If gold, silver and other precious minerals could be "picked up" as on the fabled Tom Tiddler's ground, by a ray of light, then the striving for wealth would cease and work would be reduced to a minimum.

The prospect was stupendous, but hardly entirely pleasing.

If there were no need for effort, then the powers of mind and body would sink into inertia.
"What object should we live for ?" he mused--"Merely to propagate our own kind and bring more effortless beings into the world to cumber it?
The very idea is horrible! Work is the very blood and bone of existence--without it we should rot! But one must work for something or some one--wife ?--children ?--Useless labour!--for in nine cases out often the wife becomes a bore,--and the children grow up ungrateful.
Why waste strength and feeling on either ?" Thus mentally arguing, the exquisite lines of Tennyson's "Lotus Eaters" suddenly rang in his memory like a chime of bells from the old English village where he had lived as a boy, when his mother, one of the past sweet "old-fashioned" women, used to read to him and teach him much of the best in literature,-- "Death is the end of life; ah, why Should life all labour be?
Let us alone.

Time driveth onward fast And in a little while our lips are dumb, Let us alone.

What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past, Let us alone.