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I think this is the source of what is erroneous in the Marxian interpretation of history, which tacitly assumes that acquisitiveness is the source of all political actions. It is clear that many men willingly forego wealth for the sake of power and glory, and that nations habitually sacrifice riches to rivalry with other nations.
In my "Future in America" I have taken the former largely at Miss Tarbell's estimate, and treated him as a case of acquisitiveness raised in Baptist surroundings. But I doubt very much if that exhausts the man as he is to-day.
As a matter of policy Severine encouraged her husband to continue his trade in hosiery, which any other man but himself would have long renounced; and she sent him to Paris, and about the country, on business connected with it. Up to the year 1830 Phileas, who was thus enabled to exercise his bump of "acquisitiveness," earned every year a sum equivalent to his expenses.
When intelligence provides improved methods of production, these may be employed to increase the general share of goods, or to set apart more of the labour power of the community for the business of killing its rivals. Until 1914, acquisitiveness had prevailed, on the whole, since the fall of Napoleon; the past six years have seen a prevalence of the instinct of rivalry.
War, it may be said, and said truly, is a tremendous example of evil, in the misery, hardship, waste of human life, and mis-spending of human energies, which it occasions. But what is it that produces war? Certain tendencies of human nature, as keen assertion of a supposed right, resentment of supposed injury, acquisitiveness, desire of admiration, combativeness, or mere love of excitement.
One admits, as per exception, the queer acquisitiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the game for his own sake. Undoubtedly he exists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product of the system, a pathological product, a kind of elephantiasis of individualism. But speaking broadly, consumption goods, present or future, are the end in sight of the industrial struggle.
Initiative, self-reliance, boldness in conception, fertility in resource, readiness in execution, acquisitiveness, inventive genius, appreciation of material advantages these, shot through with a certain fine idealism, genial human sympathy, and a high romantic strain are the traits of the American national type as it emerged from the Old Southwest.
There is, however, another side to this question, as we shall see presently. Another instinct which has supplied fuel to patriotism of the baser sort is that of acquisitiveness.
Nevertheless, as the appropriation of other people's property has an exquisite charm for some temperaments, as a stolen apple to a child's palate is much more delightful than one that is not the demon of acquisitiveness is always leaning over a man's shoulder, that is to say, a poacher's shoulder, or even that of a gentleman with poaching tastes and inclinations, to breathe in his ear bad advice.
Garfield during his famous trip to the New York conference in the late canvass, and jet it was not conversation or discussion. He fastened upon me all the powers of inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness, and absorbed all I had learned in twenty years of the politics of this State.
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