MILLIONAIRES AND THEIR MILLIONS.
IT would be interesting to know and compare the feel- ings with which people read the announcement= whether well founded or not we cannot say—that Mr. Andrew Carnegie's income is three millions sterling. Three millions would not so long ago have been thought to be a pretty fair capital. Allowing for a few invest- ments bringing in rather more than 3 per cent., it would mean an income of £100.000. But what a pittance this must seem to Mr. Carnegie! How he must pity the im- poverished wretch who has to make two ends meet on just one-thirtieth of what his own realised property brings in I We are not equal, however, to entering into the thoughts of a millionaire on the subject. It would be like a house-fly criticising Lord .Salisbury's foreign policy. Even the imagination has its limits, and we question whether- even a syndicate of minor poets, who may be regarded as the representatives of that divine faculty, could enter into the mind of the possessor of such an income as this. Our speculation is of a much more modest character. It is what the crowd, the people like ourselves, those who have only a hearsay knowledge of great fortunes, think about wealth such as this. What is the opinion of the moralist, of the economist, of the man who is interested in the general wellbeing of society ? Will he he distressed or pleased at this wonderful piece of news ? Will he think that it is good or bad for the world that such huge properties should be in existence, that one man should appropriate so large a part of the world's heritage ? We fancy that the opinion most commonly held, at all events in the first instance, will be that these vast fortunes must be bad for the world and bad also for their owners. They imply, it will be confidently asserted, lavish expenditure in all directions, and where expenditure is lavish a great deal of it is likely to be vicious. The millionaire is presumed to be continually setting a bad example on a vast scale, and he may count upon having imitators. He will be a perennial source of extravagance, and consequently of corruption, and who is there that can set bounds to such a torrent when once it has begun to flow ? The spectacle of gigantic wealth, of gigantic power conferred by wealth, of the passions which the possession of this wealth generates, of the un- restrained ability to gratify them in any and every direc- tion, that presents itself is surely one of unmixed terror.
We greatly doubt it. We doubt, that is, whether the results of these abnormal incomes are ordinarily them- selves abnormal The picture which first presents itself on hearing of this fabulous wealth is that of a Count of Monte Cristo—a mysterious personage exerting strange and secret powers on all with whom he comes in contact —a being above law and above morality. This, we say, is the first picture that rises before the mental dye. But the second is very different. The millionaire in Mr. Kipling's " Captains Courageous " probably comes very much nearer the truth. He exercises, indeed, vast powers of a certain kind, but that kind is not in itself remark- able. A. child who travelled with the chairman of a railway company might wonder when he saw the little bunch of ivories which passes him over every railway in the Kingdom, and so children of a larger growth may wonder at Mr Kipling's vivid description of the railway journey in the Constance car across the American Conti- nent. But there is nothing unusual in the powers which make such a journey possible. They are only a multipli- cation of a power which any one can wield who can afford to order a special train. Dumas knew very well that be could only make his hero's wealth interesting by making it minister to a purpose with which the wealth itself had nothing to do. And then the Count of Monte Cristo's wealth came to him by chance. Had he had to make it for himself we may be pretty sure that his desire for vengeance on his enemies would either have interfered with his accumulations or have been forgotten in the absorption of piling one million on another. The man who makes a fortune like Mr. Carnegie's, or a fortune very much less than Mr. Carnegie's, has his work cut out for him, and by the time he has completed his task the energy that has hitherto borne him up is probably exhausted. If it is not, he will almost certainly go on making money. The habit has so grown upon him that it is hardly possible for him to break it off. The reckless expenditure which we ordinarily associate with a millionaire is seldom consistent with the single-eyed devotion to one pursuit without which he would not have been a million- aire. It is told of a great advocate who was asked why he went on at the Bar after he had succeeded to a fortune, that he put the question in return : "Can you show me any- thing as amusing as making £20,000 a year ? " And this probably is the feeling of every man who has made money on a great scale. The process itself is too inter- esting to be given up except on the supposition that he has lost the mental and physical energy which made its exercise possible. This is the only explanation of the extraordinary and needless risks which very wealthy men will sometimes run. They have made fortunes large enough to satisfy any ordinary ambition, and on the theory which places the danger of a great fortune in the lavish expenditure of its owner they ought now to be devoting themselves to ambition or luxury. Instead of this they are thinking only how they can make their great fortune greater. They are fascinated by the prospect of doubling or trebling it at a stroke, and in making that stroke they possibly lose it all.
