The millionaire, or the multi-millionaire, if the plainer term be
inadequate to express his lofty condition, is the hero of democratic
America. He has won the allegiance and captured the imagination of the
people. His antics are watched with envy, and described with a faithful
realism of which statesmen are thought unworthy. He is hourly exposed to
the camera; he marches through life attended by a bodyguard of faithful
reporters. The trappings of his magnificent, if vulgar, existence are
familiar to all the readers of the Sunday papers. His silver cars and
marble palaces are the wonder of a continent. If he condescend to play
golf, it is a national event. "The Richest Man on Earth drives from, the
Tee" is a legend of enthralling interest, not because the hero knows how
to drive, but because he is the richest man on earth. Some time since a
thoughtless headline described a poor infant as "The Ten-Million-Dollar
Baby," and thus made his wealth a dangerous incubus before he was out of
the nursery. Everywhere the same tale is told. The dollar has a power
of evoking curiosity which neither valour nor lofty station may boast.
Plainly, then, the millionaire is not made of common day. Liquid gold
flows in his veins. His eyes are made of precious jewels. It is doubtful
whether he can do wrong. If by chance he does, it is almost certain that
he cannot be punished. The mere sight and touch of him have a virtue far
greater than that which kings of old claimed for themselves. He is at
once the en-sample and the test of modern grandeur; and if, like a Roman
emperor, he could be deified, his admiring compatriots would send him to
the skies, and burn perpetual incense before his tomb.
Though all the millionaires of America are animated by the same
desire,--the collection of dollars,--they regard their inestimable
privileges with very different eyes. Mr Carnegie, for instance, adopts
a sentimental view of money. He falls down in humble worship before the
golden calf of his own making. He has pompously formulated a gospel
of wealth. He piously believes that the millionaire is the greatest of
God's creatures, the eloquent preacher of a new evangel. If we are to
believe him, there is a sacred virtue in the ceaseless accumulation of
riches. It is the first article in his creed, that the millionaire who
stands still is going back, from which it follows that to fall behind in
the idle conflict is a cardinal sin. A simple man might think that when
a manufacturer had made sufficient for the wants of himself and his
family for all time he might, without a criminal intent, relax his
efforts. The simple man does not understand the cult. A millionaire,
oppressed beneath a mountain of gold, would deem it a dishonour to
himself and his colleagues if he lost a chance of adding to the weight
and substance of the mountain.
Mr Carnegie, then, is inspired not by the romance but by the sentiment
of gold. He cannot speak of the enormous benefits conferred upon the
human race by the vast inequalities of wealth and poverty without a
tear. "Millionaires," he says, "can only grow amid general prosperity."
In other words, if there be not millions in the country the millionaire
cannot put his hand upon them. That is obvious enough. His second text
cannot be so easily accepted. "Their wealth is not made," he asserts
dogmatically, "at the expense of their countrymen." At whose expense
then is it made? Does Mr Carnegie vouch for the probity of all his
colleagues? Does he cover with the aegis of his gospel the magnates
of the Standard Oil Company, and that happy firm which, with no other
advantage than a service of cars, levies toll upon the fruit-growers of
America? Was the Steel Combine established without inflicting hardships
upon less wealthy rivals? An answer to these simple questions should be
given before Mr Carnegie's second text be inscribed upon the walls of
our churches. It is not enough to say with Mr Carnegie that trusts obey
"the law of aggregation." You need not be a Socialist to withhold your
approval from these dollar-making machines, until you know that they
were not established upon ruin and plunder. Even if the millionaire be
the self-denying saint of modern times, it is still possible to pay too
high a price for his sanctity and sacrifice.
It is the favourite boast of the sentimental millionaire that he holds
his wealth in trust for humanity,--in other words, that he has been
chosen by an all-wise Providence to be the universal almsgiver of
mankind. The arrogance of this boast is unsurpassable. To be rich is
within the compass of any man gifted or cursed with an acquisitive
temperament. No one may give to another save in humbleness of spirit.
And there is not a millionaire in America who does not think that he is
fit to perform a delicate duty which has eluded the wise of all ages.
In this matter Mr Carnegie is by far the worst offender. He pretends to
take his "mission" very seriously. He does not tell us who confided
the trust of philanthropy to him, but he is very sure that he has been
singled out for special service. It is his modest pleasure to suggest a
comparison with William Pitt. "He lived without ostentation and he died
poor." These are the words which Mr Carnegie quotes with the greatest
relish. How or where Mr Carnegie lives is his own affair; and even if
he die poor, he should remember that he has devoted his life, not to the
service of his country, but to the amassing of millions which he cannot
spend. It is obvious, therefore, that the noble words which Canning
dedicated to the memory of Pitt can have no meaning for him, and he
would be wisely guided if he left the names of patriots out of the
argument.
