THE FASCINATION OF MONEY.
PERHAYS the most noteworthy fact about the list of mil- lionaires we published last week was the interest it excited. People who rarely read anything spelled over that long, closely- printed column of names and figures as if they expected somehow to find a notice within it of some legacy coming to themselves, quoted the amounts with a sort of smacking of the intellectual lips, and in many cases took great pains to recall hazy memories of the will-maker's career. The Times, which has an instinct for subjects interesting to the well-to-do, republished the list in the driest form without adding our comments or making any of its own, judging, and as we imagine judging rightly, that no bareness of outline or difficulty of perusal would diminish the attraction of such a catalogue of the rich. We ven- ture to say the list obtained more readers than the best essay on politics we ever issued, and that if we could or would publish a similar one of the living rich, beginning with the fifteen or sixteen peers who receive I100,000 a year and upwards from land and "town lots," our publishers would be unable to meet that day's demand. Nor is the source of this interest in a dry column of statistics very far to seek. The figures arouse the passion of day-dreaming in one of its commonest and, we fear, most unhealthy forms. With thousands of Englishmen, and particularly, we fear, of educated Englishmen, money in any form, and particularly in the form of masses of capital vested in one man's hand, excites the imagination as scarcely anything else does, sets them off dreaming about the grand things they would do if only they were to inherit or to acquire in any swift way one of those splendid fortunes. Great estates do not attract them in the same way, for great estates yield their returns slowly, and involve duties, and imply establishments ; but with a fortune in money even of a quarter of a million, what might they not do for themselves, or their relatives, or their friends, or their children ? They could make everybody happy—they do it in novels—and yet be richer than anybody themselves, a consoling consideration which makes liberality less irksome. Then, no one, how- ever wise or self-restrained, is quite free from the liability to Alnaschar dreams, from lingering hopes of the full gratification of his master desire, be it to acquire power, to maintain a con- sistent splendour, to surround himself with a court—a very frequent form of secret weakness—or only to play Mmenas on a mighty scale. The most common dreams, however, are dreams of action ; and the dreamers may be comforted by the thought that, in all human probability, they are dreams merely,—that they would do none of all the fine things which wealth, when still to be acquired, seems to render so easy. If there is one thing invariable about English millionaires, it is their inaction in such employment of their wealth. None of them use it for any well defined purpose external to themselves, whether good or evil. Not one makes of it an instrument of political power, though really great means, if skilfully and unscrupulously employed, might within certain limits acquire power in England as well as in America. Not one, or at all events not one male, executes any mighty work for the people, gives London water, or rebuilds Manchester, or turns a smaller city into an ideal munici- pality,—all of them tasks a man with Mr. Brassey's fortune, a strong will, and thirty years of life before him might reasonably attempt. Not one has attempted to solve a problem like peasant proprietorship, or to buy up an Irish county and see how perpetuity of tenure would work, or to endow a new Church militant, or to do anything on the grandly experimental scale. Not one has yet attempted to do mischief on any gigantic scale and with a view only to the enjoyment of his own whim, though we could conceive of mischief—such, for example, as the conversion of islands into hunting-grounds—which it is quite within the range of British imagination to devise and of money to accomplish. The wealth seems of itself to restrict instead of enfranchising the imagination, to diminish instead of developing originality, whether for good or evil. It affects, to begin with, the owner's belief in the power of money. The straggling professional man looks on a quarter of a million as Aladdin's lamp, but if he had it he would in ten years wonder why he could do so little. His first emotion would be a desire to make his money quite safe ; his next, unless he was abnormally an-English, to possess a " place ;" and his next, to be rid of the worry of careful supervision. When he had obeyed those three instincts, he would find that he had invested his money — the purchase of land included — at about 31 per cent., that he had two establishments to keep up, that he had lost his old scale of calculation about all expenses, and that the /8,000 a year he was receiving was a very moderate income, oat of which if he gave away a tenth he would be very liberal indeed. The idea of giving on a great scale would frighten him, as it frightens Vice-Chancellor 'Matins, who on Tuesday decided, no doubt wisely in the case before him, that
great gifts were so improper that a solicitor who drew up the deeds conveying them ought to be soundly fined for lending his skill to assist in such deplorable acts of weakness. Until he reached a very high figure indeed, the sense of wealth would not come to him, and even when he had reached that figure there would remain the reluctance to part with capital, and a new sense of the difficulty of doing anything great, that is scenically great, out of the surplus income. Two millions will accomplish much, but a year's surplus, say of .£40,000, will do but very little. The interests of ordinary life being gone—for after all, it is difficult to work at anything except politics when the money payment for the work has lost all meaning—he would have to discover a new one, and would find it either in accumula- tion, or in building, or in buying, the latter a taste which can become a sovereign passion. The Medicean habit of mind would come upon him like a cloud, and he would find that of all his dreams not one could be realised without immense self-sacri- fice, which he would have rather less energy to make than in days when he dreamed of making it. And yet he would not be changed, but would only feel the old fascination of money in a new and slightly less imaginative form.
