8 REV. JONES VERY, IN MEMORIAM ; 



tion, money fiends let loose in a continent. Puritan in- 

 tensity goes to trade. The American hero is a rich man. 

 Formerly it was "King" Hooper in Marblehead and Derby 

 here. Now it is Vanderbilt and Stewart in New York, 

 and Bonanza kings on the Pacific. They sway the con- 

 tinent and shake the markets of the world. A curious 

 thing it is, the richest men are not Americans of Eng- 

 lish stock Astor, Girard, Vanderbilt, Stewart, Mackay. 

 We are beaten in our own field. The richest man in the 

 world is a Jew. We devote more talent to getting 

 money than any people, but we spend it more freely, and 

 are less mercenary than Europeans. We are generous 

 and live on a scale they don't know. The American is 

 ashamed of economy. He thinks it belittles him. He 

 is barbarous. 



The influence of materialism here is great and undue, 

 because it is a new country, as is commonly recognized. 

 There is no tradition, no past, no romance, that is all in 

 Europe, speaking broadly. It is not worth while to go 

 on sentimentally about this, or to make it too much capital 

 in trade as literary men do sometimes, James for ex- 

 ample. Hawthorne took note of it. Emerson has fought 

 it all his life. Irving made much of the old world. 



With this enormous weight of material civilization to 

 contend against, we can fly to nature as Very did in- 

 stinctively. Look at our chequer-board cities and ab- 

 sence of all past. The past is as needful to man as the 

 future. We destroy it as sOoii as we make it. We have 

 to seek it in Europe, which is to us what Greece was to 

 Rome, the source of the more aesthetic culture and re- 

 finement. The past never tempers our lives or appeals 

 to our imaginations. It is the future. Everything is 

 painfully new and does us harm, makes us material. 

 We are carted off and dumped down into every new 



