 and pleased with his little conceit, the
old man passed on smiling.
    Yesterday I should have considered the simile apt enough, but since then I
had visited a world incomparably more affluent than this, in which money was
unknown and without conceivable use. I had learned that it had a use in the
world around me only because the work of producing the nation's livelihood,
instead of being regarded as the most strictly public and common of all
concerns, and as such conducted by the nation, was abandoned to the hap-hazard
efforts of individuals. This original mistake necessitated endless exchanges to
bring about any sort of general distribution of products. These exchanges money
effected - how equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement house
districts to the Back Bay - at the cost of an army of men taken from productive
labor to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns of its machinery, and a
generally debauching influence on mankind which had justified its description,
from ancient time, as the »root of all evil.«
    Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the
throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called »a
wonderful piece of mechanism« was an imperfect device to remedy an unnecessary
defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.
    After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business quarter
for an hour or two, and later sat a while on one of the benches of the Common,
finding an interest merely in watching the throngs that passed, such as one has
in studying the populace of a foreign city, so strange since yesterday had my
fellow citizens and their ways become to me. For thirty years I had lived among
them, and yet I seemed to have never noted before how drawn and anxious were
their faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces of the
educated as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well it might be so, for
I saw now, as never before I had seen so plainly, that each as he walked
constantly turned to catch the whispers of a spectre at his ear, the spectre of
Uncertainty. »Do your work never so well,« the spectre was whispering, - »rise
early and toil till late, rob cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never
know security. Rich you may be now and still come to poverty at last. Leave
never so much wealth to your children, you cannot buy the assurance that your
son may not be the servant of your servant, or that your daughter will
