Robert Southey bewailed the “undisputed and acknowledged supremacy” of the spirit of Mammon in England. “Commercial nations, if they acknowledged the deity whom they serve, might call him All-Gold,” Southey wrote, warning that Mammon is “a more merciless fiend than Moloch.” Wordsworth recoiled from the commercial frenzy of London, lamenting that “rapine, avarice, expense / These are idolatry; and these we adore.” “Money, money is here the god of universal worship,” he complained to his sister Dorothy. To the middle classes, “rapacity and extortion,” he continued, were “glory and exultation.”
