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Updated: April 30, 2025
Passionate and fantastic, tyrannical, addicted to the coarsest excesses, the King of Prussia had, nevertheless, managed to form an excellent army of sixty thousand men, at the same time amassing a military treasure amounting to twenty-eight millions; he joined, not without hesitation, the treaty of Hanover, concluded on the 3d of September, 1725, between France and England.
Generally speaking, one cannot approve of men who make their money from mines, which are as a rule worked by criminals, or savages, labouring in chains in unhealthy subterranean dungeons; but yet this method of amassing a fortune seems much the more honourable, when compared with Crassus's purchase of confiscated lands and his habit of bidding for houses that were on fire.
But it was always a paying investment, for once his reputation was established the gold-maker found an endless variety of ways of turning his alleged knowledge to account, frequently amassing great wealth. Some of the cleverest of the charlatans often invited royal or other distinguished guests to bring with them iron nails to be turned into gold ones.
It is a letter written from one of undoubted information in Madras to Sir John Clavering, describing the practice that prevailed there, whilst the Company's allies were under sale, during the time of Governor Winch's administration. "One mode," says Clavering's correspondent, "of amassing money at the Nabob's cost is curious. He is generally in arrears to the Company.
It would be sheer affectation in us to pretend that this merchant-burgess had any mental or physical characteristic about him to justify his appearance in a romance, if we except the power he had shown of amassing wealth, of which he had so much that he could boast the possession of more than twenty goodly tenements, some of wood and some of stone, besides shares of ships and bank stock.
I frequently saw this individual, availing myself of the permission which he had given me to call upon him. A truly singular personage was he, with his love of amassing money, and his nationality so strong as to be akin to poetry.
By what authority, then, do you object to my amassing treasure? what right have you to prevent my using means, which although you call them sordid and criminal, I see approved by the sovereign? Will you have me renounce my happiness? The voluptuary argues, You pretend that I should resist my desires; but was I the maker of my own temperament, which unceasingly invites me to pleasure?
I thought of a learned scholar who, through patient labor in amassing facts, had demonstrated the influence of the frontier in the development of our national ideals; who had pointed out how, at each successive stage of American history, the heroes of the frontier, pushing farther and farther into the wilderness, conquering first the low coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard, then the forested foothills and ridges of the Appalachians, had finally penetrated into the Mississippi Valley, and, subduing that, had followed on westward to the prairies, and then to the great plains, and then clear across the great divide, the alkali deserts, and the Sierras, to California and the Pacific Coast; how these frontiersmen, at every stage of our history, had sent back wave after wave of strength and virility to keep alive the sturdy ideals of toil and effort and independence, ideals that would counteract the mellowing and softening and degenerating influences of the hothouse civilization that grew up so rapidly in the successive regions that they left behind.
They had stood up as advocates for a standing army; they now unjustly superseded the East India company; they were accused of having robbed the public by embezzling the national treasure, and amassing wealth by usurious contracts, at the expense of their fellow subjects groaning under the most oppressive burdens.
Peace of mind, the bubble reputation, the amassing of a fortune, a happy domestic life, humanitarian effort, the perfecting of one's character each may become the controlling end which furthers or inhibits individual desires and emotions. Or the ends may be such as to appear to most men far more insignificant.
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