Written, but Never Sent

I. TO A RICH RELATIVE

MY DEAR COUSIN, —
You are very kind. You are noble. There is a beauty in your devotion to duty, in your power of self-dedication, which brings tears to my soul and joy to my heart. If I could take gifts of money from anyone gladly, it would be from you. I do take the money, but I am hurt when I take it. Nevertheless, I know that you would be hurt more if I did not take it. So I do not refuse.
You think I take it gladly because I need it, though you know I take it reluctantly because I am proud. You think I am really thankful to piece out our scanty income this way, and to save the family from indigence or overwork. Yes, I am thankful. Of course, it does ease things to have an addition of twenty per cent to one’s income once or twice a year. Five hundred dollars is not much to you, but it is undeniably much to us. Nevertheless, we should get along and be happy, and the children would become liberally educated ladies and gentlemen, even if you did not help us.
I accept the money because there is no really good reason why I should be too proud to take it and the pleasures it brings; because there is no really good reason why you should not part with it; and because the cordiality between us would vanish if I did not take it. You would be hurt, deeply hurt.
But I am deeply hurt in taking it, because I know you believe that it is my husband’s inadequacy which makes his income so small. You believe that the reason his whole profession is so poorly paid is because the job does not require first-rate ability. You believe exceptional capacity commands high prices. You believe that rarity makes value. When, as so often happens, one of his profession goes into a lucrative occupation and gets rich, you believe this is because ‘he was too good for his former job; it could not hold him; it was not a man’s job.’ The men who stay in the profession are to your mind weak brothers, and not fit for anything better.
But, inside the profession, we know that those ‘successful’ men are usually men who were not good enough for their job among us, or, more rarely, men whose ability was recognized in the profession but was not at all exceptional — plenty of others here could have done as well if they too had changed their work. Plenty do change and make good, every year. But the best ones almost all stay — because it is a profession where a man can live up to his conscience and not blink contradictions. And also because it is a profession which looks to the future, deals with the invisible, and taxes a man’s whole intelligence.
My own husband, for instance, would have made a capital lawyer (as he was advised upon graduation from college). But there are too many ‘fictions ’ in the law and too much outworn precedent to be followed. The integrity and clarity of his mind made that profession impossible to him; yet fortunes are made in the law.
He would have made a good politician. His keen practical sense, his constructive imagination, his intelligence in government, finance, and sociology, and his wide outlook would have fitted him well for that. He impressed men, too, and has a power of command. But he hates a lie, he hates a subterfuge, and he hates self-interest. He hates a weakening compromise and he looks for perfect results. Yet fortunes are made in politics.
He would have made a highly successful business man. You smile; you ‘know better.’ Yet he is always made treasurer or chairman of the finance committee wherever he works; and he has financed our family affairs so that always we could have gone on without your aid. He has given his children every advantage in kind that your children have had — besides a good many which yours have gone without. Our children have had everything that is worth while except gardening and horseback riding; and by going to a farm some summer, we can give them those. He is resourceful, imaginative, quick to think in figures, clever at finance, determined, and tireless. He would have made an exceptionally able business man, only — he has a clear intelligence, an over-powering sense of justice, and an unquenchable reforming spirit. The absurdities, inequalities, clumsiness, crudities, and ridiculous guesswork of business would have been unendurable to him. Yet fortunes are made in business.
