ROADS TO IMPORTANCE.
IT is not very easy to become a person of importance in England. The old roads, indeed, are open—through service to the State, either in Parliament, or in the field, or occasionally in diplomacy, or through great success at the Bar, or in the Church—but the new roads are very few. The man who wine his way to the Cabinet, or defeats an army in the field, or carries through a great negotiation on which the eyes of the country are fixed, becomes, no doubt, known to the whole people, has his movements thenceforward recorded, finds his opinion highly regarded, and receives a great amount of very flattering deference. People do not exactly crumble their bread if they sit next him at dinner, as Sydney Smith said he did if he sat next an Archbishop, but they do speak as to a superior, do court his notice, do display great readiness to perform for him small services. Men make way for an Archbishop or a Lord Chancellor ; and we do not doubt that Mr. Goschen when he reached the Cabinet, Lord Kitchener after Omdurman, or Lord Pauncefote when be returned from the Peace Congress, perceived that he had in some way risen well above the crowd. The eagerness to see such a man, to hear him, to obtain from him courteous notice by service, soon teaches him that he has really become a man of mark, one who is somebody among millions, whose presence creates a slight but perceptible stir and flutter. The new roads, however, to a position of that kind are not many. Lord Rosebery in his speech of Saturday about railways said that in America the president of a great "road" received as much deference as a Dake in England, travelled in chariots to which no Duke could aspire, and was practically " almost despotic within his sphere." Other observers have made the same remark about railroad presidents, bank presidents, presidents of the greater " combines," and " bosses " in New York, Philadelphia, and California ; and we have heard it repeated on the Continent about millionaires, who, when recognised there, are treated almost like crowned heads ; but it would be difficult to point to men in the same position in England. Very great officers in the Army receive in military society something of that deference, and we have been assured that a man with three millions is in the City considered very great indeed, is courted obsequiously at public dinners, and might do very odd things without exciting hostile comments; but the attention paid to either is confined to a circle, and he excites no sensation that can be called national. He did at the end of the last century, as witness the flutter
caused by " the Nabob," but he does not now. The great industrial chiefs are little known except in localities or in their special trades, and a man may control an important commercial fleet without being a very great man, except in the port he chiefly patronises. The mightiest millionaire
outside the centres of business is very much like anybody else, though he must have inside his waistcoat a singular sense of power, and lesser millionaires are tritons only in special ponds. Mr. Rhodes just before the Raid came, perhaps, nearest of all the men of our day to being a person of real importance, though not a statesman, a soldier, or a diplomatist, and a position not unlike his was accorded to the head of the Barings, and perhaps of one or two other firms, and is habitually accorded to the bead of the Rothschilds, who on the Continent ranks rather with Princes than ordinary noblesse. Importance in the highest degree is, how- ever, hardly attainable in this country. Society is too old, too compact, too much dominated by an aristocratic tradition. There are too many of us, and our interests are too varied. Influence is, of course, attainable, sometimes of a very far-reaching kind, and those who possess it find many to worship them and defer to them, and fetch and carry for them; but importance in its truest sense, importance such as accrues to the few men who rule, is scarcely to be obtained, at least over the whole area of English life. Who has it ? Not the railway chairman outside his railway ; not the bank chairman beyond the circle of his customers; hardly even the successful promoter, unless, indeed, he is supposed, as was supposed at one time of Mr. Hudson, to be able to distribute wealth. Within limited circles no doubt there are such men who receive, and sometimes exact, an amazing amount of deference, greater decidedly than that paid to rank, because less regulated by a well-understood etiquette, and perhaps also because enforced by greater pressure; but no such circle covers the whole nation. No one without rank is so well known that an account of him when he is mentioned is surplusage or impertinence. Very big Englishmen indeed acknowledge when they arrive in London that they have "found themselves" not quite plea- santly, though they assume an air of acquiescence.
We wonder whether the desire to be of importance which sometimes manifests itself so strongly among the suc- cessful is a bad ambition or not. It would seem at first sight to be only a modern phase of the desire for power, or the lust for fame, which from the earliest period have marked very many considerable, and even noble, minds. The wish to be respected most be right, and to be important is only to be a little more respected than usual, and by a wider circle. We suspect, however, that there is a difference, and that the thirst for importance is a lower impulse than the older passions. Men desire power in order that they may do something with it, which something cannot be wholly self-regarding ; and fame in order that that which they have done may be widely recognised; but they desire importance chiefly that they may be important, may be bigger, in fact, than they naturally are. The desire is self-regarding entirely, and therefore apt to be ignoble. The consciousness of power begets pride, the con- sciousness of fame generates vanity, but the consciousness of importance fosters pomposity, and that last product is by far the lowest of the three. To be famous is the desire of the statesman, the soldier, the poet, or the author ; to be impor- tant the desire of the millionaire, the trader, or the industrial chief. These latter may be equally useful to the community, but work which is paid for in money is seldom the highest work, and the important are usually lower men than the powerful or the famous. The president of, say, the Illinois Railway will smile at the suggestion, but Oliver Wendell Holmes will be remembered when he is forgotten, as Abraham Lincoln and General Grant will outlive them both. That is not the test ? Then what is the test by which we should measure, not indeed the greatness of men, but the impress their greatness has made upon their fellows' minds ?
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