Money by Agnes Repplier

"As the world is, and will be, 'tis a sort of duty to be rich," wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and her words -- which sound almost ascetic in our ears -- were held to be of doubtful morality in the godless eighteenth century which she adorned and typified. Even Lady Mary endeavoured to qualify their greed by explaining that she valued money because it gave her the power to do good; but her hard-headed compatriots frankly doubted this excusatory clause. They knew perfectly well that a desire to do good is not, and never has been, a motive power in the acquisition of wealth.

Lady Mary did render her country one inestimable service; but her fortune (which, after all, was of no great magnitude) had nothing whatever to do with it. Intelligent observation, dauntless courage, and the supreme confidence which nerved her to experiment upon her own child, -- these qualities enabled her to force inoculation upon a reluctant and scandalized public. These qualities have lifted mankind out of many a rut, and are all we shall have to depend on while the world rolls on its way. When Aristotle said that money was barren, he did not mean that it was barren of delights; but that it had no power to get us to any place worth reaching, no power to quicken the intellectual and spiritual potencies of the soul.