Wealth & Money Quote by Elbert Hubbard

A country’s barbarism, Hubbard suggests, can be tallied at the cash register. The line works because it turns “civilization” from a lofty ideal into a banal budget choice: paper that feeds the mind versus sugar that occupies it. The provocation isn’t anti-gum puritanism so much as an attack on a consumer culture that confuses comfort with culture, distraction with development. By making the comparison absurdly concrete, Hubbard drags moral ambition out of speeches and into everyday habit.

The subtext is a rebuke to democratic complacency. If the public can be nudged to buy what’s easy, tasty, and immediate, it can just as easily neglect what’s difficult, slow, and formative. Books stand in for sustained attention, civic literacy, and the uncomfortable practice of thinking past appetite. Chewing gum stands in for the new pleasures of mass production: cheap, ubiquitous, marketed hard, and designed to be consumed without reflection. His “never” is the point: progress is not inevitable; it’s purchased.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Hubbard was writing in an America speeding through industrialization, advertising, and the rise of mass-market leisure. As a Roycroft-era moralist-businessman with Arts and Crafts sympathies, he distrusted a culture that could churn out goods faster than it could cultivate taste or judgment. The sentence is a small, well-aimed insult meant to sting a modernizing nation into asking whether it’s building citizens or just customers.