A friend of mine once wrote a parable ("and if these words should meet his eye," etc.). I have not seen it written down. It may have been written down. But in its verbal form it was something like this (as it was told to me).

A number of candidates were offered what they would choose. But they could choose only one thing each. The first chose health. And the second, beauty. And the third, virtue. And the fourth, form. And the fifth, ticklishness, which means an active sense. And the sixth, forgetfulness. And the seventh, honesty. And the eighth, immunity from justice. And the ninth, courage. And the tenth, experience. And the eleventh, the love of others for him. And the twelfth, his love for others. But the thirteenth (they were thirteen, including Judas) chose money. And he chose wisely, for in choosing this, all the others were added unto him.

If ever I complete that book which I began in the year 1898 called "Advice to a Young Man" (I was twenty-eight years of age at the moment I undertook it) it will there be apparent by example, closely reasoned argument, and (what is more convincing than all) rhetoric, that money is the true source of every delight, satisfaction, and repose.

Do not imagine that, upon this account, I advise the young to seek money in amounts perpetually extending. Far from it! I advise the young (in this my uncompleted book) to regulate their thirst for money most severely.

"Great sums of money" (said I, and say I) "are only to be obtained by risking ruin, and of a hundred men that run the risk ninety-nine get the ruin and only one the money." But money as a solid object; money pursued, accumulated, possessed, enjoyed, bearing fruit: that is the captain good of human life.

When people say that money is only worth what it will purchase, and that it will purchase only certain things, they invariably make a category of certain material things which it will purchase, and imagine or hope that it will purchase no more. And these categories, remember, are drawn up always by unmoneyed men. For your moneyed man has no need to work and therefore no need to draw up categories, which is a very painful form of toil. They say money will purchase motor-cars and bathrooms—several bathrooms—and foods and drinks and the rest of it—and then its power is exhausted.

These fools leave out two enormous chapters—the biggest chapters of the lot. They leave out the services of other men, always purchasable. And they leave out the souls of other men often purchasable. With money in a sufficient amount you can purchase any service, and with money you can purchase many individual souls.

Now, that is important.

Take the purchasing of services with money. You start a newspaper. Perhaps you cannot write very well yourself. I have known very many extremely rich men whose writing was insignificant—never persuasive or enduring in effect. The greater part of them cannot write for more than a few minutes without breaking down. Just as an elderly man cannot play Rugby football for more than a few minutes or so without breaking down. But they can hire men to write. And they do. They do not exactly buy the souls of those men they hire. They only buy the services. Often enough have I had a pleasant talk with one of these serfs in private when his daily task was done (at from one to three thousand a year) concerning the vices of his master and the follies which he (the serf) had had to defend with his pen.

But to be able to purchase the services of men thus (I am only speaking of my own trade, but all other trades are equally purchasable, and the lawyers actually advertise that they are purchasable!)—to be able, I say, to purchase services thus is a category ridiculously neglected by those who pretend that money brings nothing but material enjoyment.

It brings, for instance, immunity from the criminal law. At least it does to-day. It did not until modern times even here, but it does to-day. If you doubt it, take a little bit of paper and mark the men who have been sent to prison during your own lifetime while possessed (not after having been possessed) of five thousand a year. It is an instructive winter game.

But if money can purchase services it can also, with less certitude, but on a very large scale, purchase those other little things we noted—the souls of men. Here there is a distinction.

When you purchase a service you do not necessarily purchase a soul. You only purchase a soul when, by the action of your money, you corrupt the individual. I do not say "corrupt him beyond all salvation," but, at any rate, beyond any remaining desire for salvation. When, for instance, by the possession of money, you acquire the respect of a man, you are, to a small extent, purchasing his soul. When by the action of money you make a man fall into certain habits which at last become his character, you are purchasing a soul.

I keep on saying "you," though I know well enough, wretched reader, that you are in no position to do all this. In fact, you find it the devil and all to purchase what is necessary for your household. If you are a man with a thousand a year, for instance (there have just passed my window three men with a good deal less, not judged by their clothes but by my knowledge of them in a countryside), then you are worth what was called before the war about four hundred pounds a year. Taxation and Inflation, the twin gods that rhyme, have done for the rest.