In one other occupation he would have been preëminent — burglary. His ingenuity, his daring, his caution and wariness, his practical sense, his constructive imagination, his suspiciousness, his power over men, his quick accuracy in action, would have made him a superlative crook. But — his conscience, and his kind heart — alas! — Yet fortunes are made in burglary. So having, besides all the qualities which I have mentioned, a clear talent for his own profession, he adopted that and has stuck to it, because there he need never offend his conscience or silence his kind heart. Nor need he hoodwink his observation or blinder his intelligence.
As for you, you silently despise him, because you believe that his not earning much proves that he is of mediocre capacity as a mind and as a man. Very nearly every rich man looks upon a man who has not made money as having made a failure — unless he has gained fame. Even then, the moneyed man doubts the claims of a fame which has not received financial recognition. Very nearly every famous man, however, sees life otherwise. He usually rates an intelligent obscure man at least as highly as he rates himself, and he knows that money is no measure of worth. The famous man seems to look upon his fame more or less as a matter of accident; but every moneyed man tends to believe his own money to be a proof of his own superiority. This may be because fame has always been gained by some past achievement, and the famous one does not feel certain of his ability to maintain fame by further successes. He has to earn his reward as he goes along. But money is present power, and much money is almost sure evidence of future increase of that power. This gives the moneyed man assurance, while the famous man is modest. The trouble is, you do not realize that money is made merely by providing successfully for people’s immediate obvious needs. What people think they must have right off, they will pay for. And if you are able to provide it quicker or better than other men, they will pay you high for it. They will not pay high for future benefits or for any other benefit which is invisible.
If you were accustomed to wide ranges of thought, and to observing the large motions of mankind in history; if you were a comprehensive thinker by habit, you would have noticed that from my husband’s profession and its cognates have sprung all the ideas which have later led to the progress of mankind. But men do not pay high for the production of ideas which may benefit posterity. And so, what a man is paid for his work is no measure of his real worth to the world, and no measure of the rarity of his intellect or of his virility. What is uncommon and out of the fashion is not in much demand. No one demands very eagerly to be benefited in ways which he cannot fully understand.
If you were accustomed to wide areas of thought, instead of courteously sitting opposite each other and trying each to get through the evening without being rude (to the other), you and my husband would spend long hours in productive conference. Your virility, your sincerity, your incisive mind, and your experience in a field different from his, would meet his virility, sincerity, incisiveness, and separate experience in delighted exploration of causes and planning for results.
But, your education stopped short just where you most needed it. You never were led out into the open fields of imagination and larger sympathy where he lives all the time. So you despise him, and he is hopelessly baffled by your unspoken scorn and your incomprehension. Your splendid mind is but half used, and he does not know where to meet you.
You have not exactly blindered your intelligence or offended your conscience, because your intelligence was never given scope enough in your youth. You had the power, but not the training, to be wise. Your mind sees only straight ahead. But you have hoodwinked your observation and silenced your kind heart, and you are well aware of that yourself, now that the excitement of rivalry is over, and old age is creeping upon you.
You are naturally very kind; you are truly noble in your steady self-sacrifices; your devotion to duty as you see it, is beautiful. I accept your money because I love and admire you; but I do wish you had intelligence, conscience, and observation sufficient to make you love and admire my husband.
My dear cousin, it is one of the saddest places in our family life, this failure to ‘connect’ with you. But it would be worse if we broke the bond completely. I could not bear to refuse your money. If only you knew how we admire and honor and love you — if only you could see our worth as plainly as we see yours!
Ever with devotion and despair,
YOUR AFFECTIONATE KINSWOMAN.

