LETTER XVII.

OPINION OF WEALTH.

EARLIER than we suppose, children form opinions of those who are around them. They are anxious to know who are good, and how they have earned that distinction. We should be ready to guide their first ideas of what is worthy of praise, or dispraise, for these are the germinations of principle. Let us not inoculate them with the love of money. It is the prevailing evil of our country. It makes us a care-worn people. "I know an American," said a satirical traveller, "wherever I meet him, by the perpetual recurrence of the word dollar. See if you can talk with him one hour, and not hear him use it."

Not only does the inordinate desire of wealth engross conversation, but turn thought from its nobler channels, and infect the mind as with an incurable disease. It moves the ambitious to jealous or fierce competition, and the idle to fraud, and the unprincipled to crime. Ask the keepers of our prisons, what vice peoples many of their cells? They will tell you, the desire to

get money without labour. Ask the chaplain of yonder penitentiary, what crime that haggard man has committed, whom he is toiling to prepare for an ignominious death? He replies, "the love of money led him to strike at midnight the assassin's blow."

The determination to be rich, when disjoined from honest industry, opens the avenues of sin; and even when connected with it, is dangerous, unless regulated by the self-denying spirit of religion. Allowed to overleap the limits of moderation, it becomes a foe to domestic enjoyment, and tramples on the social pleasures and charities of life.

Since, then, the science of accumulation is in its abuse destructive, and in its legitimate use unsafe, without the restraint of strict principle, let us not perplex the unfolding mind with its precepts, or confound it with its combinations. The child hears perpetual conversation about the dearness or cheapness of the articles with which he is surrounded. Perhaps the associations which he forms, are not between the furniture and its convenience, between his apparel and its fitness or comfort, but between the quantity of money which they cost, or the adroitness with which the merchant was beaten down. He is interested by frequent remarks from lips that he reveres, about how much such and such a person is worth;

and hears the gradation gravely settled between neighbour and neighbour. "Does worth mean goodness?" inquires the child. "No. It means money." "Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow," said the ethical poet. But the child, coming with his privately amended dictionary, says, "Money makes the man," of course, he whose purse is empty, is less than a man. Some person is spoken of as possessing distinguished talents. The listening child is prepared to admire, till the clause, "he can never make a fortune," changes his respect to pity or indifference. The piety of another is mentioned, his love of doing good, his efforts to make others better and happier. "But he is poor." Alas, that the forming mind should be left to undervalue those deeds and motives, which, in the sight of heaven, are the only true riches.

Possibly, in the freedom of domestic discourse, some lady is censured for vanity or ignorance, for ungrammatical language, or an ill-spelt epistle. But "she is rich," may be the reply, and he sees the extenuation accepted. If he is skilful at drawing inferences, or indisposed to study, he says, "money is an excuse for ignorance, so if I have but little knowledge, it is no matter, if I can only get rich." He hears a man spoken of as unkind, or intemperate, or irreligious. He listens for the sentence of blame, that such con

duct deserves.

"He is worth half a million," is "Can money

the reply. And there is silence. excuse sin?" asks the poor child, in silent ruminations.

It is unwarily remarked at the table, "such a young man will be very rich when his father dies." Beware lest that busy casuist arrive at the conclusion, that a parent's death is not a great affliction if he leaves something behind: that if his possessions are very large, the event may be both contemplated and borne with indifference. Now, though the long teaching of a selfish world, may fasten this result on the minds of men, it should never enter the simple sanctuary of a child's heart, displacing the first, holiest affections of nature.

A little girl once heard some conversation in the family about the hiring of a sempstress, and reported it to her sister. "One is very poor," said she, "and has an aged mother and two little children to support. The other is not so poor. But she does not ask as much by several cents a day. I heard it said that she does not work as well. But, then, she works cheaper, and dresses better. So we have hired her. Yet, sister, I felt sorry for the widow with the babies, for she looked sad and pale, and said she had no way to get bread for them but her needle. I was afraid they would cry to be fed, and that the lame

grand-mother would suffer." The sister who had lived longer in this world of calculation, said, "it is perfectly right to hire her who asks the least, because it saves money."

Now, my dear friends, is it not both unkind and hazardous thus to puzzle the moral sense of our children? to leave them to believe that wealth is both an excuse for ignorance and a shelter for vice? that it is but another name for virtue? that for the want of it, neither talent or piety can atone? that it is right to desire the death of a relative to obtain it? or to grind the face of the poor to save it? How could the most inveterate enemy injure them so directly and permanently, as by making their earliest system of ethics a contradiction and a solecism? Yet this is done by the conversation and example of parents, who love them as their own souls.

Of what effect is it, that we repeat to them in grave lectures on Sundays, that they must "lay up for themselves treasures in heaven," when they can see us, the other six days, toiling after, and coveting only "treasures on earth?" When we tell them that they must not "value the gold that perisheth," neither "love the world, nor the things of the world," if they weigh the precepts with our illustration of them, will they not think that we mean to palm on them what we disregard ourselves, and despise our cunning? or else, that