If you are what they called before the war a rich man (you will excuse me, but random essays are read by all sorts of people), if you were, say, a squire with six thousand a year, you are now worth what your local scribbler at two thousand a year was worth before the war. Horrible but true. So when I say "you," I only do so by way of rhetoric and of shorthand. I cannot be pestered to know what each of you is exactly worth, and, upon my soul, as things now are, I do not think any one of you exactly knows.

To return. I say that money, acting thus, purchases souls. It purchases souls not only in regardant, but in gross. In regardant, I may explain, means "as regards the particular relation between one soul and its purchaser," while in gross means "of the world in general."

Thus a man may be a serf regardant when he is a serf to a particular lord, but not a serf in his general status. Or he may be a serf in gross, that is, a serf to anybody who comes across him. And in the same way, there is a cad regardant and a cad in gross, and still more is there a coward regardant and a coward in gross. For instance, a man may be a general coward, and that is being a coward in gross, or he may be a particular coward in the matter of riding a particular horse, and then he is only a coward regardant.

I say, then, that the power of your money to purchase souls may be in gross or regardant. It may purchase a particular soul, in which case, God help you! Or it may have a general effect upon All Souls (I mean not the College but the generality of mankind, for whom I postulate souls), and in this case you are not perhaps very much to blame. It is rather their fault than yours.

When your money has purchased souls in gross—gross souls in gross and grossly purchased by the gross—it means that you are worshipped for your money, and this is as common a worship as the worship men give to their country.

There is a kind of insufficiency—I had almost called it idiocy—which tries to shuffle out of this valuable truth by pointing to particular cases (there are perhaps half a dozen at one time in a great community like ours) of men who, possessing great wealth, are yet not respected. But you will find that these are exceptions who have deliberately done all that they could not to be respected. The ruck of men with large fortunes are respected for all those things which money is supposed to bring—justice, kindliness, humour, temperance, courage and judgment. And even the very few rich men who are not respected are still admired for some mystical quality. "There must have been something in the man for him to have made half a million before he was forty."

I should have said, "There must have been something lacking in other men for this guttersnipe to have got so much out of them," but I am here deliberately the devil's advocate, and I know that I have not a leg to stand on.

If you are possessed of great wealth ... (Digression: Little wealth is disgusting, like mediocrity in verse. If you are going in for being wealthy you must be very wealthy or not wealthy at all. Anywhere in a plutocracy may you see the very wealthy hobnobbing with poor hack-writers and versifiers and essay writers and such, but never with the quarter-wealthy or the eighth-wealthy) ... if you are possessed of great wealth, I say you are, in a plutocracy, a great man. You are both loved and feared; everywhere respected and also admired. Your good qualities are as enduring as stone; your evil qualities are either transformed into something slight and humorous or sublimated till they disappear.

There is more than this. Something goes on within yourself. Because you are respected and admired you become more solid. You envisage your faults sanely. You are far from morbid. If you have the manhood to correct your failings, you correct them temperately. You have poise and grasp. If, more wisely, you indulge your foibles—why, that is a pardonable recreation. Your judgments are well-founded. You are tempted to nothing rash or perilous. You may be led, for the relief of tedium, into some slight eccentricity or other, but that will give you the more initiative and a strong personality: not exactly genius, for genius is a zigzag thing, burning and darting, unsuited to the true greatness of wealth. It has not enough ballast and repose.

What is most important of all, those whose permanent affection you ardently desire, those whose good you crave, those whose respect you hunger for like food, will all of them at once respond to your desire if money backs it. You can give them what they really need, and you can give it them unexpectedly when they really need it. Thus do they associate you with happiness. You, meanwhile, can behave with the leisure that produces their respect. Gratitude will do the rest, or, at any rate, security, and the habit of knowing that from you proceeds so much good.

Thus does dear Mammon give us half a Paradise on earth and a fine security within. Mammon is an Immediate Salvation. And the price you pay for that Salvation is not so very heavy after all: only a creeping gloom; a despair, turning iron and threatening to last for ever.

So the whole thing may be summed up in a sentence that runs in my head more or less like this: "Make unto you friends of the Mammon of iniquity that they may receive you into their everlasting habitations." My italics.