"Mike" McDonald, the king of gamblers, was buried like a king of men.
There were flowers, tears, friends, orations and processions. But as
clothes are not, neither is a funeral, an index to character--nor even
is the obituary column.
Strangers, reading the story of the last day above the sod of
McDonald's body, might has thought that Chicago had lost a leading
good citizen. They were told that McDonald had amassed wealth, but
they were not told how he got it. They read of the great men whom he
had befriended, but they were not told of the men whom he had ruined.
They were not told that Mike McDonald living, had violated the laws
of the land, of society and of the home.
"Mike" McDonald died worth a million dollars. A young man beginning
life, familiar only with the post-mortem, story of McDonald, and
seeing no condemnation of his method of getting rich, might feel
encouraged to hold to the idea that the accumulation of money bars all
criticism for the way it is acquired.
Though the publicity of cold type has put no brand on the dead
McDonald, the story of "Mike" McDonald's life and fortune is not yet
finished.
Suppose he did die worth a million dollars, whom will it benefit? What
good will it do?
There will be a fight in every dollar, a quarrel in every penny.
There will be a strife among men and women over this fortune.
Much of it will go to lawyers to defend a woman charged with murder.
Much more of it will go to other lawyers who will try to break his
will. As McDonald's money was ill-gotten, so will it be spent to no
good purpose.
In a few years McDonald will be forgotten except by those whom in life
he ruined. His fortune will be gone. No one will remember him for the
good he did, if he did any good.
Let not "Mike" McDonald's success in securing money encourage you to
follow his method.
If you, young man, had an opportunity of entering a gambling venture,
with a certainty of securing for yourself a fortune of a million
dollars, you would be a fool to take advantage of that opportunity.
There is nothing in the life of even a successful gambler worth
imitating and nothing that he does worth admiring.
"Mike" McDonald may have been better than the ordinary class of
gamblers, but the occasional good deeds that men of his character do
are always exaggerated.
Ninety-nine gamblers out of a hundred that amass fortunes die paupers.
The money that a few accumulate, even as McDonald did, is, as a rule,
a curse to those that inherit it.
But if McDonald had sense--and we believe he did have sense--in the
closing years of his life he cursed the day when he started on a
career that wrecked him, socially and morally, and left him in his
dying hour a bankrupt in everything but the possession of a few
hundred thousand dollars, which he could not take beyond the grave.
And what has happened after McDonald's death, and what will happen in
the courts of law, will prove to men that ill-gotten money carries a
sting to its possessor and a curse to those who inherit it.