionaires. I have found them on the whole equally
happy and equally satisfied with their position in life. If there was
a difference at all, I discovered that those who ate from silver
plates were sometimes complaining about the materialism of our time,
in which so much value is put on money. I have never found their fate
especially enviable, nor that of the others especially pitiable, and
evidently they themselves have no such feelings. The general
impression is much more as if actors play on the stage. The one gives
the role of the king in purple cloak and ermine, the other plays the
part of a beggar in ragged clothes. But the one role is not more
interesting than the other, and everything depends upon the art of
playing the character.

This whole scramble for money's worth is based on a psychological
illusion, not only because pleasure and displeasure are dependent upon
relative conditions, but also because the elimination of one source of
feeling intensifies the feelings from other sources. The vulgar
display of wealth which cheapens our life so much, the desire to seek
social distinction by a scale of expenditure which in itself gives no
joy, have in our time accentuated the longing for wealth out of all
proportion. This is true of every layer of society. The clerk's wife
spends for her frocks just as absurdly large a part of his income as
the banker's wife. Every salesgirl must have a plume on her hat rather
than a nourishing luncheon. Others must have six motor cars instead
of a decent library in their palace. But this longing for useless
display is still outdone by the hysterical craving for amusement. The
factory girl must have her movies every night, and besides the nine
hundred kino shows, a hundred and t