Chapter 5

ABOUT THE SOCIAL-STAKE SYSTEM, THE DANGERS OF CONCENTRATION, AND
OTHER MORAL AND IMMORAL CURIOSITIES.

The affairs of my father were almost as easy of settlement as those
of a pauper. In twenty-four hours I was completely master of them,
and found myself if not the richest, certainly one of the richest
subjects of Europe. I say subjects, for sovereigns frequently have a
way of appropriating the effects of others that would render a
pretension to rivalry ridiculous. Debts there were none: and if
there had been, ready money was not wanting; the balance in cash in
my favor at the bank amounted in itself to a fortune.

The reader may now suppose that I was perfectly happy. Without a
solitary claim on either my time or my estate, I was in the
enjoyment of an income that materially exceeded the revenues of many
reigning princes. I had not an ex-pensive nor a vicious habit of any
sort. Of houses, horses, hounds, packs, and menials, there were none
to vex or perplex me. In every particular save one I was completely
my own master. That one was the near, dear, cherished sentiment that
rendered Anna in my eyes an angel (and truly she was little short of
it in those of other people), and made her the polar star to which
every wish pointed. How gladly would I have paid half a million just
then to be the grandson of a baronet with precedency from the
seventeenth century!

There was, however, another and a present cause for un-easiness that
gave me even more concern than the fact that my family reached the
dark ages with so much embarrassing facility. In witnessing the
dying agony of my ancestor I had got a dread lesson on the vanity,
the hopeless character, the dangers, and the delusions of wealth
that time can never eradicate. The history of its accumulation was
ever present to mar the pleasure of its possession. I do not mean
that I suspected what by the world's convention is deemed
dishonesty--of that there had been no necessity--but simply that the
heartless and estranged existence, the waste of energies, the
blunted charities, and the isolated and distrustful habits of my
father appeared to me to be but poorly requited by the joyless
ownership of its millions. I would have given largely to be directed
in such a way as while escaping the wastefulness of the shoals of
Scylla I might in my own case steer clear of the miserly rocks of
Charybdis.

When I drove from between the smoky lines of the London houses into
the green fields and amid the blossoming hedges, this earth looked
beautiful and as if it were made to be loved. I saw in it the
workmanship of a divine and beneficent Creator, and it was not
difficult to persuade myself that he who dwelt in the confusion of a
town in order to