479

Wealth as the source of a nobility of the blood. Wealth necessarily produces an aristocracy of race, for it permits one to select the most beautiful women and to pay the best teachers; it allows a person to be clean, to have time for physical exercise, and, above all, to avoid dulling physical labor. It provides all the conditions to enable men, in a few generations, to move and even behave elegantly and beautifully: greater freedom of feeling, the absence of miserable pettiness, of degradation before one's employers, of penny thrift.
For a young man, precisely these negative advantages are the richest birthright of good fortune; a very poor man with a noble nature usually destroys himself: he does not advance and acquires nothing; his race is not viable.
But one must also remember that the effects of wealth are almost the same if a man is permitted to consume three hundred talers a year, or thirty thousand: then we no longer find any substantial heightening of favorable conditions. But to have less, to beg as a boy, and to debase oneself, is terrible, though it may be the right point of departure for those who want to try their luck in the splendor of the courts, in submission to the mighty and influential, or for those who want to be heads of churches. (It teaches how to slink bent over into the underground passageways of favor.)