THE AMERICAN WORSHIP OF MILLIONA TRES. T HERE is one disadvantage
in the modern substitution of wealth for birth as the grand claim to social dis- tinction, of which social philosophers do not make quite enough. Birth is incommunicable, and can never, there- fore, excite an imitative spirit in a whole community. A Brahmin caste may by its mere existence and acceptance shut out something of hope from men not born into it, just as the existence of Kings shuts out some forms of political rivalry, and therefore of political effort, or it may produce, in some countries it does produce, an injurious tendency to servility. It can never, however, develop the passion of imitation, never become an object of desire, and therefore never beget in the millions an injurious or artificial ideal. No effort will give a . man ancestors, and honour paid to a few on account of their ancestry can never have any widespread influence in debasing society. Honour paid to money can. Every man either can make money, or thinks he could make it if circumstances were favourable, and is therefore affected by any honour paid to the rich merely on account of their millions. The influence may extend through every grade, and a whole community become affected, as, according to the Nation, is already the case within the United States. There, where birth can hardly be said to exist, and there is no acknowledged rank, and political leaders do not grow, their natural power being caught in the minute meshes of the Federal system, and character is con- cealed by a rather dull uniformity in its manifestations, the millionaire tends rapidly to become the aristocrat. He, says the Nation, is the grand object of interest and of imi- tation. He has the 'mysterious fascination" which in England, and England alone, attaches to rank. He is the man of whom there is an ideal picture in the general mind, who is expected somehow to be different from other beings of his kind, and who is, therefore, watched and reported and admired and condemned as if he were of separate mould, or as if, says our shrewd contemporary, men thought that by careful attention to his ways they could learn his secret, and themselves grow into millionaires. His movements are often reported, his character is constantly discussed, and—this is the true climax—he is left nearly free, American opinion, which demands of all others a certain conformity to usage, positively liking the millionaire to do queer things with his money, "if only the public may hear all about it." The instinctive proclivity to admiration which no man, however you train him, can altogether escape, is in America expended on the millionaire. When, says the Nation, New York was informed that Mr. John D. Rockefeller, the dictator of the Standard Oil Company, the successful Ring which has monopolised petroleum, and of which we recently gave an account, had accumulated a fortune of £25,800,000, the great city, the third in the world in population, and probably the second in wealth, experienced a thrill of pleasurable excitement, and felt that for one day at least it had been enlivened by in- teresting news.
If the Nation is well informed—and certainly the newspapers of the Union give us no reason to doubt the accuracy of its statements—it is difficult to ques- tion that one of the old fears for democracy was well founded, and that with the decease of all other sources of distinction, it is money which has come to honour in the great Republic; it is money in great masses which almost all men in America in their secret day-dreams raise into an ideal. It is money, too, in itself, for though we should fully admit that money in masses is power, and therefore good or evil according to the use made of it, and though one or two of the mammoth millionaires are spending great sums upon the encouragement of art, and the collection of rich museums and mighty libraries, it is not for these things that popular admiration, and even a kind of affection, go out towards them, but only for their possession of the cash. More is said of Jay Gould, a man believed, truly or falsely, to be an unjust dealer and capable of bribery, than about Mr. Astor, who simply takes his rents, and gives out of them liberally to certain public institutions. The caste—the sixteen who are, as it were, Dukes, and the forty-four others who may be called Peers—have as yet done little to merit their position except possess ; and for what they have done are not honoured so much as for what they have. That is not a noble worship, even if we compare it with the worship of birth, which at least rests upon a theory, or of rank, which at least assumes some previous service performed by the family possessing it ; and it is hard not to think that it must ultimately degrade the community which yi6lds to it. All Americans, we are told, are learning to idealise million- aires, the very servants quoting service with them as proofs of their own merit, —that is, in fact, to idealise money. It is hard to do that, to get the glory of money into the very imagination, the