The Rhine Gold

Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking
woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five
years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to
leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking
them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and
preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your
knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the
golden age will endure.

Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the
golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with
common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men
you know. Suppose you reveal to that man the fact that if he will
only pluck this gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men,
driven by the invisible whip of hunger, will toil underground and
overground night and day to pile up more and more gold for him
until he is master of the world! You will find that the prospect
will not tempt him so much as you might imagine, because it
involves some distasteful trouble to himself to start with, and
because there is something else within his reach involving no
distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that
is yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the
gold, and all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age
will endure. Not until he forswears love will he stretch out his
hand to the gold, and found the Plutonic empire for himself. But
the choice between love and gold may not rest altogether with
him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose
affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you. In
that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and
disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love he
can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that, he
will make short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting
its lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.

In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great
cities of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually
reproducing itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and
upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly
to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic
powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch.
But few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until
the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human
impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere
appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot
purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits
driven to build their lives upon riches. How inevitable that