Atlas Shrugged (82 page)

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Or did you say it’s the
love
of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of
disarmed
victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood-money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves—slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers—as industrialists.

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of
money
—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to
make
money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words .‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out.”

Francisco had not glanced at Rearden once while speaking; but the moment he finished, his eyes went straight to Rearden’s face. Rearden stood motionless, seeing nothing but Francisco d.‘Anconia across the moving figures and angry voices between them.

There were people who had listened, but now hurried away, and people who said, “It’s horrible!”—“It’s not true!”—“How vicious and selfish!”—saying it loudly and guardedly at once, as if wishing that their neighbors would hear them, but hoping that Francisco would not.

“Señor d.‘Anconia,” declared the woman with the earrings, “I don’t agree with you!”

“If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully.”

“Oh, I can’t answer you. I don’t have any answers, my mind doesn’t work that way, but I don’t feel that you’re right, so I know that you’re wrong.”

“How do you know it?”

“I feel it. I don’t go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you’re heartless.”

“Madame, when we’ll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won’t be of any earthly use to save them. And I’m heartless enough to say that when you’ll scream, ‘But I didn’t know it!’.—you will not be forgiven.”

The woman turned away, a shudder running through the flesh of her cheeks and through the angry tremor of her voice: “Well, it’s certainly a funny way to talk at a party!”

A portly man with evasive eyes said loudly, his tone of forced cheerfulness suggesting that his sole concern in any issue was not to let it become unpleasant, “If this is the way you feel about money, señor, I think I’m darn glad that I’ve got a goodly piece of d.‘Anconia Copper stock.”

Francisco said gravely, “I suggest that you think twice, sir.”

Rearden started toward him—and Francisco, who had not seemed to look in his direction, moved to meet him at once, as if the others had never existed.

“Hello,” said Rearden simply, easily, as to a childhood friend; he was smiling.

He saw his own smile reflected in Francisco’s face. “Hello.”

“I want to speak to you.”

“To whom do you think I’ve been speaking for the last quarter of an hour?”

Rearden chuckled, in the manner of acknowledging an opponent’s round. “I didn’t think you had noticed me.”

“I noticed, when I came in, that you were one of the only two persons in this room who were glad to see me.”

“Aren’t you being presumptuous?”

“No—grateful.”

“Who was the other person glad to see you?”

Francisco shrugged and said lightly, “A woman.”

Rearden noticed that Francisco had led him aside, away from the group, in so skillfully natural a manner that neither he nor the others had known it was being done intentionally.

“I didn’t expect to find you here,” said Francisco. “You shouldn’t have come to this party.”

“Why not?”

“May I ask what made you come?”

“My wife was anxious to accept the invitation.”

“Forgive me if I put it in such form, but it would have been more proper and less dangerous if she had asked you to take her on a tour of whorehouses.”

“What danger are you talking about?”

“Mr. Rearden, you do not know these people’s way of doing business or how they interpret your presence here. In your code, but not in theirs, accepting a man’s hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship. Don’t give them that kind of sanction.”

“Then why did
you
come here?”

Francisco shrugged gaily. “Oh, I—it doesn’t matter what I do. I’m only a party hound.”

“What are you doing at this party?”

“Just looking for conquests.”

“Found any?”

His face suddenly earnest, Francisco answered gravely, almost solemnly, “Yes—what I think is going to be my best and greatest.”

Rearden’s anger was involuntary, the cry, not of reproach, but of despair: “How can you waste yourself that way?”

The faint suggestion of a smile, like the rise of a distant light, came into Francisco’s eyes as he asked, “Do you care to admit that you care about it?”

“You’re going to hear a few more admissions, if that’s what you’re after. Before I met you, I used to wonder how you could waste a fortune such as yours. Now it’s worse, because I can’t despise you as I did, as I’d like to, yet the question is much more terrible: How can you waste a mind such as yours?”

“I don’t think I’m wasting it right now.”

“I don’t know whether there’s ever been anything that meant a damn to you—but I’m going to tell you what I’ve never said to anyone before. When I met you, do you remember that you said you wanted to offer me your gratitude?”

There was no trace of amusement left in Francisco’s eyes; Rearden had never faced so solemn a look of respect. “Yes, Mr. Rearden,” he answered quietly.

“I told you that I didn’t need it and I insulted you for it. All right, you’ve won. That speech you made tonight—that was what you were offering me, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Mr. Rearden.”

“It was more than gratitude, and I needed the gratitude; it was more than admiration, and I needed that, too; it was much more than any word I can find, it will take me days to think of all that it’s given me—but one thing I do know: I needed it. I’ve never made an admission of this kind, because I’ve never cried for anyone’s help. If it amused you to guess that I was glad to see you, you have something real to laugh about now, if you wish.”

“It might take me a few years, but I will prove to you that these are the things I do not laugh about.”

“Prove it now—by answering one question: Why don’t you practice what you preach?”

“Are you sure that I don’t?”

“If the things you said are true, if you have the greatness to know it, you should have been the leading industrialist of the world by now.”

Francisco said gravely, as he had said to the portly man, but with an odd note of gentleness in his voice, “I suggest that you think twice, Mr. Rearden.”

“I’ve thought about you more than I care to admit. I have found .no answer.”

“Let me give you a hint: If the things I said are true, who is the guiltiest man in this room tonight?”

“I suppose—James Taggart?”

“No, Mr. Rearden, it is not James Taggart. But you must define the guilt and choose the man yourself.”

“A few years ago, I would have said that it’s you. I still think that that’s what I ought to say. But I’m almost in the position of that fool woman who spoke to you: every reason I know tells me that you’re guilty—and yet I can’t feel it.”