Sharp County record., 1883-08-09
Is Money Worth the Price!

is money N0TIu lHe Irlces
Money is good thing to have in the
house. 1t would be waste of time to
preach any other doctrine to the Ameri-
can people, who run such feverish race
with fortune, but the current news of the
dayyields an abundance ofincidents from
the lives of the great men in our money
world that preach the hollOwness of mere
riches. One great Wall-street mega
thosaurus has so strained his nervous syS-
tenn in the midnight cOntrivings OF
snares for his fellows on the street that
he at last forgetS the secret of the old
fashioned honest sleep that used to come
unsought to his eyelids. He must build
him galley of more than Asiatic splen-
dor and sail away in search of the toun-
tain that no one has ever found when
once lost.
The railway world is strewn with the
wrecks of human life. The collapse of
Tom Scott, who believed himself as in
yincible in physique as in railway com
binations, is only an extreme instance
of what is happening all around us.
When the greatest of our railway kings
died, the list of diseases, as given by
his doctors in the trial of the case to
break his will, was about as long as the
schedule of his property. He appears
to have bequeathed his ailments with
his dollars to his descendant. The rail
road king who can take million dol
lars to Europe for spending money did
not dare, for fear of being kidnapped,
to take the Western trip which he bad
planned over the mountains. His hun
dred millions hardly saved him from a
shudder when he read in his morning
paper that the freight-handlers, during
their strike last year, said in one of their
desperate moments "Let us 90 and
look at Vanderbilt's house on the
Avenue,"
1t was a wonderful stroke Of good
fortune for the delivers in the Comstock
lode to get their picks into the bonan-
"a. But what happiness does this
bonanza appear to have brought its dis
covercrS or any one else? The specula-
ton that followed left San Francisco
scared and scorched as if by a hotter
fire than that which swept over Chi
caeo. The Colorado and the Nevada
bonanzas have each contributed sad
scandal to the divorce courts. One of
the great bonanza kings has the remote
satisfaction of knowing that part of
his family is cutting a great swell in
the gayest capital of the world, while
he is living without his family in the
dreariest region outdoors, and another
was described the other day as wander
ing through the lonesome magnificence
of a mansion which he had filled with
books he did not have the taste to read,
and statues celebrating heroes he could
not pronounce the names of, and musi-
cal instruments not one of which he
could play.
All this is common enough, but there
is one failure in life which the very rich
make so regularly that it almost rises to
the rank of social law. They so con-
centrate their minds on money-making
that they entirely neglect the making of
the habits and character of those to
whom they expect to intrust the spend
ing of it. They can not spend it. The
habit of mind which made it possible to
accumulate makes it impossible to
scatter. But they are too busy to
teach their boys and girls how to use
this enormous power Of money. 1t is
easier to give the child, who has just
awakened to the pleasures that he can
buy, ten dollars than it is to teach him
how to spend ten cents wisely or to
make it by his own labor. The wonder
at 1t te = We y ots
of fortune to doubt their own shrewd-
ness in piling up millions which they
intend to commit to unframed hands
Chicago Tribune.