"What is the use of worrying about it, Sidney? It cannot be helped now.
Besides, if your father saved money, and the others were improvident, he
deserved to make a fortune."

"Granted; but he didn't make a fortune. He took a fortune that others
made. At Cambridge they taught me that his profits were the reward of
abstinence--the abstinence which enabled him to save. That quieted my
conscience until I began to wonder why one man should make another pay
him for exercising one of the virtues. Then came the question: what did
my father abstain from? The workmen abstained from meat, drink, fresh
air, good clothes, decent lodging, holidays, money, the society of their
families, and pretty nearly everything that makes life worth living,
which was perhaps the reason why they usually died twenty years or so
sooner than people in our circumstances. Yet no one rewarded them for
their abstinence. The reward came to my father, who abstained from
none of these things, but indulged in them all to his heart's content.
Besides, if the money was the reward of abstinence, it seemed logical to
infer that he must abstain ten times as much when he had fifty thousand
a year as when he had only five thousand. Here was a problem for my
young mind. Required, something from which my father abstained and in
which his workmen exceeded, and which he abstained from more and more as
he grew richer and richer. The only thing that answered this description
was hard work, and as I never met a sane man willing to pay another for
idling, I began to see that these prodigious payments to my father were
extorted by force. To do him justice, he never boasted of abstinence.
He considered himself a hard-worked man, and claimed his fortune as the
reward of his risks, his calculations, his anxieties, and the journeys
he had to make at all seasons and at all hours. This comforted me
somewhat until it occurred to me that if he had lived a century earlier,