THE BARNATO SUICIDE.
IT is not difficult to understand the great interest taken in the suicide of Mr. Barnato. Apart from his connec- tion with some thirty companies, all of which will feel more or less the impact of his death, his career had been watched with an interest which both in its degree and its cause has been a little unusual. He was the commonest of the new millionaires, and at one time it seemed possible that he might become the biggest. A great number of average Englishmen would like to become fabulously rich if they could become so by pure volition, and it really seemed as if Mr. Barnato had realised that ideal. He was a "plain man," if ever there was one, a little Jew from Petticoat Lane with no particular education, and except unusual financial courage, rising some times to Napoleonic audacity, no qualities beyond such as are common to the thousands whom he left behind him in the squalor of the Ghetto, and he rose to the top of the shadier financial world. He had been an adventurer in South Africa without a penny, odd man in a Kimberley circus, a pedlar in dia- monds, a small jobber in shares ; yet before he was forty he was reputed to be worth seventeen millions, and probably, if his shares in his own companies had main- tained their value, would really have possessed seven. He entertained with profusion, he built a palace for him- self, not yet finished, in Park Lane, and he was under- stood to be of all the speculators there the one who had most influence with the governing group at Pretoria. That seems to the lower English middle-class man im- mense success, and it was achieved by one who, to external seeming, was like a prosperous little tradesman, and who; whatever his capacities, had none of those which we associate with greatness. Anybody might be a "Barney Barnato," and as he got so far ahead of the ruck, everybody felt in- terested to see what would become of him. He might die a Peer or in a ditch, and the news that he did die a suicide, that the pressure of immense and risky transactions had broken down even his nerve, and worn out even his hope, fulness, came on the man in the street, to whom the Stock Exchange is something of a mystery, with a recognisable shock. That kind of career, then, was not so pleasant after all, but had drawbacks which even the hunter after wealth would not, if he fully recognised them, be quite willing to face, anxieties more keen and more imperative than those which beset the well-trodden ways. It is hardly worth while to make millions and die so,—that was the reflection, spoken or unspoken, of thousands who, while the great speculator was alive, had regarded his career with a feeling which, if it was not envy, was something exceedingly like that dirty passion.
We do not believe the assertion that rapid commercial fortunes are always obtained by fraud, and though we dislike monopolies, think a monopoly of diamonds, which was the original foundation of Mr. Rhodes's, Mr. Beit's, and Mr. Barnato's wealth, the least injurious to man- kind of all the Trusts by which the world is nowadays pillaged for the benefit of a few. We have no means of knowing whether Mr. Barnato ever stepped over the line which divides sharp trading from deception on investors—we fancy he had a conscience somewhere if it is true that his biggest feat of " promoting " was accomplished without the issue of any kind of prospectus, the promoter trusting entirely to the magic of his name—and we shall not therefore moralise about his career ; but we wish we could form a definite opinion whether the rise of the new millionaires is economically beneficial or not. That most of them are socially nuisances, because they promote the worship of wealth, and degrade the ideal of ambition, is undeniable ; but are they also nuisances from the economic point of view ? A great many keen-sighted people say they are, that mammoth fortunes are only made by taking enormous risks, that such risks turn both commerce and associated enterprise into gambling contrivances, and that the effect of millionaires' transactions is to take away from steady industry much of the profit which alone makes it attractive to the majority. Why keep cows if somebody else is to have most of the milk and all the cream ? Banks would do as reservoirs of capital just as well as millionaires, and would not have the same interest in crushing out small men, or the same means of establish- ing monopolies, which latter must be, by the very law of their being, deductions from the temptations to industry and the opportunities for it. If one man owns all the paper-mills, paper-making ceases to be one of the indus- tries on which the average man can embark. A sort of hopelessness is spread through the industrial world by such competition, and because one Rockefeller "goes in " for oil- dealing ten thousand families are shunted out of a profit- able and beneficial method of earning.a quiet living. There is and can be no answer to those arguments, but they do not quite cover the