THE LATE MR. VANDERBILT.
ITO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIE,—Praise of a prominent man after his death is some- times overdone, but in your editorial of September 16th on the death of Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the American multi- millionaire, you have—unwittingly, I am sure—failed to do a man full justice. Mr. Vanderbilt, as you suggest, was not a man of creative and initiatory force, nor of insistent per- sonality; his phenomenal wealth came to him by inheritance, it was not self-wrought. He was, as you say, "in all respects like a hundred thousand other men." But the fact that he never gave evidence of a consciousness of the difference in outward conditions between himself and the other hundred thousand was in itself no mean trait. And this was true of Mr. Vanderbilt. Unostentatious in manner, simple in habits and in taste, easily accessible, with an open ear and an open hand to the needs of others, he gave cheerfully, wisely, and largely out of his abundance. It is true that he devoted personal attention to the conservation of his large financial interests, but those who knew him best ascribed his premature breakdown, not to a mad chase after greater wealth, but largely to his untiring devotion to the many exacting duties which he had silently assumed, for the physical, moral, and spiritual advancement of the community in which he lived. It were a pity, in these days of somewhat too public charity, combined occasionally with suspected motive, to have a fine example of faithful stewardship fail of reuognition because of the modesty which characterised it.—
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