Bring me the best years of your life. Bring me
your thoughts, your hopes, your loves; ye shall have Veal for them.
Now's your time! Now's your time! Buy! Buy!"
Oh! Children of Israel, was Veal, even with all its trimmings, quite
worth the price?
And we! what wisdom have we learned, during the centuries? I talked
with a rich man only the other evening. He calls himself a
Financier, whatever that may mean. He leaves his beautiful house,
some twenty miles out of London, at a quarter to eight, summer and
winter, after a hurried breakfast by himself, while his guests still
sleep, and he gets back just in time to dress for an elaborate
dinner he himself is too weary or too preoccupied to more than
touch. If ever he is persuaded to give himself a holiday it is for
a fortnight in Ostend, when it is most crowded and uncomfortable.
He takes his secretary with him, receives and despatches a hundred
telegrams a day, and has a private telephone, through which he can
speak direct to London, brought up into his bedroom.
I suppose the telephone is really a useful invention. Business men
tell me they wonder how they contrived to conduct their affairs
without it. My own wonder always is, how any human being with the
ordinary passions of his race can conduct his business, or even
himself, creditably, within a hundred yards of the invention.
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