whole area of discussion. Big trees keep the sun from the corn, but big trees have their uses too. Experience seems to show that small men, whether acting singly or in combination, shrink from great risks, and that the courage without which no man becomes a millionaire is a very useful economic quality. No one, for instance, would deny that the work of building railways is highly useful to mankind, and while the railways of Europe were being built it was discovered by actual experiment that the millionaire contractors were the best to employ, that even if they charged extravagantly, their railways actually did get done, while the little people were pausing or fail- ing before unexpected obstacles. Suppose a bank has four millions, its directors cannot expend three in filling up Chat Moss, for they may be robbing their shareholders, who trust to their judgment and discretion. Bet the contractor with four millions can pitch three into the swamp, first,because they are his own, and secondly, because if his judgment prove faulty, he has still enough left for luxury or for beginning again. "If I lose a quarter of a million," said a considerable contractor, "over that in- fernal bridge, I'm ruined; but if Brassey loses it he'll just build it again. Thai's the use of Brassey";--and we do not see where the answer to that rough apology for the new millionaire is to be found. There are big, risky things to be done which are also useful things, and he is, occasionally at all events, wanted to do them. If only one could give millionaires consciences there would be a true place for them in the social fabric, even if they never gave away a penny, and were only intent on becoming billionaires. The trouble is that their consciences die, as those of most conquerors do, in the very magnitude of their transactions, which tempt them to act as if they were powers of Nature, and sweep on to their ends regardless alike of human misery and of right and wrong. There is a man in America, it is said, who crushes a dealer once a week by unfair underselling, and all the while, in his own judg- ment, is only keeping the price of his article so steady that production never slackens. Indeed, though we all assume that "Trusts," as we call them, or "combines," as the Americans call them, or "monopolies," as Elizabeth's courtiers called them, are pure evils, there are occasions on which even they have their uses. It is, we believe, a positive fact that the marvellous wealth of the Transvaal in coal is partially lost to mankind because the compe- tition of small leaseholders brings down the price till it is hardly worth while to dig.
The great danger from millionaires, we suspect, is one which many of our readers will pronounce fanciful, the danger indicated in Mr. Barnato's sad end. They tend, like despots, to go mad. The proportion of them in America who suffer from "nervous disease," or a habit of drinking contracted by efforts to keep down nervous ailment, is extraordinary, is, in fact, described by good medical authority as amounting to 50 per cent. That is always accounted for in newspapers as the result of nervous strain, of fierce anxiety, of overwork ; but we are by no means sure that u unlimited power is known of itself to overtax the brain, so an unlimited command of wealth does not weaken the controlling will. The desire to do something bigger still masters them, they do not get the help despots do from counsellors, and by and by their power of action, rapid and irresponsible action, gets too much for their mental strength. We do not care, it would not, indeed, be right, to give instances ; but we are greatly mistaken if many of the new millionaires are not showing a tendency to the special form of mental weakness which is called megalo- mania, or "lea grandeurs," a desire to make their houses, their yachts, their pleasaunces, even their activities, bigger than for their own objects it is necessary they should be made. They become too conscious of their own magni- ficence, are too completely their own pivots, think too largely and constantly of their own relation to the world around them. Madness lies in that direction, and we should not be at all surprised some day to see a mammoth millionaire loose in the world, and doing mis- chief on a scale which would compel more than one country to question whether the right to spend one's own money had not limits which the owner must be prevented by force from passing. Millionaires have already waged one private war, and we can conceive one or two directions in which their action, even if strictly within the moral law or dictated by active benevolence, might be productive of much disaster. There are two lines of Southey's which, if they are not poetry, contain in them a truth which all men possessed of irresponsible power—and that is the position of the millionaire in modern society—will do well to lay to heart :— "Fool to believe Less than Omniscience Omnipotence can wield."
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