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Letters to Children

There are many places you can read about the real purpose of money, but I enjoyed the insight offered by a group of writers from the 1920s and 1930s known as the Agrarians, a group of writers and poets from Vanderbilt who criticized American culture.

I can't adequately paint a picture of “the South,” and it is not necessary to understand what I'm going to write here. You should understand, though, that prior to the War Between the States (also called, erroneously, the Civil War), the South had a great culture. Yes, there was slavery and slavery was an abomination, but the South's arguments for (and against) slavery were more cogent that we're led to believe, and much of the slavery wasn't the South's fault.

But slavery isn't important here. I only mention it because I don't want you (like so many others) to write off the pre-war South due to slavery and refuse to learn any of their lessons.

The South was the most loyal to the finest things in our country's European culture. The South, in particular, held to Europeans' wisdom concerning money and material prosperity. This wisdom, and the South's inheritance of it, was explained best by John Crowe Ransom's essay, "The South Defends Its Heritage" (see page 239 of my book, The Superfluous Men). Here are some excerpts and paraphrases from that excellent essay that point to a good approach to money:

*The practical effort of making money is a prerequisite to the reflective and aesthetic life.

*It is the European intention to live materially along the inherited lines of least resistance, in order to put the surplus of energy into the free life of the mind.

*The South never conceded that the whole duty of man was to increase material production, or that the index to the degree of his culture was the volume of his material production. His business seemed rather to envelope both his work and his play with a leisure which permitted the activity of intelligence.

*The South took life easy, which is itself a tolerably comprehensive art.

As near as I can tell, the South, prior to the War and to a greatly-reduced extent following the War, lived off its establishment. A Southern gentleman inherited a plot of land and a house and maybe a little money, and worked it only as much as absolutely necessary to preserve his time for other, higher, things. For the best of them, these other things were, I assume, arts and philosophy. He then passed on what he received to his children. Now, I don't know how that worked when a man had many children. I think one of the children received the land, and the others were put into positions in life where they could provide for themselves (as military officers or as doctors, for instance, like Walker Percy's uncle and guardian did with his three nephews).

In any event, you, my children, will need to apply the theory to your lives. How much of your inheritance you spend and how much you keep for your children, how much you work so you have more to pass onto your children without hindering your own high calling as rationale creatures made in God's image. Those are specific that you must work out. You won't do a perfect job of it, but merely understanding the general principles–that we are meant to accumulate enough money to allow us to pursue the higher things in life and that any excess accumulation tends to interfere with the higher pursuits and therefore should be avoided–will help immensely to keep your lives sane.

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