' I have been accustomed to
put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, that the price we
have to pay for money is paid in liberty. Between these
two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail
to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on
one or other, that a man may pay too dearly for his
livelihood, by giving, in Thoreau's terms, his whole life
for it, or, in mine, bartering for it the whole of his
available liberty, and becoming a slave till death. There
are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we
buy, and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a
thousand a year, a two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a
year livelihood? and can you afford the one you want? It
is a matter of taste; it is not in the least degree a
question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there
is no authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in
the Bible. It is true that we might do a vast amount of
good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improbable;
not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite
distinct from that of doing good, hut the practice of the
one does not at all train a man for practising the other.
*
We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
that which is congenial. It is only to transact some
higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant
from Admetus.
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