Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the
stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.
*
Though I have all my life been eager for legitimate
distinction, I can lay my hand upon my heart, at the end of
my career, and declare there is not one--no, nor yet life
itself--which is worth acquiring or preserving at the
slightest cost of dignity.
*
For surely, at this time of the day in the nineteenth
century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear
more timorously than getting and spending more than he
deserves.
*
It remains to be seen, by each man who would live a true
life to himself and not a merely specious life to society,
how many luxuries he truly wants and to how many he merely
submits as to a social propriety; and all these last he
will immediately forswear. Let him do this, and he will be
surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him
in complete contentment and activity of mind and senses.
Life at any level among the easy classes is conceived upon
a principle of rivalry, where each man and each household
must ape the tastes and emulate the display of others.
One is delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in
furniture or works of art or dress; and I, who care
nothing for any of these refinements, who am perhaps a
plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer,
flannel-shirts, and a camp bed, am yet called upon to
assimilate all these other tastes and make these foreign
occasions of expenditure my own.
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