Wealth & Money Quote by Donald G. Mitchell

Mitchell’s line is a velvet-gloved argument for class power: money doesn’t just buy comfort, it buys manners, and then sells those manners back to society as “character.” The phrasing is telling. Wealth isn’t refinement itself; it’s a “means” of refinement, as if taste and gentleness are almost mechanical outputs once the proper fuel is added. That’s a reassuring idea for an emerging bourgeois culture eager to believe its prosperity has moral aesthetics baked in.

The shrewdest move is how he frames gentleness as “security.” Gentleness becomes less a virtue than a luxury good protected by capital. Remove “disturbing anxieties” and you remove the irritability, desperation, and sharpened edges that poverty forces into daily life. It’s empathetic on the surface - yes, anxiety roughens people - but the subtext subtly absolves the wealthy. Their calm isn’t discipline; it’s insulation. Their civility is not proof of superiority; it’s proof of better shock absorbers.

Context matters: Mitchell wrote in 19th-century America, when industrial wealth and middle-class respectability were tightening their alliance. The culture was busy moralizing economic outcomes, turning financial success into evidence of self-control and failure into evidence of coarseness. Mitchell’s sentence participates in that project while also accidentally revealing its fraud: if gentleness is secured by money, then “refinement” is less an inner triumph than a well-funded environment. It’s a genteel worldview that admits, almost too plainly, that virtue can be purchased on an installment plan.