Christopher Crayon's Recollections. The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself

And now it is time for me to make my bow and retire. Having said that my bank was smashed up, I cannot expect any one to be subsequently interested in my proceedings. We live in a commercial country and a commercial age, and the men whom the society journals reverence are the men who have made large fortunes, either by their own industry and forethought and self-denial, or by the devil’s aid. And I am inclined to think that he has a good deal to do with the matter. If ever we are to have plain living and high thinking, we shall have to give up this wonderful worship of worldly wealth and show. Douglas Jerrold makes one of his heroes exclaim, “Every man has within him a bit of a swindler.” When Madame Roland died on the scaffold, whither she had been led by the so-called champions of liberty and equality and the rights of man, she exclaimed, as every school-boy knows, or ought to know, “Oh, Liberty, what crimes are done in thy name!” So say I, Oh, wealth, which means peace and happiness, and health and joy (Sydney Smith used to say that he felt happier for every extra guinea he had in his pocket, and most of us can testify the same), what crimes are done in thy name; not alone in the starvation of the poor, in the underpaying of the wage-earning class who help to make it, but in the way in which sharks and company promoters seek to defraud the few who have saved money of all their store. You recollect Douglas Jerrold makes the hero already referred to say, “You recollect Glass, the retired merchant? What an excellent man was Glass! A pattern man to make a whole generation by. What could surpass him in what is called honesty, rectitude, moral propriety, and other gibberish? Well, Glass grows a beard. He becomes one of a community, and immediately the latent feeling (swindling) asserts itself.” And the worst of it is that Glass as a company director and promoter is worshipped as a great man, especially if he secures a gratuitous advertisement by liberality in religious and philanthropic circles, and exercises a lavish liberality in the way of balls and dinners. Society crawls at his feet as they used to do when poor Hudson, the ex-draper of York, reigned a few years in splendour as the Railway King. Glass goes everywhere, gets into Parliament. Rather dishonest, a sham and a fraud as he is, we make him an idol, and then scorn far-away savages who make idols of sticks and stones.