THINGS MONEY CANNOT BUY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14299, 19 February 1910, Page 6 (Supplement)

THINGS MONEY CANNOT BUY.

LOVE, BRAINS, HAPPINESS. Love.is the divinest element in the. human., It is God's' finest, gift to man. It is ; the most powerful factor for good in the whole ■world, Under its protecting wings nestle all the virtues. In marriage it means that two face life together, with each other, for each other, content with whatever life may bring if it leaves them each other, It means letting the small world outside dwindle into insignificance while their larger world rises to the dignity of two who have become one. True, love means all that is finest, most tender, most lasting,' consecrated to union and unity for a lifetime. ' It comes to rich and poor alike but it cannot be bought. • -

When loveless money seeks to buy love by spreading out on the counter in the matrimonial market its stocks and bonds, houses and lots, bank . accounts, automobiles, fine dress, position in society, .-travel abroad, and the others, and the woman looks languidly Over the outfit where she has to take the owner too, and finally consents, he has not bought love. He has some understudy to love, an imitation, a combination of policy and pretence. There is never, a sweet spontaneity, a word, a ; look, a- tone, that splashes like water from an overfull fountain,'but only the pettiness of cool, counterfeit emotion. lie has closed an option oh a partner in matrimony as he might on a block of stock. He has bought not Cupid, .but cupidity. If wealth wants love, it must, give love. It must be an exchange, not' a purchase. The rich man must win love as the poorest man wins it— because of what he is, not for what he has. . Capital is in error ..when it says, pompously and arrogantly, • "I can buy brains!" This is across the deadline. It can buy only the '. service of i brains, their output, their product, but never toe mind behind them, which generates new ideas as a rosebush puts forth new blossoms. Money can buy a masterpiece of painting; but it cannot purchase the power to put on the faint-, est flesh tint nor even, the power really to appreciate the marvellous, canvas at its true worth. _ So far ■" as the 1 depth, the secret, the sublime conception i of some ideal, realised by the artist, genius, ; the. picture may be as meaningless to its owner as though it was a cuneiform inscription. It may be to him merely thirty-five thousand -dollars in a frame. The rich man *, who has genuine joy in his art collection receives it from Some innate, kinship with the artist's imagination that no money could' buy, no love of money take away. ' .-.._. ,:

Money can purchase a great library; of books; bound in the finest levant, and harmoniously arranged; in ■ sets; but; it caiinot buy the magic: power to create one single thought of some one of these great iriinds, > these reincarnated in type, which has influenced countless thousands for centuries. Money alone could never bring the joy and companionship /from books that comes as a benediction to some student in an attic, poor in money 1 but rich in intellect. He can call the greatest thinkers of the ages to speak with him from his "little mantelshelf of classics, and feel their joyous nearness to him as he comprehends and responds. He is living, for his brief hour of respite, in the great democracy and brotherhood of letters, and so absorbed that he does- not note the growing dusk that begins 'to dim. his page. This appreciation defies a mere cheque book. The man who is rich; may have it ' too ; , but" it never came to him by purchase. '■ .■.■.:■• ; ■ .:•...