Mr Carnegie's choice of an epitaph is easily explained. He is wont to
assert, without warrant, that "a man who dies rich dies disgraced." He
does not tell us how the rich man shall escape disgrace. Not even the
master of millions, great and good as he is reputed to be, knows when
his hour comes. There is a foresight which even money cannot buy. Death
visits the golden palace of the rich and the hovel of the poor
with equal and unexpected foot. The fact that Mr Carnegie is still
distributing libraries with both hands seems to suggest that, had he
been overtaken during the last twenty years, he would not have realised
his ideal. There is but one method by which a rich man may die poor, and
that is by disencumbering himself of his wealth the very day that it is
acquired. And he who is not prepared for this sacrifice does but waste
his breath in celebrating the honour of a pauper's grave.
As there is no merit in living rich, so there is no virtue in dying
poor. That a millionaire should desert his money-bags at his death is
not a reproach to him if they be honestly filled. He has small chance of
emptying them while he is on the earth. But Mr Carnegie has a reason for
his aphorism. He aspires to be a philosopher as well as a millionaire,
and he has decided that a posthumous bequest is of no value, moral or
material. "Men who leave vast sums," says he, "may fairly be thought
men who would not have left it at all had they been able to take it with
them." On such a question as this the authority of Mr Carnegie is not
absolute. Let the cobbler stick to his last. The millionaire, no doubt,
is more familiar with account-books than with the lessons of history;
and the record of a thousand pious benefactors proves the worth of wise
legacies. Nor, indeed, need we travel beyond our own generation to find
a splendid example of wealth honourably bestowed. The will of Cecil
Rhodes remains a tribute to the generosity and to the imagination of
a great man, and is enough of itself to brush aside the quibbles of Mr
Carnegie.
The sentiment of "doing good" and of controlling great wealth leads
rapidly to megalomania, and Mr Carnegie cannot conceal the pride of
omniscience. He seems to think that his money-bags give him the right to
express a definite opinion upon all things. He has distributed so many
books, that perhaps he believes himself master of their contents. Though
he has not devoted himself to politics or literature, he is always
prepared to advise those who give themselves to these difficult arts.
He has discovered that Greek and Latin are of no more practical use
than Choctaw--which is perfectly true, if the useless money-bag be our
_summum bonum_. With the indisputable authority of a man who keeps a
large balance at his bank, he once dismissed the wars of the Greeks as
"petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages." Poor Greeks! They
did not pay their bills in dollars or buy their steel at Pittsburg. The
chief article in his political creed is that monarchy is a crime. In his
opinion, it is a degradation to kiss the King's hand. "The first man who
feels as he ought to feel," says Mr Carnegie, "will either smile when
the hand is extended at the suggestion that he could so demean himself,
and give it a good hearty shake, or knock his Royal Highness down." In
the same spirit of sturdy "independence" he urged the United States some
years since to tax the products of Canada, because she "owes allegiance
to a foreign power founded upon monarchical institutions." "I should use
the rod," says the moneybag, "not in anger, but in love; but I should
use it." Fortunately, it is not his to use; and his opinions are only
memorable, since the country which he insults with his words is insulted
also by his gifts. We may make too great a sacrifice in self-esteem,
even for the boon of free libraries.
And with a hatred of monarchy Mr Carnegie combines a childlike faith in
the political power of money. Though his faith by this should be rudely
shaken, he clings to it as best he may. Time was when he wished to buy
the Philippines, and present them, a free gift, to somebody or other.
