William James was a wise man.

Once upon a time there was an America where prominent people spoke and wrote of ideas like this:

"Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung.  We have grown literally afraid to be poor.  We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life.  If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.  We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant:  the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly, - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.  When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship;  when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to  be chosen.  But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases.  Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.  There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.  Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes.  We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket.   Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces;  yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help us to set free our generation.  The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty.
I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers."

From The Varieties Of Religious Experience", by the American philosopher William James.
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