THE MITLTI-MILLIONAIRE.
ACORRESPONDENT of the Daily Mail has been exercising himself about "a new peril,"—the man who has more money than he can conveniently spend, or, as he has been called, the multi-millionaire. When, it may be asked by the way, was that word coined? It was not very long ago that a millionaire was looked upon as something of a rarity ; to-day the possessor of a mere million goes almost unnoticed. But the man with a million to spend every year cannot go unnoticed if he spends it, so huge are the gifts which he is compelled to make if he is to get rid of his money and not to "die disgraced," as Mr. Carnegie is supposed to have put it. It is, indeed, the sheer difficulty he finds in spending instead of accumulating his wealth that compels the attention and publicity which just possibly he might like to avoid.
A year or two ago, if we remember rightly, there was published a novel of which the ingenious plot was woven round the difficulty the hero had in getting rid of a minion pounds in twelve months. He had to spend the million pounds, and account for it, in order to come into possession of a much larger sum. There were limitations imposed, of course ; for example, he was not allowed to give away any money; he might not bet or gamble heavily ; if he built, the building had to be finished within the year. There were other things he might not do, but what they were does not much matter; at all events, the writer of the story made out a very good case. The man with the fuillion discovered all sorts of pitfalls. When he betted or gambled, for instance, he in- variably won large sums of money, which distracted him ; but of course his greatest difficulty was that he might not give anything away. He had to buy in the ordinary markets, and he found it only just possible to spend the money in the time.
But if the disability to give is removed from the path of the multi-millionaire anxious to benefit permanently the com- munity to which he belongs, in what way would he spend it to the best advantage? One haunting danger he must be always guarding against,—the danger of pauperising those to whom he gives money. If he makes a community less anxious to acquire by its dun effort something which it desires, he dis- courages local energy and talent; and of course those are precisely what he wishes to develop and encourage. In certain directions, however, be would seem to be on safe ground. It is difficult to see how a community can be harmed by being provided with increased facilities for the education of its members. If, therefore, like Mr. Carnegie, the multi-millionaire decides to present free libraries to towns which do not already possess them, so that no embryo Gibbon or Edison shall be prevented from writing, or inventing, by lack of means to buy books; or if he decides, like Mr. Rocke- feller, to present huge sums to educational establishments, he can hardly do harm, and he may do immense good. But it is when he leaves the attempt to improve the mental well-being of thousands of men and women, and tackles the much more attractive and much more dangerous problem of improving their physical well-being, that the spender of millions of pounds finds deep difficulty before him. There, to begin with, is the problem, never yet solved, of the hospitals. The hospitals want more and more money every year ; now and then there comes a year, as has happened twice quite recently, when the rich men and the public have been asked to make, and have made, a great effort to set the hospitals on their legs once and for all. It is, seemingly, hopeless to expect that this will ever be done under present conditions, and with new discoveries and new methods of treat- ment being adopted year by year,—or perhaps not adopted for lack of capital. To take one instance only of a new discovery, the benefits of which cannot be distributed as widely as they might be if there were more money to spend, there is the Finsen lamp cure for lupus. It costs £10,000 to establish and endow a Finsen lamp, and the cure, up to a certain stage of the disease, is practically certain. With a sufficient number of Finsen lamps at their disposal the doctors could burn lupus out of every afflicted man, woman, and child at present suffering from that hideous disease; but there are not enough Pinson lamps, and the sufferers have to wait their turn for months and years, knowing that each day brings nearer the stage when the disease cannot be cured. That is a ghastly enough idea ; especially ghastly, of course, because the cure for the disease has been discovered, whereas the doctors are still groping in half-darkness for certain cures for such diseases as cancer and consumption. Could n0, then, the multi-millionaire step in here and make himself, so to speak, the physician of the nation; could he not endow great Colleges of Medicine devoted to research and experi- ment in the case of diseases of which the cure is still un- known? He could do so, certainly; but would he be doing good? It is at least questionable whether it would be a satis- factory state of affairs if everybody could be doctored free. Even as things are to-day, it is doubtful whether a certain proportion of the money subscribed by the public for the upkeep of hospitals does not find its way into wrong channels,— that is, it is not an unknown thing for persons to take ad- vantage of free treatment at the hospitals when they can perfectly well afford to pay doctors' fees. It would do no good in the end if such a state of things became the rule instead of the exception. And, again, the multi-millionaire thinking of endowing great schools of research might ask himself, in view of the discoveries of the past, whether there might not come a time when those schools, having fulfilled the object for which they were founded—say the discovery of the cause and the cure of cancer—would turn their energies to research in what he might consider wrong directions. They might make work for themselves,—one of the most pernicious forms of extravagance.
There is at least one other channel into which a man anxious to spend money well might be tempted to pour the stream of wealth, and that is private charity. Every man of wealth and position receives begging-letters, and knows, too, that occasionally they are the outcome of genuine want and distress. Every one, again, is familiar with those cases of poverty in which just a little more money—the very rich man would perhaps hardly believe how little it is—would make all the difference between happiness and misery. The writer heard of one such case a short time ago, in which it was only the unexpected arrival of a chance sovereign which prevented a lady from taking her three children to the workhouse. Yet she had somehow managed to conceal her poverty from her neighbours, and it was only by chance that it was discovered that, unable to obtain needlework, she had lived for days practically on nothing in order that the children might have food. Such cases are nearly always those of gentlefolk, and are, of course, familiar to every clergyman's wife. Could
not the multi-millionaire help P. Re might, and probably he already does; indeed, we believe that if the cheque-Woke of most rich Englishmen were open to inspection it would be found that sums of money were given away in private charity of this kind to an extent wholly unsuspected by their nearest friends. But there is one thing which is quite clear, and that is that no single man could spend a million a year in private charity safely and well. Somewhere, somehow, the giving away of so large a sum would check the necessity and the desire to work ; the money, that is, would be ill-spent because, instead of encouraging industry, it would purchase indolence.
"Glorious gifts and foundations," wrote Bacon, "are like sacrifices without salt; and but the painted sepulchres of alms, which soon will putrefy and corrupt inwardly." Is there, then, any real danger in the accumulation of great riches in the hands of one man ? Can the multi- millionaire be regarded in any sense as "a new peril" ? Probably not. In the first place, the man who has amassed large sums of money himself seldom or never squanders it. He knows its value too well ; he must be a good business man to have become rich, and good business men do not play ducks and drakes with what they have hardly earned. With his heir, of course, the case might be different. The story is told of John Mytton, who succeeded to a very large property in his minority, that he was anxious to sell a certain estate. A friend tried to dissuade him from doing so, on the ground that it had been so long in the family. "How long P" he asked. "Five hundred years," he was told. "The devil it has ! " he exclaimed; "then it is high time it went out of it." But this kind of spendthrift is not a public danger ; his money merely slides back into the hands of those who know how to use it better. There would seem, indeed, to be only one dangerous form of multi-millionaire, and that is the man who uses his wealth for political objects. He can, or he can try to, smash a Constitution. He can organise and he can bribe. He can make men rich or poor. But he cannot do so everywhere, and he is not a danger to a State possessing a sound Legislature and governed by sound men. He might be a danger, perhaps, to a ring-fence com- munity such as South Africa contained before the war, but he could never be a danger in a community better organised. The best men—the men who alone could forward or thwart his political projects—would be neither allured nor frightened • by his money.
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