"Now you set your foot on shore
In Novo Orbe; here's the rich Peru;
And there, within, sir, are the golden mines,
Great Solomon's Ophir."
Unlimited credit! Wealth without bound! Power to gratify any
desire--all desires! That was the luck of the Golden Butterfly. No
wish within the reach of man that Gilead Beck could not gratify. No
project or plan within limits far, far beyond what are generally
supposed reasonable, that he could not carry out. Take your own case,
brother of mine, struggling to realise the modest ambitions common to
cultured humanity, and to force them within the bounds of a slender
income. Think of the thousand and one things you want; think of the
conditions of your life you would wished changed; think of the
generous aspirations you would gratify: think of the revenges,
malices, envies, hatreds, which you would be able to satiate--_had
you the wealth which gives the power_. Then suppose yourself suddenly
possessed of that wealth, and think what you would do with it.
Your brain is feeble; it falters at a few thousands; a hundred
thousand a year is too much for it--it was as much, if I remember
rightly, as even the imagination of the elder Dumas attained to.
Beyond a paltry twenty thousand or so, one feels oppressed in
imagination with a weight of income. Let us suppose you stick at
twenty thousand. What would you do with it? What could you not do with
it? Your ideal Society--the one thing wanting, only rich men cannot be
brought to see it, to regenerate the world--that could instantly be
put on a sound footing. Your works--those works which you keep locked
up in a desk at home--you could publish, and at once step into your
right position as a leader of thought, an [Greek: hanax andrôn]. Your
projects, educational, moral, theatrical, literary, musical, could all
together, for they are modest, be launched upon the ocean of public
opinion. You could gratify your taste for travel. Like Charles
Kingsley, you could stand in the shadow of a tropical forest (it would
not be one quarter so beautiful as a hundred glades ten miles from
Southampton) and exclaim, "At last!" You are an archæologist, and have
as yet seen little. You could make that long-desired trip to Naples
and see Pompeii; you could visit the cities of the Midi, and explore
the Roman remains you have as yet only read of; you could take that
journey to Asia Minor, your dream of twenty years, and sketch the
temples still standing, roofed and perfect, unvisited since the last
stragglers of the last crusading army died of famine on the steps,
scoffing with their latest breath at the desecrated altar. Their bones
lay mouldering in front of the marble columns--silent monuments of a
wasted enthusiasm--while the fleshless fingers pointed as if in scorn
in the direction of Jerusalem. They have been dust this many a year.
Dust blown about the fields; manure for the crops which the peasant
raises in luxuriance by scratching the soil. But the temples stand
still, sacred yet to the memory of Mother Earth, the many-breasted
goddess of the Ephesians. Why, if you had that £20,000 a year, you
would go there, sketch, photograph, and dig.
What could not one do if one had money? And then one takes to thinking
what is done by those who actually have it. Well, they subscribe--they
give to hospitals and institutions--and they save the rest. Happy for
this country that Honduras, Turkey, and a few other places exist to
plunder the British capitalists, or we should indeed perish of
wealth-plethora. Thousands of things all round us wait to be done;
things which must be done by rich men, and cannot be done by trading
men, because they would not pay.
_Exempli gratia_; here are a few out of the many.
1. They are always talking of endowment of research; all the men who
think they ought to be endowed are clamouring for it. But think of the
luxury of giving a man a thousand a year, and telling him to work for
the rest of his days with no necessity for doing pot-boilers. Yet no
rich man does it. There was a man in Scotland, the other day, gave
half a million to the Kirk. For all the luxury to be got out of that
impersonal gift, one might just as well drop a threepenny-bit into the
crimson bag.
2. This is a country in which the dramatic instinct is so strong as to
be second only to that of France. We want a National Theatre, where
such a thing as a 300 nights' run would be possible, and which should
be a school for dramatists as well as actors. A paltry £10,000 a year
would pay the annual deficit in such a theatre. Perhaps, taking year
with year, less than half that sum would do. No rich man has yet
proposed to found, endow, or subsidise such a theatre.
3. In this City of London thousands of boys run about the streets
ragged and hungry. Presently they become habitual criminals. Then they
cost the country huge sums in goals, policemen, and the like.
Philanthropic people catch a few of these boys and send them to places
where they are made excellent sailors. Yet the number does not
diminish. A small £15 a year pays for a single boy. A rich man might
support a thousand of them. Yet no rich man does.
4. In this country millions of women have to work for their living.
Everybody who employs those women under-pays them and cheats them.
Women cannot form trade-unions--they are without the organ of
government; therefore they are downtrodden in the race. They do men's
work at a quarter of men's wages. No trade so flourishing as that
which is worked by women--witness the prosperity of dress-making
masters. The workwomen have longer hours, as well as lower pay, than
the men. At the best, they get enough to keep body and soul together;
not enough for self-respect; not enough, if they are young and
good-looking, to keep them out of mischief. To give them a central
office and a central protecting power might cost a thousand pounds a
year No rich man, so far as I know, has yet come forward with any such
scheme for the improvement of women's labour.
5. This is a country where people read a great deal. More books are
printed in England than in any other country in the world. Reading
forms the amusement of half our hours, the delight of our leisure
time. For the whole of its reading Society agrees to pay Mundie &
Smith from three to ten guineas a house. Here is a sum in arithmetic:
house-bills, £1,500 a year; wine-bill, £300; horses, £500; rent, £400;
travelling, £400; dress--Lord knows what; reading--say £5; also, spent
at Smith's stalls in two-shilling novels, say thirty shillings. That
is the patronage of Literature. Successful authors make a few hundreds
a year--successful grocers make a few thousands--and people say, "How
well is Literature rewarded!"
