Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking woman.
Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five years ago.
The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to leave the gold
alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them, enjoying with
perfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no human being
will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and whilst you remain
in that frame of mind the golden age will endure.
Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the golden
age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with common desires,
cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men you know. Suppose you
reveal to that man the fact that if he will only pluck this gold up,
and turn it into money, millions of men, driven by the invisible whip
of hunger, will toil underground and overground night and day to pile
up more and more gold for him until he is master of the world! You will
find that the prospect will not tempt him so much as you might imagine,
because it involves some distasteful trouble to himself to start with,
and because there is something else within his reach involving no
distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that is
yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the gold, and
all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age will endure. Not
until he forswears love will he stretch out his hand to the gold, and
found the Plutonic empire for himself. But the choice between love and
gold may not rest altogether with him. He may be an ugly, ungracious,
unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous and
despicable to you. In that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly
humiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the
love he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that,
he will make short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting its
lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.
In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great cities
of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually reproducing
itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and upon all the
fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly to gather gold in an
exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic powers, will find the treasure
yielding quickly to his touch. But few men will make this sacrifice
voluntarily. Not until the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the
higher human impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere
appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot purchase
their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits driven to build
their lives upon riches. How inevitable that course has become to us is
plain enough to those who have the power of understanding what they see
as they look at the plutocratic societies of our modern capitals.