This is old, cheap, and profitless stuff, you say. What is the good of drawing these contrasts? We know all about them. They are a part of the eternal inequality of things. Services and rewards never have had, and never will have, any relation to each other. Please do not remind us that Charlie Chaplin (or Charles Chaplin as he desires to be known) earns £130,000 a year by playing the fool in front of a camera, and that Wordsworth did not earn enough to keep himself in shoe-laces out of poetry which has become an immortal possession of humanity, and had to beg a noble nobody (the Earl of Lonsdale, I think) to get him a job as a stamp distributor to keep him in bread and butter.
Do not, my dear sir, be alarmed, I am not going to work that ancient theme off on you. And yet I think it is necessary sometimes to remind ourselves of these things. It is especially necessary now when there is so much easy talk about "equality of sacrifice," and so much easy forgetfulness of the inequality of rewards. It is useful, too, to remind ourselves that riches have no necessary relation to service. The genius for getting money is an altogether different thing from the genius for service. I suppose the Guinnesses (to take an example) are the richest people in Ireland. And I suppose Tom Kettle was one of the poorest. But who will dare apply the money test as the real measure of the values of these men to humanity--the one fabulously rich by brewing the "black stuff," as they call it in Ireland; the other glorious in his genius for spending himself, without a thought of return, on every noble cause and dying freely for liberty in the full tide of his powers? Which means the more to the world? Perhaps one effect of the war will be to give us a saner standard of values in these things--will teach us to look behind the money and title to the motives that get the money and the title. It is not the money and title we should distrust so much as the false implications attaching to them.
And, after all, we exaggerate the importance of the material rewards. They must often be very much of a bore. As the late Lord Salisbury once said, a man doesn't sleep any better because he has a choice of forty bedrooms in his house. He can only take one ride even though he has fifty motor-cars. He cannot get more joy out of the sunshine than you or I can. The birds sing and the buds swell for all of us, and in the great storehouse of natural delights there is no money taken and no price on the goods. Mr. Rockefeller's £100 a minute (if that is his income) is poor consolation for his bad digestion, and the late Mr. Pierpoint Morgan would probably have parted with half his millions to get rid of the excrescence that made his nose an unsightly joke. We cannot count our riches at the bank--even on the material side, much less on the spiritual. As I came along the village this morning I saw Jim Squire digging up his potatoes in the golden September light. I hailed him, and inquired how the crop was turning out. "A wunnerful fine crop," he said, "and thank the Lord, there ain't a spot o' disease in 'em." And as he straightened his back, pointed to the tubers strewn about him, and beamed like the sun at his good fortune, he looked the very picture of autumn's riches.