BOOKS.

INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES. t

"I BELIEVE in rich men, and I cannot longer bear to see rich men humiliated before the world." The sight which the author of Inspired, lifillionaires desires to avoid is rare; what he really means is that be desires' to see rich men glorified before the world, because in his opinion they are, and are to be, the saviours of society. The problem of the age is, he says, "an essentially religious problem," and the millionaires are to solve it. They are the men "who succeed in believing big and difficult things,- leaning on great spiritual prin- ciples." They are -the men who prove that " the golden rule works." They illistrate " the growing successfulness of God," because "'great love consists, not in unselfishness, but in identifying one's selfishness with other people's." They are

• The glaring inferiority of these lines to Goldsmith's well-]nown epitaphs in his " Retaliation " is, to judge by recent psychical communications in verse, a strong proof of their genuineness.

t Inspired Millionaires: a Staitu of the Man_of Genius in Business. By Gerald

Stanley Lee. London : Grant Richards. net.']

the people who are to preach the modern. gospel, "advertising the efficiency of goodness." They are not now—and cer-

tainly- the millionaires of the future will not be—like

the rich men of old. There is a sense in which they might be called "The Innocents of Riches—some of them." The qualification is indeed needed. " I do believe that the next great thing that is going to happen in the world is one inspired millionaire," continues: this new apostle of money.

When the reader has taken:in so much be will surely pause to take-breath. Is there anything practical in all this-? he will

ask himself. What is this idealized millionaire' doing—or to do P Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee gives him some very plain advice. "Get your monopoly without being, mean,"! we read, "that is, by invention, by some sheer; overwhelming-service to mankind, by saving every man on the planet. several pounds a year."

Here at least we are able to understand our author's ideal— this is his notion of an overwhelming. service. He goes on to defend monopolies. "Pocket the-money. See to it that you are able to keep an absolute, unquestioned control throughout the world of the thing you have thought of for it. In other words, see to it that you have an; opportunity to be mean if you want to." The " Innocents " are to enjoy temptation !

On the other band Mr. Lee is no advocate of "meanness:' He believes that monopolies are the inevitable outcome of indi- vidualism. " What a democracy is for is to create a free and favourable atmosphere for producing exceptional personalities." All that savours of Socialism is to him either savagery or sentimentality. At best Socialism is, in his opinion, Tolstoyism. Nothing can come of it but the turning of the world upside down and bringing " a residuum of Russian peasants " to the top.

The first thing which Mr. Lee requires of his ideal millionaire is "a belief in human nature," or, as we should. put it; a belief in the money value of 'brains. The millionaire must see that " belief in human nature can be made to pay."

He must realize that "almost any kind.of waste can be better afforded in a factory than wasting men's minds." Over- specialization, he believes, destroys men's power of thought.

The idea is certainly not a new one. Each man in a factory should know something of other men's work, should serve a short daily apprenticeship to some part of his trade other than the one which occupies the majority of his time. No man must be chained to a single machine. "To put a man for five, ten, or fifteen years into solitary confinement with a machine is really to throw away the machine and the man both." Only give the men a chance to use their minds, and

they will use them to improve their work, and out of the crowd will rise a few men of inventive- genius. Also- the men will take pleasure in their work, and will not want other pleasure. Their work will not be done as a duty; "the lion of delight

will be roused in them—a thing which Mr. Lee tells us in a. somewhat distasteful passage is a far stronger thing, than the conscience. Conscience, he says,

-"is at best only a very small part of a man, and if our hold on a man is to be firm and enduring, and endure moods and all kinds of events and the weather of the world, it seems to be necessary to get hold of the whole man, and the only way to get hold of the whole man is to get hold of the power in him which most sums him up, which concentrates the whole of him in itself, and this means that we must strike clown through to the creative instinct in the man, the stronghold of vitality and desire."

But to bring into being. an ideal factory an ideal factory

manager is a sine qua non. A man with exceptional• powers is needed. The factory managers of the future will be men who have " spiritual' powers in business, who see things and

do things by using their souls daily, and by getting the use of the souls of others." Of course such a man will require a high salary. "Everybody will see that if a manager can be found who really has a soul he ought to be paid a salary which shall approxi- mate to the actual market value a soul has in this modern business world.' The trade unions will, he assures us, be the worst opponents of the model factory manager.

"The first objeotion ouch a superintendent would encounter in attempting to introduce &partial rotary system of employment in his factory would probably come from the trade-union men. The trade unions would oppose it on the ground that it would lead to the discovery of more met, andnf• more men's- actual qualities at more points, than would be otherwise- possible, and would inevit- ably result in the giving of more freedom and wages to some men than to others." One of the extraordinarily clever questions which our author asks is "what sort of world this really is under the noise." The reader finds himself putting the .question in another form and asking himself what sort of Look this really is "under the noise." Worldly epigrams used to out through spiritual problems, Biblical language employed to elucidate what are usually considered " money matters," meaningless rodo- montade and claptrap colloquialism all jar together on an Englishman's ears. The writer tells us that, "after a more or less intimate knowledge of big, glowing business men on the one band and of the churches on theother, I do not see what there is that the churches and preachers, as they just now generally stand, can do for them." Some of these "Innocents" are "almost like churches and cathedrals in themselves." We hope they will be pleased with their portraits. But if Mr. Lee has little use for churches he is still anxious—under the circumstances it seems an odd anxiety—to square his views with those expressed in the Bible. He has a great respect for "several immortal journalists" thrown up by the Hebrew race and " called prophets." Also he goes a long way out of his way to prove that the rich young man in the New Testa- ment was told to get rid of his possessions because he had " a poor, helpless, neuter soul" unworthy, the reader supposes, apparently, of the supreme good, the dollar. This new instructor of millionaires has not lately read the account— probably he would say the report—of the incident. Helpless neuter souls are not described as pre-eminently lovable.

After all, however, all this is "noise." What does the man want—in practice ? He wants, so far as we make out, better mental conditions for hand-workers. He wants that no man should be a hand-worker only. He believes that profit comes not out of a machine but out of the imagination of the man who invented it and out of the sum total of the imaginations of the men who work it. He thinks no business will ever succeed as it should succeed till every man in it is given up to it body and soul ; he must be attracted to devote himself to it with all his heart and all his mind and all his soul and all his strength. Conditions which will pro- duce such men depend on benevolent despotism, and the wages which will attract the right despots are largely paid in con- sideration and something little short of worship. Given all these things we shall produce, in his opinion, a new heaven and a new earth overflowing with energy and money.