P.S. If only I could send this letter! But you would not believe it. You would not understand; you would be hurt; and we should just be further apart than before.

II. TO A VERY RICH NEIGHBOR

MY DEAR MR. ARISTOS, —
Since you moved into this neighborhood and bought a thousand acres of land, we have lived within five hundred feet of one another for seven years. Your lady and I exchange calls and have long pleasant chats. Our children lunch together at each other’s houses; we accept each other’s invitations to dinner, and I think we all four enjoy these occasions. The boys and girls exchange proffers of outdoor sports to be enjoyed together; though yours seldom accept because they are too busy with lessons, and so ours are sparing of their own acceptances.
Certain privileges of wood and water which we enjoyed before you created your estate, we continue to enjoy with your courteous encouragement and apparently to your entire satisfaction. You also offer to sell us vegetables at low rates, or to give us kindling from the enormous piles of packing-boxes which accumulate in your back premises from time to time; and you do various other little acts, trying to help make life agreeable for us.
When we asked you to sell us a parcel of land — sixty by seventy feet — which we had not been able to secure from the former owner, in order to complete our precious three acres, you offered us the free use of that bit ‘just as if it were ours, without payment,’ saying that you disliked ever to part with any land.
When we heard you were coming near us, we were troubled, for we feared the close neighborhood of elaborateness and formality and pride. We were afraid our children might have to learn that there is arrogance even in America. But not so. You are simple. You are kind. You have been in every way a good neighbor, a remarkably good neighbor.
It is curious that, after seven years of such perfectly friendly intercourse, we are not friends. We know a great deal more about each other than we did in the beginning; but we do not really know each other any better at all. This is the more odd, because we have so many points of agreement in matters which make the most difference between folks. A sense of duty is the leading emotion in your lives as well as in ours. You are sincere; you, too, are interested in social betterment, in religious enlargement, and in educational improvement; you like the same sports. We all four enjoy the same magazines (the Atlantic being the sole reading of any one of us sometimes for weeks), and we admire the same public men. Your land is just like ours, only there is more of it. Your house has the same appointments as ours, only there are more of them and they are finer. We all wear the same kind of clothes, only you have more of them. Each couple loves its own children more than anything else except, of course, each other. We all admire and cultivate the same kind of manners; we even enjoy the same kind of jokes. What more is necessary to make people friends?
And yet, we are not friends. As I see it, the explanation is your money, — your extra money, — not the money you spend, but the money you have not spent.
We are so afraid that you will think we are after it, that we dare not talk freely on any of the subjects which interest us most deeply — because those subjects are all objects; and objects always need money. You are so redundantly rich! Whatever one of our dreams we might begin to be eloquent about, we could not long conceal the fact that it was still but a little way toward fulfilment — for lack of money. In short, whatever we said, we should consciously fear that we sounded like beggars. And beggars, satellites, or dependents, we will not be. We have a fixed determination not to ask money for any of our projects from people who are not already eager to give.
And on your side, we are utterly at a loss to know how you feel. We have an impression that we do not seem to you of the slightest importance. Your refusing to sell the strip of land to us seemed to us equivalent to saying, ‘We do not care to make you at home near us. We think of you as of birds who have nested close by. We treat you with consideration, and we watch you with interest, but we shall not care when you flit, leaving the nest empty and ourselves more free to range at pleasure beneath your trees.’
Nothing you ever say or do seems to prove anything different. There is, indeed, a possibility that you are as diffident as we. Perhaps you like us as fully as we like you, but are afraid that we do not find you interesting. But no! A rich man practically always looks upon a man who has not made money as a failure, unless he has gained fame. Even then, he inclines to doubt the value of a fame which cannot gain financial recognition. As a matter of fact, are you not all the while silently on the watch to avoid encroachments from us, and to elude possible openings for favors to be asked? Are you not all the time on guard against our becoming beggars, satellites, or dependents?
And so it goes: we take the privileges of wood and water, because we believe that in a properly conducted state those opportunities would be ours of public right. We do not take other favors which you offer, because we believe that in a properly conducted state those things would still be matters of private right, and we have no special claim upon you. We have not the claim of friendship, which is the only basis upon which one can accept private favors. In a friendship the mutual exchange of invisible benefits is so great, so constant, and so valuable, that tangible benefits are given and received without consideration of money value, simply as outward expressions of that inner interchange.
Do you remember that, several years ago, after we had once or twice invited your boys to go sailing or snowshoeing with us, you offered to employ my husband to take charge of their sports all the time? So it goes. You look upon us as a duty, and as a possible convenience, but never, it seems to us, as possible friends. We are sorry, for we like you candidly, and you are our nearest neighbors. Very cordially,
YOUR FRIEND AND NEIGHBOR.

P.S. I cannot send you this letter, because you might think it sheer impudence; or, if you did not, any efforts which you made thereafter to become friends would seem to us to spring from your all-pervasive sense of duty, and we should give them a cold reception as being favors which we had asked for. We will not be beggars.