Would that our young men had either of these bents! They have copied from England a certain love of sport, without the English climate or the calm of country and garrison life, to make these sports logical and necessary.As the young American millionaire thinks he must go on increasing his fortune, we see the anomaly of a man working through a summer's day in Wall Street, then dashing in a train to some suburban club, and appearing a half-hour later on the polo field.Next to wealth, sport has become the ambition of the wealthy classes, and has grown so into our college life that the number of students in the freshman class of our great universities is seriously influenced by that institution's losses or gains at football.
What is the result of all this? A young man starts in life with the firm intention of making a great deal of money.If he has any time left from that occupation he will devote it to sport.Later in life, when he has leisure and travels, or is otherwise thrown with cultivated strangers, he must naturally be at a disadvantage.
"Shop," he cannot talk; he knows that is vulgar.Music, art, the drama, and literature are closed books to him, in spite of the fact that he may have a box on the grand tier at the opera and a couple of dozen high-priced "masterpieces" hanging around his drawing-rooms.If he is of a finer clay than the general run of his class, he will realize dimly that somehow the goal has been missed in his life race.His chase after the material has left him so little time to cultivate the ideal, that he has prepared himself a sad and aimless old age; unless he can find pleasure in doing as did a man I have been told about, who, receiving half a dozen millions from his father's estate, conceived the noble idea of increasing them so that he might leave to each of his four children as much as he had himself received.With the strictest economy, and by suppressing out of his life and that of his children all amusements and superfluous outlay, he has succeeded now for many years in living on the income of his income.Time will never hang heavy on this Harpagon's hands.He is a perfectly happy individual, but his conversation is hardly of a kind to attract, and it may be doubted if the rest of the family are as much to be envied.