DON'T pretend to despise money. Because if you do people won't listen. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them are striving for it - and they know you are. Even the minister who preaches the gospel of self-sacrifice is moved to take his message elsewhere by the offer of a larger salary. Why? Money is the only thing that will procure him the necessities, and even many of the higher things of life.

Among the savages there is no need of money, and when the millennium arrives there will probably be none of it. But in the world as it exists to-day and for a long time to come, money is the universal yardstick by which are measured the material necessities, comforts and luxuries of life, and even education, art and literature.

Usually we do not pay for air, although in the cities we pay for space. Good water costs something in the cities and so does land to stand upon. A man may go into the wilderness and have air, water and land for nothing, but his gun and ax cost money. You can not get away from it. There is no living without money unless one becomes an utter savage.

What is money? We can not say whether it is good or bad until we know what it is. Money has several uses or functions, but it has one great fundamental use that far transcends all the others in importance. As the economists say, it acts as a "medium of exchange." This means that if I have two barrels of potatoes and want an ice-box which another man has, it is not necessary actually to exchange the ice-box for the potatoes, a most cumbersome and difficult thing to do. Instead, "money" passes between us.

The first difficulty in exchanging an ice-box for two barrels of potatoes is that the two owners may not live anywhere near each other and it would take much time and trouble to bring them together. The second difficulty is that you can hardly measure ice-boxes in terms of potatoes. It would be easy enough if there were nothing in the world but those two articles, but there are thousands upon thousands of different things, and how is the owner of any one to know what it is worth in terms of all the others? I may produce nothing but potatoes. That is all I have to offer the world in return for hundreds of necessities and luxuries I may want or need. But just imagine the confusion if all those goods had to be exchanged for potatoes and for one another.

But once all people agree upon a single commodity which they will exchange for all other commodities, the whole business is simplified. I sell my potatoes for money and lay the money by until I want the other articles and buy them with money. Thus money is an absolute necessity unless we go back to savagery, or unless the government takes over everything, makes all people work for it and passes out food and clothing by a ticket system. Even then, the tickets would be in a sense a form of money.

This brief explanation of money should make clear what is its use and what its abuse. It is merely a means of exchange for other articles. Consequently there is no advantage of getting too much of it because no one human being can use more than a reasonable amount of necessities, comforts and luxuries. It is equally bad to have too little money, because that plainly indicates that one has not been doing his full share in producing the goods which mankind needs. The man who has no money is all right on a desert island. But in a modern, civilized, industrial community he is usually an ordinary loafer. If scenery is all he wants, he usually stands on the land some other man has worked for, to view it. Most commonly he is just a dependent, living on some one else's money.

Those who love money for itself, those whom we call misers, are probably afflicted with a form of insanity or disease. Money is all right to touch, handle and use, but if it sticks, then it is dangerous. The Greeks said: "Gold has no smell." If money affords more than a momentary pleasure in handling, then go to your doctor, for you have some strange disease. Remember that money has only one important use, to exchange for goods. There is something abhorrent, abnormal, morbid, in loving money for its own sake. Money is wholly a means, never an end.

Business men especially need to keep this distinction in view. Constantly dealing in money, balances and profits concentrates the attention upon money to such an extent that one's viewpoint may easily be warped. William Fel-singer, president of one of the great savings-banks in New York City, recently said that the big men of to-day are those who realize that money is only a recognized means for carrying on a work of real worth. There are not many misers in the old-fashioned sense among leading business men, in his opinion.

"To the man who has accumulated money through some big enterprise," said Mr. Fel-singer, "that mass of money merely signifies and stands for what he has done. The accumulation of money itself means nothing and none are so poor as those who think so. If a man could keep on working and having enough for his needs, that man would have a fortune stored up within himself. But some die in harness and others must rest, so it is necessary to save."

There are a few people who see no good in saving and investing money. Such people defend extravagance and waste by saying that it puts money into circulation, which is one of the most pernicious fallacies I know of. As I have already pointed out, money exists only to be used, but it should be spent in a useful, productive, sane and healthful manner.