“Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice” (Samuel Johnson’s phrase) was neither possessed nor coveted by literary folk like Miss O’Connor and Dr. Kirk. We were conservative enough, Flannery at her farm near Milledgeville and I at my decayed ancestral house on the edge of Mecosta; but our conservatism had nothing to do with money, nothing at all. Such a declaration puzzles economic determinists, who curiously fancy that everybody is overtly or covertly in the service of Mammon. Yet the crippled girl in Georgia and the bohemian Tory in the stump-country of Michigan were not concerned to take away other people’s money or, for that matter, to accumulate any of their own. Their concern was for the order of the soul and the order of the republic.
(Russell Kirk, Right Reason Does Not Pay, emphasis added) Will we see their likes again?
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 