Now the captains of industry are the commanding figures of
the day and the student, the poet, the philosopher, the statesman have
gone into innocuous desuetude. Amy Lowell is preferred to Longfellow:
Charlie Chaplin draws bigger crowds than Shakespeare can interest.
Trainmen get wages higher than are the salaries of some of our
governors. Unskilled labor is paid more than the teachers of our youth
receive. The cost of living was never higher in the history of mankind.
How illuminating to turn from this picture to that of Dante's age. Then
in Florence, a bushel of wheat cost about fifteen cents, a carpenter
could buy a broad ax for five cents, a saw for three cents, a plane
for four cents, a chisel for one cent. The average daily wage of a
woolworker was about thirty-six cents. In view of the high purchasing
power of money in Dante's age, the fact that he borrowed at least seven
hundred and fifty seven and a half golden florins, a debt that was not
paid until after his death, leads one to think that he must have been
regarded by his contemporaries as prodigal in the use of money. His
financial difficulties must have given him an uneasy conscience for he
insists repeatedly on the wickedness of prodigality. In fact he makes
the abuse of money on the part either of a miser or of a spendthrift a
sin against the social order punishable according to the gravity of the
offence in Hell or Purgatory.
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