2O2 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 



or so clever as some of my fellow-men who earn 

 more money and wear good coats. In a coun- 

 try where the measure of a man is the amount 

 of money or property that he has been able to 

 acquire, either through industry or luck in gam- 

 bling, it is inevitable that the money stand- 

 ard, or the coat standard, should acquire the 

 weight of a moral law. The man who wears a 

 patched coat and only wears gloves when the 

 weather makes the gloves a physical comfort, 

 must be an inferior sort of man, because he has 

 evidently not kept pace with his fellows in the 

 race. In the Old World the struggle for money 

 and material prosperity has not been so exhaust- 

 ing these last few hundred years, and has not 

 excluded spiritual things so completely as with 

 us ; and there we find, in consequence, that the 

 outward signs of the ability to earn money are 

 not deemed so essential to the fixing of a man's 

 standing in the community. To wear a patched 

 coat and to work with one's hands in a garden, 

 do not in themselves stamp a man in France 

 and England as an inferior person. I was par- 

 ticularly impressed with this when some years 

 ago an English clergyman a man of much cul- 

 ture and reading gave up his cure in a fashion- 



