Letters from Oxford
Guiney, Louise Imogen
MONEY By HILAIRE BELLOC THE moment a man sets down the title "Money" over a bit of writing, or brings out the word "money" in conversation, the first idea everyone must have is that he is going...
...By an accident which is common in human affairs, its very stupidity is its strength...
...MONEY By HILAIRE BELLOC THE moment a man sets down the title "Money" over a bit of writing, or brings out the word "money" in conversation, the first idea everyone must have is that he is going to do one of two things...
...if he is lazy he certainly will not be...
...Cardinal Manning said to me when I was nineteen years old and first entering this writing trade of mine, "Always sign your name to what you write...
...I have not always followed it...
...The first thing that occurs to me is this: let us avoid like an intellectual and moral plague the false idea that the virtues, greater or lesser, make a man wealthy, and that there is something disgraceful, either morally or intellectually, in becoming poor...
...IO THE COMMONWEAL May 7, 1930 In the old days there was much truth in the idea that industry produced money for the industrious man and that poverty was his own fault...
...What is quite certain is that getting hold of large sums of money rapidly in the modern fashion, has nothing to do with industry—unless we mean by industry a feverish occupation in gambling...
...Now if we can get rid of that idolatry from the mass of modern men, we shall get rid of one of the main incentives for grasping at wealth: and the best medicine for ridding us of such false ideas is the close observation of how great accumulations arise...
...If a man lives upon his own land as did his fathers before him, working hard may make him moderately prosperous...
...If I knew how to become rich quickly I doubt if I should share the knowledge...
...I could make a list of fifty great fortunes made and lost under my own eyes and in my own lifetime...
...Never was there a more cursed heresy, nor ever was there a more contemptibly foolish error of the intelligence...
...If it meant that, we should be condemning the whole human race from the beginning of civilized times...
...Still a counsel of perfection it remains—and I am following it here although from the simplicity of these poor remarks of mine I should prefer perhaps that they remained anonymous...
...Selling oneself is the universal disease of our time...
...It does not mean preferring a greater gain for one's labor than a lesser...
...Either to advise them how to become rich quickly, or to advise them to have nothing to do with the beastly thing at all...
...There is no really honest labor about it...
...while as for leaving money alone, why, to pay no attention to money means, nowadays, to neglect keeping alive...
...Especially would it prevent these new millionaires from controlling and manufacturing public opinion...
...And most men (especially if they are poor men) will agree at once...
...That is why what the public is told on national affairs is so very different from what one learns from private conversation...
...But I am talking here of something quite different...
...Selling oneself does not mean taking occupation...
...I am talking of a sort of sacramental attitude toward the possession of money in large amounts...
...And in the acquisition and the loss there was present precisely the same cause—mere gambling...
...It was a counsel of perfection...
...Of course, all sane morals, that is all Catholic morals, teach us what is after all only common sense, that there is nothing to despise in poverty...
...and that is our attitude toward money in the present whirl of things...
...The last thing to be said about money is, I think, the most important, and surely it is very simple...
...That is still true among the peasantries of Europe...
...But when people are comfortably sure that you are not going to bore them with either of these directions, they must still have a lingering fear that you are going to deluge them with commonplaces, such as—that money is dross: that one must be prudent in the management of it...
...If we watch this growth today we shall discover that exactly the same kind of man who achieves them loses them...
...It means doing for money that which our conscience tells us not to do (or even our honor tells us not to do) and something we would not do if we were fortunate enough to be free men...
...It is thought normal and natural—especially by those who serve out news and political arguments in the press...
...Many men who earn their living by the pen cannot follow it from the nature of their engagements...
...There is no actual production of wealth...
...I say this is a new disease and therefore let us hope one which will not last long...
...For our fathers, throughout countless generations, regarded a great accumulation of money as dependent more upon luck than upon anything else...
...And the converse is true...
...The very word "fortune" should teach us that...
...They are ruined by a speculator 3,000 miles away, by a sudden change in fashion engineered by a few press monopolists by one of those raids upon small investments which, under the immorality of our time, the law fails to punish...
...From this there follows a second principle, morally of the highest importance: let us avoid, like a plague of the intellect and of the conscience as well, the quite modern and quite despicable illusion that the possession of wealth is something to be worshiped and the lack of it something to be despised...
...But oddly enough the converse is not true...
...and he usually loses quicker than he wins...
...The sort of religious awe in which modern men stand toward it...
...But most of us today are not people living on our own few acres...
...I shall try to avoid these commonplaces because I want to discuss something more or less new...
...Most men today, and especially poor men, have got hold of a quite new idea and a damnably false one, to wit, that the possession of large sums of money by a man makes him in some way essentially superior...
...It is this, one should never sell oneself...
...The habit is an idolatry and an idolatry of the basest kind...
...how we come up against money in the modern moral chaos (which is at the same time the modern tendency to the control of life by a few financial powers...
...that one can't take it with one after death—and so on...
...Now if we can get it well fixed into our heads that, though sober industry is still a virtue and should in a proper state of society add decency to wealth, yet that today great wealth has nothing to do with industry, we have taken the first and most important step toward the right appreciation of money in this our broken-up and utterly unstable modern world...
...The modern idea that it in some way connotes a real superiority in character...
...Most of us are living on salaries doled out by great capitalists or capitalist organizations...
...Modern men fall from a decent family competence into miserable poverty daily, not through lack of industry, but through remote causes of which they know nothing and which act with an abominable injustice...
...Heaven knows I have not the capacity for the first, and I hope I have not the hypocrisy or impudence for the second...
...If men could not be bought, rapidly made fortunes would lose three-quarters of their power...
...The goddess of fortune was merely the goddess of luck...
...and therefore when men talked of another man's "great fortune," they meant by their speech that he had great luck— not high spiritual rank...
...Great wealth, however suddenly acquired, has always had its effect upon society...
...Even today there is something in it that industry is associated with material well-being in a modest way...
...Of course men have always been struck by display: they have always accepted subordination to great fortunes : they have always envied those richer than themselves...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 1
