Note 606 — Chapter VI

The opinion of the celebrated alienist Maudsley is also very interesting; he says: “Perhaps one, and certainly not the least, of the ill effects which spring from some of the conditions of our present civilization, is seen in the general dread and disdain of poverty, in the eager passion to become rich. The practical gospel of the age, testified everywhere by faith and works, is that of money-getting; men are estimated mainly by the amount of their wealth, take social rank accordingly, and consequently bend all their energies to acquire that which gains them esteem and influence. The result is that in the higher departments of trade and commerce speculations of all sorts are eagerly entered on, and that many people are kept in a continued state of excitement and anxiety by the fluctuations of the money market. In the lower branches of trade there is the same eager desire for petty gains; and the continued absorption of the mind in these small acquisitions generates a littleness of mind and meanness of spirit, where it does not lead to actual dishonesty, which are nowhere displayed in a more pitiable form than by certain petty tradesmen. The occupation which a man is entirely engaged in does not fail to modify his character, and the reaction upon the individual’s nature of a life which is being spent with the sole aim of becoming rich, is most baneful. It is not that the fluctuations of excitement unhinge the merchant’s mind and lead to maniacal outbreaks, although that does sometimes happen; it is not that failure in the paroxysm of some crisis prostrates his energies and makes him melancholic, although that also is occasionally witnessed; but it is that exclusiveness of his life-aim and occupation too often saps the moral or altruistic element in his nature, makes him become egoistic, formal, and unsympathetic, and in his person deteriorates the nature of humanity. What is the consequence? If one conviction has been fixed in my mind more distinctly than another by observation of instances, it is that it is extremely unlikely such a man will beget healthy children; on the contrary, it is extremely likely that the deterioration of nature which he has acquired will be transmitted as an evil heritage to his children. In several instances in which the father has toiled upwards from poverty to vast wealth, with the aim and hope of founding a family, I have witnessed the results in a degeneracy, mental and physical, of his offspring, which has sometimes gone as far as extinction of the family in the third or fourth generation. When the evil is not so extreme as madness or ruinous vice, the savour of a mother’s influence having been present, it may still be manifest in an instinctive cunning and duplicity, and an extreme selfishness of nature—a nature not having the capacity of a true moral conception or altruistic feeling. Whatever opinion other more experienced observers may hold, I cannot but think, after what I have seen, that the extreme passion for getting rich, absorbing the whole energies of life, does predispose to mental degeneration in the offspring—either to moral defect, or to moral and intellectual deficiency, or to outbreaks of positive insanity under the conditions of life.”606