The Falls City tribune., 1910-12-02

arraignment for the good of which
it 50 often depriyes it's winner. Down
deep in his heart whether he himself
realizes it or not, the thing that he
most yearninsly desires, and for the
sake of securing which he piles up
wealth, is the happiness which he
thinks is inevitably linked with it.
And the happiness isn't there in
most instances. And it isn't there
just because, too often, he has
battered the capacity for happiness in
gaining the wealth.
Sometimes it's health, though this
is, comparatively a lesser thing. And
just a few blocks from where this is
written is one of John d. Roekefel-
ler's numerous homes. Ills income
this year is said to be $50, 900, 600.
Estimating his expenditures on an al
most parsimonious scale he could
easily afford sw~eetbreads, at a dollar
a pound, and nightingales' tongues,
at fabulous quotations, cooked by
radium at a thousand dollars a mile
gram, three times a day. Any yet
his digestion has been so greatly i'm
paired by his strenuous efforts to
crowd out other oil sellers, that, it
is said, he is reduced to a diet of
bread and milk.
Sometimes the winning of wealth
shuts a man out from the kingdom of
happiness, because it has been won
at the cost of culture. He has money
enough tt buy all the best books, pic
lures, statuary; to visit all the beau
ty spots of earth. And for him. of
tentimes, they are all but as pearls
east before swine.
A steady atrophy of the finer quail
tiles and capacities has been going
on. He has fed them as fuel to the
flame of his inordinate ambition to ac
cumulate wealth. And by the time
the wealth has come they are dead
beyond resurrection, and the happi-
ness he thought his wealth would
bring him eludes him to the end. 1t
isn't there"
This is not a mere scare picture
drawn by a professional moralist, it is
the word for word confession of many
a man who has paid the price.
Sometimes the fierce heat of mod
ern wealth-getting so curdles the
milk of human kindness in the mans
heart, that by the time he is a null
ti-millionaire he is as much of a
mummy as the Pharoh of the Exodus.
When a pirate, in the olden days,
was ready to stop sailing the main,
it might have been very pleasant if
he could quietly retire to some
charming villa and in the bosom Of
a devoted family, and surrounded by
admiring friends, spend life's mellow
years in ease and dignity. But the
trouble was he could not, for various
self-evident reasons.
No more can his modern represen-
tatiye. In the cut-throat competi-
ton involved in piling up swollen for
tunes, the wrongs perpetrated upon
rivals are but shadows of the wrong
done the mans self. The spring of
of unselfish love and godlike sym
pathy dry up, and will not start to
flow again in later years.
If this was a sermon, there is one
more item in this count that would
receive chief emphasis. for it in
cludes most of the others.
This man who in the pursuit of hap
piness, is deluded into thinking that
it is to be found in the pot of gold at
the foot of the rainbow's arch, and
who sacrifices all else to it, "loses
his own soul"
He has sixty or seventy years to
do with as he would.
He coined them into gold.
And he forfeited heaven in the
operation.
He is, above all others. the "blind