Now he thinks that he may purchase the peace of the world for a round
sum, and sees not the absurdity of his offer. Even his poor attempt to
bribe the English-speaking peoples to forget their spelling-books was a
happy failure, and he still cherishes an illusion of omnipotence. At the
opening of his Institute at Pittsburg he was bold enough to declare that
his name would be known to future ages "like the name of Harvard." He
might remember that Harvard gave not of his abundance. He bequeathed for
the use of scholars a scholar's books and a scholar's slender savings,
and he won a gracious immortality. Mr Carnegie, in endowing education,
is endowing that which he has publicly condemned. Desiring to teach the
youth of his country how to become as wealthy as himself, he has poured
contempt upon learning. He has declared that "the college-made" man had
"little chance against the boy who swept the office." He is to be found,
this victim of an intellectual ambition, in the salaried class, from
which the aspiring millionaire is bidden to escape as quickly as
possible by the customary methods of bluff and bounce. Why, then, if Mr
Carnegie thinks so ill of colleges and universities does he inflict his
millions upon them? He has known "few young men intended for business
who were not injured by a collegiate education." And yet he has done his
best to drive all the youth of Scotland within the gates of the despised
universities, and he has forced upon his own Pittsburg the gift of "free
education in art and literature." Is it cynicism, or vain inconsequence?
Cynicism, probably. The man who, having devoted his whole career to
the accumulation of superfluous wealth, yet sings a paean in praise
of poverty, is capable of everything. "Abolish luxury, if you
please,"--thus he rhapsodises,--"but leave us the soil upon which alone
the virtues and all that is precious in human character grow,--poverty,
honest poverty!" Has he shed the virtues, I wonder; or is he a
peculiarly sanctified vessel, which can hold the poison of wealth
without injury?
Of all millionaires, Mr Carnegie is at once the least picturesque and
the most dangerous. He is the least picturesque, because he harbours in
his heart the middle-class ambition of philanthropy. He would undertake
a task for which he is manifestly unfit, in the spirit of provincial
culture. For the same reason he is the most dangerous. He is not content
to squander his immense wealth in race-horses and champagne. He employs
it to interfere with the lives of others. He confers benefits with a
ready hand which are benefits only when they are acquired by conquest.
Of a very different kind is Mr Thomas W. Lawson. He, too, is a
millionaire. He, too, has about him all the appurtenances of wealth. His
fur-coats are mythical. He once paid 30,000 dollars for a pink. "He owns
a palace in Boston," says his panegyrist, "filled with works of art;
he has a six-hundred acre farm in Cape Cod, with seven miles of fences;
three hundred horses, each one of whom he can call by name; a hundred
and fifty dogs; and a building for training his animals larger than
Madison Square Garden." These eloquent lines will prove to you more
clearly than pages of argument the native heroism of the man. He was
scarce out of his cradle when he began to amass vast sums of money, and
he is now, after many years of adventure, a king upon Wall Street. He
represents the melodrama of wealth. He seems to live in an atmosphere
of mysterious disguises, secret letters, and masked faces. His famous
contest with Mr H. H. Rogers, "the wonderful Rogers, the master among
pirates, whom you have to salute even when he has the point of his
cutlass at the small of your back and you're walking the plank at his
order," was conducted, on Mr Lawson's part, in the spirited style of
the old Adelphi. "Mr Rogers' eyes snapped just once," we are told, on
a famous occasion; but Mr Lawson was not intimidated. "I held myself
together," he says proudly, "with closed hands and clinched teeth."
Indeed, these two warriors have never met without much snapping of eyes
and closing of hands and clinching of teeth. Why they snapped and closed
and clinched is uncertain. To follow their operations is impossible for
an outsider, but Mr Lawson always succeeds in convincing you that on the
pretence of money-making he is attacking some lofty enterprise. He would
persuade you that he is a knight-errant of purity. "Tremendous
issues" are always at stake. The heroes of Wall Street are engaged in
never-ending "battles." They are "fighting" for causes, the splendour of
which is not dimmed in Mr Lawson's lurid prose. They have Americanised
the language of ancient chivalry, until it fits the operations of the
modern market. They talk of honour and of "taking each other's word,"
as though they had never stooped to dollars in their lives. But of one
thing you may be sure--they are always "on hand when a new melon is cut
and the juice runs out."
Like the knights of old, they toil not neither do they spin. They make
nothing, they produce nothing, they invent nothing. They merely gamble
with the savings of others, and find the business infinitely profitable.
Yet they, too, must cultivate the language of sentiment. Though the
world is spared the incubus of their philanthropy, they must pretend, in
phrase at least, that they are doing good, and their satisfaction proves
that nothing so swiftly and tranquilly lulls the conscience to sleep as
the dollar. But, as the actor of melodrama falls far below the finished
tragedian, the heroes of the Street, typified by Mr Lawson, are mere
bunglers compared with the greatest millionaire on earth--John D.
