Cayton's weekly. [volume] (Seattle, Wash.) 1916-1921, 1920-07-10
AN ESSAY ON MONEY

cldllStS Inat money was all mistake. Ihey
believed, like the old satirists, that there
was a curse upon gold and silver, and that
the use Of them had corrupted men. Hence
they had way of advocating some money
substitute such as labor-checks. in the
hope that men might no longer be dazzled
into greed by the sight of the precious
metals. The Socialists, it is only fair to
say, had more method in their hatred Of
gold than had the satirists. The satirists
hated gold merely because they pretended to
themselves that it had destroyed the ancient
simplicity of life. The Socialists were anx-
ious, for their part, to find medium of
exchange which would entitle a man to
fair equivalent for his labor. but which
would have no value if boarded, as a
means of more and more subjecting the la
Dor of other people to his private interest.
1t is possible to smile at the Utopian's
dream of saving the world by forbidding
the saving of money. But even the average
man has been compelled again and again to
do something to put a limit on the power OF
one man s money over another. In ancient
Greece, so great was the power of money
till the time of Scion that, if man could
not pay his debts. he became the slave of
his creditor. Until fairly recent times in
England the man who could not pay his
debts became. not indeed a slave, but a
prisoner. which was almost as bad.
Today you cannot with your money make
a man slave or a prisoner. but you can
make him your servant. At the back of all
the Utopian dreams is the protest against
a scheme of things in which one man has
thep over to make servants of Others The
Utopian looks forward to world in which
there shall be an equal exchange of serv-
ices instead of the one-sided system of serv-
ice which now prevails. He believes that a
society in which the possession Of gold in
itself gives mastery is a society that must
pass. He believes. even if he is an opti-
mist, that it is passing He sees in all demo
cratic countries a revolt against the power
of money and he rejoices that the servant
now bargains for an ever-increaslng share
Of it in manner for which he would have
been branded as a criminal when money
was an all but absolute monarch.
The rich man. for his part is also some
thing Of Utopian. He. too, confesses his
belief that money is burden almost too
heavy to bear. He sighs with envy as he
thinks of the poor man whose hair is not
turned prematurely gray under the weight
of his responsibilities. He regards the poor
man as a happy creature who has not
care outside his working hours, and who,
if only he is sufficiently poor, has no in
come tax to pay. AS for himself, the more
money he makes the more bills he has to
meet. He cannot read books about gypsies
and vagabonds without a secret longing to
share little of their freedom. He knows
that, for the most part, what he gets out OF
his money is simply a momentary satisfac-
ton of his vanity and that this satisfaction
becomes less and less as time goes on
The discovery that money does not really
make men happy is the most tragic thing in
the life of the nouveau richie. All the
preachers and moralists had been warning
him about it for thousands Of years, but
he had never believed them. He had a firm
conviction that a sunny little patch could
be bought for him somewhere in the uni
verse. if only he could pay the price in
cash. And which Of us does not share his
conviction? The dream Of living wherever
one p1eases, in wooded estate by the edge
of the sea, with little boat in which one
could row out on waters that were all but
ones private possession, with the power to
90 to the ends Of the world, to buy ship
or a motor-car to see everything-it is a