Mr. Gilead Beck once told me of a party gathered together in Virginia
City to mourn the decease of a dear friend cut off prematurely. The
gentleman intrusted with the conduct of the evening's entertainment
had one-and-forty dollars put into his hands to be laid out to the
best advantage. He expended it as follows:--
Whisky Forty dollars, (40$)
Bread One dollar, ( 1$)
------------------------
Total Forty-one dollars. (41$)
"What, in thunder," asked the chairman, "made you waste all that money
in bread?"
Note.--He had never read _Henry IV_.
The modern patronage of Literature is exactly like the proportion of
bread observed by the gentleman of Virginia City.
Five pounds a year for the mental food of all the household.
Enough; social reform is a troublesome and an expensive thing. Let it
be done by the societies; there are plenty of people anxious to be
seen on platforms, and plenty of men who are rejoiced to take the
salary of secretary.
Think again of Mr. Gilead Beck's Luck and what it meant. The wildest
flights of your fancy never reach to a fourth part of his income. The
yearly revenues of a Grosvenor fall far short of this amazing good
fortune, Out of the bowels of the earth was flowing for him a
continuous stream of wealth that seemed inexhaustible. Not one well,
but fifty, were his, and all yielding. When he told Jack Dunquerque
that his income was a thousand pounds a day, he was far within the
limit. In these weeks he was clearing fifteen hundred pounds in every
twenty-four hours. That makes forty-five thousand pounds a month; five
hundred and forty thousand pounds a year. Can a Grosvenor or a Dudley
reach to that?
The first well was still the best, and it showed no signs of giving
out; and as Mr. Beck attributed its finding to the direct personal
instigation of the Golden Butterfly, he firmly believed that it never
would give out. Other shafts had been sunk round it, but with varying
success; the ground covered with derricks and machinery erected for
boring fresh wells and working the old, an army of men were engaged in
these operations; a new town had sprung up in the place of Limerick
City; and Gilead P. Beck, its King, was in London, trying to learn how
his money might best be spent.
It weighed heavily upon his mind; the fact that he was by no effort of
his own, through no merit of his own, earning a small fortune every
week made him thoughtful. In his rough way he took the wealth as so
much trust-money. He was entitled, he thought, to live upon it
according to his inclination; he was to have what his soul craved for
he was to use it first for his own purposes; but he was to devote what
he could not spend--that is, the great bulk of it--somehow to the
general good. Such was the will of the Golden Butterfly.
I do not know how the idea came into Gilead Beck's head that he was to
regard himself a trustee. The man's antecedents would seem against
such a conception of Fortune and her responsibilities. Born in a New
England village, educated till the age of twelve in a village school,
he had been turned upon the world to make his livelihood in it as best
he could. He was everything by turns; there was hardly a trade that he
did not attempt, not a calling which he did not for a while follow.
Ill luck attended him for thirty years; yet his courage did not flag.
Every fresh attempt to escape from poverty only seemed to throw him
back deeper in the slough. Yet he never despaired. His time would
surely come. He preserved his independence of soul, and he preserved
his hope.
But all the time he longed for wealth. The desire for riches is an
instinct with the Englishman, a despairing dream with the German, a
stimulus for hoarding with the Frenchman, but it is a consuming fire
with the American. Gilead P. Beck breathed an atmosphere charged with
the contagion of restless ambition. How many great men--presidents,
vice-presidents, judges, orators, merchants--have sprung from the
obscure villages of the older States? Gilead Beck started on his
career with a vague idea that he was going to be something great. As
the years went on he retained the belief, but it ceased to take a
concrete form. He did not see himself in the chair of Ulysses Grant;
he did not dream of becoming a statesman or an orator But he was going
to be a man of mark. Somehow he was bound to be great.
And then came the Golden Butterfly.
See Mr. Beck now. It is ten in the morning. He has left the pile of
letters, most of them begging letters, unopened opened at his elbow.
He has got the case of glass and gold containing the Butterfly on the
table. The sunlight pouring in at the opened window strikes upon the
yellow metal, and lights up the delicately chased wings of this freak
of Nature. Poised on the wire, the Golden Butterfly seems to hover of
its own accord upon the petals of the rose. It is alive. As its owner
sits before it, the creature seems endowed with life and motion. This
is nonsense, but Mr. Beck thinks so at the moment.
On the table is a map of his Canadian oil-fields.
He sits like this nearly every morning, the gilded box before him. It
is his way of consulting the oracle. After his interview with the
Butterfly he rises refreshed and clear of vision. This morning, if his
thoughts could be written down, they might take this form:
"I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice. I have more than I can spend
upon the indulgence of every whim that ever entered the head of sane
man. When I have bought all the luxuries that the world has to sell,
there still remains to be saved more than any other living man has to
spend.
"What am I to do with it?
"Shall I lay it up in the Bank? The Bank might break. That is
possible. Or the well might stop. No; that is impossible. Other wells
have stopped, but no well has run like mine, or will again; for I have
struck through the crust of the earth into the almighty reservoir.
"How to work out this trust? Who will help me to spend the money
aright? How is such a mighty pile to be spent?
"Even if the Butterfly were to fall and break, who can deprive me of
my wealth?"
His servant threw open the door: "Mr. Cassilis, sir."