Rockefeller. We would no more give him the poor title of "Mr" than we
would give it to Shakespeare. Even "Rockefeller" seems too formal for
his grandeur. Plain "John D." is best suited to express the admiration
of his worshippers, the general fame that shines like a halo about his
head. He is Plutus in human guise; he is Wealth itself, essential and
concrete. A sublime unselfishness has marked his career. He is a true
artist, who pursues his art for its own sake. Money has given him
nothing. He asks nothing of her. Yet he woos her with the same devotion
which a lover shows to his mistress. Like other great men, Rockefeller
has concentrated all his thoughts, all his energies, upon the single
object of his desire. He has not chattered of things which he does
not understand, like Mr Carnegie. He has resolutely refrained from
Mr Lawson's melodramatic exaggeration. Money has been the god of
his idolatry,--"_Dea Moneta_, Queen Money, to whom he daily offers
sacrifice, which steers his heart, hands, affections--all."
His silence and his concentration give him a picturesqueness which his
rivals lack. He stands apart from the human race in a chill and solitary
grandeur. He seeks advertisement as little as he hankers after pleasure.
The Sunday-school is his dissipation. A suburban villa is his palace. He
seldom speaks to the world, and when he breaks his habit of reticence it
is to utter an aphorism, perfect in concision and cynicism. "Avoid all
honorary posts that cost time"--this was one of his earliest counsels
to the young. "Pay a profit to nobody" is perhaps his favourite maxim.
"Nothing is too small, for small things grow," is another principle
which he formulated at the outset of his career. "I have ways of making
money that you know nothing of," he once told a colleague, and no one
will doubt the truth of his assertion. It is said that when he was
scarce out of his teens he would murmur, with the hope of almost
realised ambition, "I am bound to be rich, bound to be rich, bound to be
rich." He imposed upon all those who served him the imperative duty of
secrecy. He was unwilling that any one should know the policy of the
Trust. "Congress and the State legislature are after us," he once said.
"You may be subpoenaed. If you know nothing, you can tell nothing. If
you know about the business, you might tell something which would ruin
us." The mere presence of a stranger has always been distasteful to him.
The custom of espionage has made him suspect that others are as watchful
as himself. He has been described erroneously as a master of complicated
villainy. He is, for evil or for good, the most single-minded man
alive. He looks for a profit in all things. Even his devotion to the
Sunday-school is of a piece with the test. "Put something in," says
he, speaking of the work, "and according as you put something in, the
greater will be your dividends of salvation."
His triumphant capture of the oil trade is a twice-told tale. All the
world knows how he crushed his rivals by excluding their wares from the
rail-roads, which gave him rebates, and then purchased for a song
their depreciated properties. At every point he won the battle. He laid
stealthy hands upon the pipe-lines, designed to thwart his monopoly, as
he had previously laid hands upon the railway lines. He discovered no
new processes, he invented no new methods of transport. But he made
the enterprise of others his own. The small refiner went the way of
the small producer, and the energy of those who carried oil over the
mountains helped to fill Rockefeller's pocket. The man himself spared no
one who stood between him and the realisation of his dream. Friends and
enemies fell down before him. He ruined the widow and orphan with the
same quiet cheerfulness wherewith he defeated the competitors who had
a better chance to fight their own battle. The Government was, and is,
powerless to stay his advance. It has instituted prosecutions. It has
passed laws directed at the Standard Oil Company. And all is of no
avail. Before cross-examining counsel, in the face of the court,
Rockefeller maintains an impenetrable silence. He admits nothing. He
confesses nothing. "We do not talk much," he murmurs sardonically; "we
saw wood." A year ago it was rumoured that he would be arrested when
he returned to America from Europe. He is still at large. The body of a
multi-millionaire is sacred.
He is master of the world's oil, and of much else beside. Having won the
control of one market, he makes his imperial hand felt in many another.
His boast that "money talks" is abundantly justified. The power of money
in making money is the only secret that the millionaires of America
discover for themselves. The man who makes a vast fortune by the
invention or manufacture of something which the people thinks it wants,
may easily take a pride in the fruit of his originality. The captains
of American industry can seldom boast this cause of satisfaction. It is
theirs to exploit, not to create. The great day in Mr Carnegie's life
was that on which "the mysterious golden visitor" came to him, as a
dividend from another's toil. Mr Rockefeller remembers with the greatest
pleasure the lesson which he learned as a boy, "that he could get as
much interest for $50, loaned at seven per cent, as he could earn by
digging potatoes ten days." The lesson of Shylock is not profound, but
its mastery saves a world of trouble. Combined with a light load of
scruples, it will fill the largest coffers; and it has been sufficient
to carry the millionaires of America to the highest pinnacle of fame.