We are inclined to believe that this fascination of money, this desire for it as an instrument of power, increases immensely with the spread of culture and of what we call civilisation—that so far from its being felt mainly by vulgar minds, it is affecting power- ful and liberal minds far more deeply. They realise the 'night of cash much more strongly than their inferiors. You can mark the truth of that sentence in the writings of men like Beckford, of " Anastasia° " Hope, of Edgar Poe—a born millionaire who never had a shilling—of Ben Jonson, of the heaps of modern writers who use wealth as the instrument of bliss. This spirit is not sordid, it is not even mean ; but it is earthy, and it begins to be injurious. Tell a group of State servants, all of the higher and more intellectual class, that the modern hunger for salaries is all wrong, that honourable poverty, real poverty, is the best condition for the servants of the people, and they look at you and answer you as if you were teaching that an officer or an official should be debarred from all righteous enjoyments,—are, in fact, not so much disaffected to the theory as hurt and chagrined at its production. It hits them like an insult. Yet when Gibbon first made the remark, it was welcomed as being wise and with a ring in it of true nobility. So strong is the fascination, that it is positively discrediting the learned professions, which, as the knowing men will remark, in a gravely monitorial tone, are " now-a-days traps for the inexperienced." Caste feeling is still strong, and profes- sional men hesitate to bring up their sons "to business," and re- sort to the whimsical compromise of encouraging them to adopt any profession except their own,—" because that you see, John, is quite full,"—bat the class most enfranchised from caste bondage, the higher aristocracy, stretches out its hands for the glittering prize with a somewhat repulsive avidity. It is the fashion to hail the announcement that a Duke's son deals in tea as a sign of progress—we have hailed it as such ourselves—and no doubt it is a sign of increasing clearness of social perception, of a disposition to be more realistic in judging of the gains of life. But that obsolete old prejudice which compelled a noble to serve the State, and the State only, to take reward only from the Sing, to be a poor officer, or a poorer clergyman, or a shivering attache, rather than a wealthy trader, had in it something of nobility too, some- thing in many cases higher, though also in many cases lower, than our modern hardness of realism. The man who, having to earn his living, is ashamed to earn it in a shop is an ass ; but the man who prefers /300 a year in the Civil Service, say, or the Army, to 15,000 a year in trade, may often make a choice far more inspiriting for his own higher nature. The gradual decline of the professions in the social scale will not be an unmixed good, tending as it must to the development of that fascination of money which is already pulverising prejudice, and will end by overbearing intellectual conviction. The change of manners under which an aristocrat will be thought to lower him- self by turning physician, or barrister, or journalist, but not to lower himself by selling goods, because the goods may yield a fortune, and the profession can only yield an income, will not, we suspect, be unmixed with evil, and it is immediately at hand. It will certainly injure the State, which will be driven to rely year by year more on the "competition wallah," the esurient man of new culture thirsting for money ; and it may injure the community, which must fall every day more under the influence of money- makers,—that is, of the men who need have only the faculties necessary for business success, invaluable faculties, no doubt, but not those which made of two petty Mediterranean States two
sources of perpetual light to succeeding mankind. Sir A. Helps, with all his worship of Mr. Brassey—a most favourable specimen of the character—would hardly aver that he could have made Athens or turned back the Jews from the worship of any but the one God, feats accomplished for mankind, the one by a minute caste of pleasure- loving slaveholders, the other by an Arab aristocrat bred a cour- tier in the most tyrannical and dissolute of Oriental Courts. That seems to us the worst of the fascination of money. We do not believe the millionaires do much harm, or spoil society, or deprave taste, or ruin the poor, or even increase the chasm between poor and rich—people must be more on a level to hate each other hard —but we do believe that the fascination of their position does in an ever-increasing ratio tend to draw the strongest of mankind from the service of the State, from literature, from scientific speculation, into the pursuit of wealth, usually given to such men only when they let their lower faculties prevail. Euclid in our days would not have thought out geometric truth for mankind. He would have made five millions by building works which an average engineer could have built as well.
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