It is a mistake to suppose that the great captains of industry, the
great organizers and directors of manufacture and commerce and monetary
exchange, are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too often they
suffer the vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the idleness and
ostentation of their wives and children, who “devote themselves,” it
may be, “to expense regardless of pleasure”; but we ought not to
misunderstand even that, or condemn it unjustly. The masters of
industry are often too busy with their own sober and momentous calling
to have time or spare thought enough to govern their own households. A
king may be too faithful a statesman to be a watchful father. These men
are not fascinated by the glitter of gold: the appetite for power has
got hold upon them. They are in love with the exercise of their
faculties upon a great scale; they are organizing and overseeing a
great part of the life of the world. No wonder they are captivated.
Business is more interesting than pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot said, and
when once the mind has caught its zest, there’s no disengaging it. The
world has reason to be grateful for the fact.
It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties of the man
whom the world was afterward to know, not as a prince among
merchants—for the world forgets merchant princes—but as a prince among
benefactors; for beneficence breeds gratitude, gratitude admiration,
admiration fame, and the world remembers its benefactors. Business, and
business alone, interested him, or seemed to him worthwhile. The first
time he was asked to subscribe money for a benevolent object he
declined. Why _should_ he subscribe? What affair would be set forward,
what increase of efficiency would the money buy, what return would it
bring in? Was good money to be simply given away, like water poured on
a barren soil, to be sucked up and yield nothing? It was not until men
who understood benevolence on its sensible, systematic, practical, and
really helpful side explained it to him as an investment that his mind
took hold of it and turned to it for satisfaction. He began to see that
education was a thing of infinite usury; that money devoted to it would
yield a singular increase to which there was no calculable end, an
increase in perpetuity—increase of knowledge, and therefore of
intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after generation with
new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world’s fitness for
affairs—an invisible but intensely real spiritual usury beyond
reckoning, because compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age.
Henceforward beneficence was as interesting to him as business—was,
indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new forces
in a commerce which no man could bind or limit.
He had come to himself—to the full realization of his powers, the true
and clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its
satisfaction. His faculties were consciously stretched to their right
measure, were at last exercised at their best. He felt the keen zest,
not of success merely, but also of honor, and was raised to a sort of
majesty among his fellow-men, who attended him in death like a dead
sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he not broken the bonds of mere
money-getting; would never have known himself had he not learned how to
spend it; and ambition itself could not have shown him a straighter
road to fame.
This is the positive side of a man’s discovery of the way in which his
faculties are to be made to fit into the world’s affairs, and released
for effort in a way that will bring real satisfaction. There is a
negative side also. Men come to themselves by discovering their
limitations no less than by discovering their deeper endowments and the
mastery that will make them happy. It is the discovery of what they can
_not_ do, and ought not to attempt, that transforms reformers into
statesmen; and great should be the joy of the world over every reformer
who comes to himself. The spectacle is not rare; the method is not
hidden. The practicability of every reform is determined absolutely and
always by “the circumstances of the case,” and only those who put
themselves into the midst of affairs, either by action or by
observation, can know what those circumstances are or perceive what
they signify. No statesman dreams of doing whatever he pleases; he
knows that it does not follow that because a point of morals or of
policy is obvious to him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to
his own friends; and it is the strength of a democratic polity that
there are so many minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and
that nothing can be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal
more than the thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose,
have not been prepared. Social reform is a matter of cooperation, and
if it be of a novel kind, requires an infinite deal of converting to
bring the efficient majority to believe in it and support it. Without
their agreement and support it is impossible.
V
It is this that the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out
when they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to
them. Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them
to themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That
will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because
they find their fellow-legislators or officials incapable of high
purpose or indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they
represent. Only cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach
the millennium so slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed
persons. Nor is it because under our modern democratic arrangements we
so subdivide power and balance parts in government that no one man can
tell for much or turn affairs to his will. One of the most instructive
studies a politician could undertake would be a study of the infinite
limitations laid upon the power of the Russian Czar, notwithstanding
the despotic theory of the Russian constitution—limitations of social
habit, of official prejudice, of race jealousies, of religious
predilections, of administrative machinery even, and the inconvenience
of being himself only one man, caught amidst a rush of duties and
responsibilities which never halt or pause. He can do only what can be
done with the Russian people. He cannot change them at will. He is
himself of their own stuff, and immersed in the life which forms them,
as it forms him. He is simply the leader of the Russians.
An English or American statesman is better off. He leads a thinking
nation, not a race of peasants topped by a class of revolutionists and
a caste of nobles and officials. He can explain new things to men able
to understand, persuade men willing and accustomed to make independent
and intelligent choices of their own. An English statesman has an even
better opportunity to lead than an American statesman, because in
England executive power and legislative initiative are both intrusted
to the same grand committee, the ministry of the day. The ministers
both propose what shall be law and determine how it shall be enforced
when enacted. And yet English reformers, like American, have found
office a veritable cold-water bath for their ardor for change. Many a
man who has made his place in affairs as the spokesman of those who see
abuses and demand their reformation has passed from denunciation to
calm and moderate advice when he got into Parliament, and has turned
veritable conservative when made a minister of the crown. Mr. Bright
was a notable example. Slow and careful men had looked upon him as
little better than a revolutionist so long as his voice rang free and
imperious from the platforms of public meetings. They greatly feared
the influence he should exercise in Parliament, and would have deemed
the constitution itself unsafe could they have foreseen that he would
some day be invited to take office and a hand of direction in affairs.
But it turned out that there was nothing to fear. Mr. Bright lived to
see almost every reform he had urged accepted and embodied in
legislation; but he assisted at the process of their realization with
greater and greater temperateness and wise deliberation as his part in
affairs became more and more prominent and responsible, and was at the
last as little like an agitator as any man that served the queen.
It is not that such men lose courage when they find themselves charged
with the actual direction of the affairs concerning which they have
held and uttered such strong, unhesitating, drastic opinions. They have
only learned discretion. For the first time they see in its entirety
what it was that they were attempting. They are at last at close
quarters with the world. Men of every interest and variety crowd about
them; new impressions throng them; in the midst of affairs the former
special objects of their zeal fall into new environments, a better and
truer perspective; seem no longer so susceptible to separate and
radical change. The real nature of the complex stuff of life they were
seeking to work in is revealed to them—its intricate and delicate
fiber, and the subtle, secret interrelationship of its parts—and they
work circumspectly, lest they should mar more than they mend. Moral
enthusiasm is not, uninstructed and of itself, a suitable guide to
practicable and lasting reformation; and if the reform sought be the
reformation of others as well as of himself, the reformer should look
to it that he knows the true relation of his will to the wills of those
he would change and guide. When he has discovered that relation, he has
come to himself: has discovered his real use and planning part in the
general world of men; has come to the full command and satisfying
employment of his faculties. Otherwise he is doomed to live for ever in
a fool’s paradise, and can be said to have come to himself only on the
supposition that he is a fool.