thirst for money into the very soul,. and not to grow debased, to subordinate intellectual aims and to let spiritual aims die out. It is not for nothing that the founders of creeds have condemned the covetous man, or that popular opinion, the result of ages of experience, despises the avaricious one. The teachers and the populace alike have detected that the pursuit is too absorbing and too earthy, that while it engrosses the mind no nobleness will grow, and that when it is the vice of the community, the strain, the painful strain, towards higher things must perforce cease. Whether millionaires are economically a gain or a loss to the community, we confess we do not greatly care. We do not our- selves see why Mr. Rockefeller should, merely on account of the sums he holds, be any more injurious than the London and Westminster Bank, which commands even greater capital than he does, and fancy that one millionaire may be a mere coffer, another a reservoir constantly filling fertilising streams, and a third a sort of bog, holding vast bodies of good water to no end except the generation of miasma. That is unimportant ; it is the elevation of the millionaire into an ideal, which is the picture drawn by the Nation, that alarms us for the future of Americans. If that is the point they have reached after their hundred years of climbing to the stars, there is not much hope in Republican institutions, none at all of their developing higher standards of life, or teaching the effete nations of Europe how to unite plain living and high thinking. Mr. Rockefeller an ideal ! We prefer even Prince Bismarck, or, for that matter, Mr. Dillon, who does at least profess, and probably believes, that the impelling motive of all he does and says—most of which we condemn—is to raise his country towards a higher level of existence among the nations.
We shall be told that we are too pessimist, that the majority of men in all countries seek for money, and that it is only the gigantic scale on which everything is conducted in the New World which makes their millionaires in any way remarkable. It is not so. Not only do we not specially decry American millionaires, but we think their quality of mammoths the most redeeming feature in the worship paid them. Money in those huge aggregates ha:- in it such potentialities, is so entirely beyond what any man can spend upon self-indulgence, that we can under- stand that the desire for it is often another form of the vague desire for power which stirs the hearth not only of the ambitious but of the philanthropic. It is not the million- aire, but the millionaire as the popular ideal, who arouses our apprehensions. Men desire money in Europe, and sometimes, when they have anything to get, worship millionaires ; but they do not make of them ideals. They are not thirsting to be themselves cellars of cash, nor are they inclined to bow down before pecuniary reservoirs. The tendency, in fact, is the other way,—to hold "mere money" in a certain intellectual scorn ; to pander to the Socialist dislike of the very rich man, to fall pros- trate, if at all, before rank, and military success, and intellect of a certain showy and advertising kind. The secret wishes of men are many, but those who desire to be as the Nitrate King, and who watch him:to catch if they may his secret of success, are certainly not the community. The majority in all grades thirst for com- petence, as they reckon competence, in order to be free ; a few desire great wealth as a tangible proof to them- selves of their own success ; one or two seek mammoth fortunes from the mere pleasure of the pyramid-builder, half vanity, half desire to do what has not been done before ; but all set an ideal before themselves other than the money. Not even in France are the millionaires raised into ideals, while in Germany they are loathed ; in Italy, where men quit business on £200 a year, they are disregarded ; in Austria they are nothing, being crushed by the reverence for birth ; and in England they are—what shall we say ? defended, with apologies for the defence, as people who are useful in their way. That the admiration for wealth—mere wealth—grows here and in all European countries, we do not deny, because all other forms of irresponsible power are dying, and men long for power less fettered than the power derived from a popular vote ; .but we are far, as yet, from what the Nation declares to be the American position. Let us hope that it exaggerates, though so many symptoms seem to confirm its words ; but if it does not, then the Republic which should be ahead of us all is rushing faster than the Monarchies along a path which leads only to the degradation of the race. Better any deity than Belial, if man is to advance, even if it be so absurd a one as is embodied in the English conception of aristocracy. That does at least impose some obligations ; but what are the obligations that the worshipper of Jay Gould in his heart respects ? Not even the keeping of a bargain.
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