There is a different class of objections which sees in these vast fortunes only so much wealth withdrawn from the society in which their owners live, and concentrated in the hands of the few, instead of being shared among the many. But is there any ground for thinking that great accumulations of wealth are bad for the community ? It is commonly, and we imagine rightly, supposed that the community benefits by capital being abundant. All industrial undertakings require capital. The first busi- ness of those who enter upon them is to assure themselves that the money which is necessary to start them can be raised on fairly easy terms. Great fortunes imply great savings, and great savings mean abundance of money anxiously waiting for a borrower. If the multi- millionaire's millions were so distributed that none of those who shared them had more than a thousand a year, where would be the accumulated capital on which industry depends for profitable employment? The whole sum would go in the maintenance of the owners and their families. We are apt to think only of the vast profits which the millionaires have drawn from the works of various kinds from which their fortunes have been drawn. But how have these works been maintained and ex- tended ? Simply by returning to them the larger part of the profits that have come out of them. The business of a millionaire, the very life of a millionaire, is largely, if not chiefly, a matter of investment. What occupies his thoughts is how to lay out his savings to the best advantage. But laying out savings to the best advantage cannot be a purely selfish process. Rather, though it may be, and probably is, a purely selfish process from the point of view of the owner of the savings, it is not a purely selfish process from the point of view of the community. The art of laving them out to advan- tage consists in finding what undertakings want them most, and what can be trusted to hold them most safely, and to use them most advantageously. It is, in fact, the difference on which the older economists insisted so strongly,—the difference between the man who hoards and the man who spends. When once invest- ment at interest took the place of "the stocking " the man who hoards became a public benefactor. He alone made the industrial growth of the community possible, because he alone provided the condition precedent of industrial growth, the capital which makes industry possible by supplying it with the necessary plant.
This view of great fortunes leaves altogether aside the question whether they are good or bad for their possessors. That must be determined by a wholly different set of considerations. There is no inherent virtue in the possession of a small as opposed to a large income. It all depends upon the use made of it. The man in the parable who had the one talent was none the better because his fortune had remained small. The man who had the ten talents was none the worse because he bad multiplied his fortune tenfold. Both alike were judged by what they had done with the fortune with which they started. Great wealth has, of course, its special temptations just as poverty has, and it may easily be that they are far greater than the temptations of poverty. But it is the way in which the temptations are met, not the fact that they are there to be met, that deter- mines the character. Important, however, as these con- siderations are to the millionaire himself, they have no bearing upon the society in which he lives. He will be judged by the use he makes of that part of the money which constitutes his personal expenditure. But where the wealth is very great this is only a very small part of the whole, and what concerns the community is that far larger part which is spent not by him but for him. The fortune of Dives may have paid the wages of hundreds or thousands of workmen, and so have benefited the com- munity, though what formed his character and deter- mined his end was the use he made of the fraction out of which Lazarus might have been helped and was not. The regions of the moralist and the economist lie far apart, and neither benefits by their being confounded.
We have spoken so far of the millionaire, as it were, in isolation, and of his position in the world when he makes no special or conscious effort to use his vast wealth for public objects. But we must not be supposed to ignore the fact that many millionaires place before themselves a very high standard of public duty, and are most sincerely anxious to make a good use of their superfluity of wealth. They regard their riches as a trust, and desire not merely to do no harm with their money, but to use it for good ends. Mr. Carnegie has, we believe, always been actuated by this desire to regard his exceptional wealth as a trust, and has placed the provision of public libraries in great centres of population here and in America as the goal of his philanthropic ambition. In his case we do not hear of "Arabian Nights " expenditure on luxury or splendour, but of princely donations to the objects he has at heart. No fair-minded person could possibly desire to take him as an example of the selfish plutocrat.
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