p. 38 p. 39 p. 40EXPEDIENCY. p. 40 Thus to his scholars once Confucius said: Better to die than not be rich: get wealth. He who has nothing, trust me, nothing is; Nay, tenfold worse than nothing. Not to be Is neither good nor bad; but to be poor!— ’Tis to be nothing with an envious wish, A zero conscious of nonentity. To get wealth, and to keep it—this is all, And the one rule of life, expediency. This was the lesson that the master taught, And then he gave some rules for getting wealth: Happy, who once can say, I have a thing. All things are given us, all things to be had, Except, alas! the faculty of having. If you are sated with one dish of fruit, Why, no more fruit have you, to call it having, Though a whole Autumn lay in heaps about you. How to have, this, my scholars, would I teach. Yet who can teach it? it is great and hard. This one thing dare I say. Be not deceived, Nor dream that those called rich have anything; Who think that what the pocket treasures up, And jealous foldings of the robe, is theirs; Theirs all the plate the burglar cannot reach, Theirs all the land they warn the traveller off: Fools! Because we are poorer, are they rich? What is none other’s, is it therefore theirs? p. 41Endeavour, O my scholars, to be rich, Scheme to get riches when you wake from sleep, All day pursue them, pray for them at night. As when one leans long time upon his hand, Then, moving it, finds all its strength is gone And it can now grasp nothing, so the soul Loses in listlessness the grasping power, And in the midst of wealth, has nothing still. I know not, O my scholars, how to bring The tingling blood through the soul’s palsied limbs, But when ’tis done how rich the soul may be How royal in possessions, I can tell,— One half of wisdom—seek elsewhere the other. The gods divorce knowledge of good from good. He who is happy and rich does seldom know it, And he who knows the true wealth seldom has it. Not only all this world of eye and ear Becomes his house and palace of delights Whose soul has grasping power; so that each form To him becomes a picture that is his, The light-stream as a fountain in his court, The murmur of all movement music to him, And time’s mere lapse rhythmical in his heart. Not only so; a greater treasure still, The lives of other men, by sympathy Incorporated with his own, are his. Get wealth, my scholars, this wealth first of all. One life is beggary; live a thousand lives. In those about you live and those remote; Live many lives at once and call it country, And call it kind; in the great future live And make it in your life
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