In other words, the sole test of their success is not their achievement,
but their money-bags. And when, with cynical egoism, they have collected
their unnumbered dollars, what do they do with them? What pleasures,
what privileges, does their wealth procure? It is their fond delusion
that it brings them power. What power? To make more money and to defy
the laws. In England a wealthy man aspires to found a family, to play
his part upon the stage of politics, to serve his country as best he
may, and to prepare his sons for a like honourable service. The American
millionaire does not share this ambition. Like Mr Rockefeller, he avoids
"honorary posts." If he were foolish enough to accept them, he would
not be loyal to the single desire of adding to his store. Perhaps we may
best express his triumph in terms of champagne and oysters, of marble
halls and hastily gathered collections. But even here the satisfaction
is small. The capacity of the human throat is limited, and collections,
made by another and partially understood, pall more rapidly than
orchid-houses and racing-stables.
This, then, is the tragedy of the American multi-millionaires. They are
doomed to carry about with them a huge load of gold which they cannot
disperse. They are no wiser than the savages, who hide and hoard their
little heaps of cowrie-shells. They might as well have filled their
treasuries with flint-stones or scraps of iron. They muster their wealth
merely to become its slave. They are rich not because they possess
imagination, but because they lack it. Their bank-books are the index of
their folly. They waste their years in a vain pursuit, which they cannot
resist. They exclude from their lives all that makes life worth living,
that they may acquire innumerable specimens of a precious metal. Gold
is their end, not the gratification it may bring. Mr Rockefeller will go
out of the world as limited in intelligence, as uninstructed in mind,
as he was when he entered it. The lessons of history and literature are
lost upon him. The joys for which wise men strive have never been his.
He is the richest man on earth, and his position and influence are the
heaviest indictment of wealth that can be made. His power begins and
ends at the curbstone of Wall Street. His painfully gathered millions
he must leave behind. Even the simple solace of a quiet conscience is
denied to the most of his class. Is there one of them who is not haunted
in hours of depression by the memory of bloody strikes, of honest men
squeezed out, of rival works shut down?
In a kind of dread they turn to philanthropy. They fling from their
chariots bundles of bank-notes to appease the wolves of justice.
Universities grow ignobly rich upon their hush-money. They were
accurately described three centuries ago by Robert Burton as "gouty
benefactors, who, when by fraud and rapine they have extorted all their
lives, oppressed whole provinces, societies, &c., give something to
pious uses, build a satisfactory almshouse, school, or bridge, &c, at
their last end, or before perhaps, which is no otherwise than to steal
a goose and stick down a feather, rob a thousand to relieve ten." If
America were wise she would not accept even the feather without the
closest scrutiny. Money never loses the scent of its origin, and when
the very rich explain how much they ought to give to their fellows, they
should carry back their inquiry a stage farther. They should tell us why
they took so much, why they suppressed the small factory, why they made
bargains with railways to the detriment of others, why they used their
wealth as an instrument of oppression. If their explanation be not
sufficient, they should not be permitted to unload their gold upon a
stricken country; they should not buy a cheap reputation for generosity
with money that is not their own.
It may be said that the millionaire decrees the punishment for his own
crimes. That is true enough, but the esteem in which America holds him
inflicts a wrong upon the whole community. Where Rockefeller is a hero,
a false standard of morals is set up. For many years he has preached a
practical sermon upon the text, "The end justifies the means." How great
are the means! How small the end! He has defended his harshest dealings
on the ground that "it is business," and so doing has thrown a slur
upon the commerce of his country. And, worse than this, the wonder and
curiosity which cling about the dollar have created a new measure of
life and character. A man is judged not by his attainments, his courage,
his energy, but by his wealth. It is a simple test, and easily applied.
It is also the poorest encouragement for the civic virtues. In England
we help to correct the vulgarity of wealth by the distribution of
titles, and a better aid than this could not be devised. Though the
champions of democracy, who believe in equality of names as devoutly
as in inequality of wealth, deem this old-fashioned artifice a shameful
crime, it is not without its uses. It suggests that public service is
worth a higher distinction than a mass of money. And, titles apart, it
is happily not in accord with the traditions of our life to regard the
rich man and the poor man as beings of a different clay and a different
destiny. We may still echo without hypocrisy the words of Ben Jonson,
"Money never made any man rich, but his mind."