BARON HIRSCH. B ARON HIRSCH, the Jewish contractor and financier, ,
who died on Tuesday at the age of sixty-five, was in many ways the very flower and perfect type of modern millionaires, and must have been, if only half the stories about him are true, a man of strangely composite character. He inherited a large fortune from his father, a Jewish Baron of Bavaria, he acquired another fortune by his marriage with Mdlle. Bischoffsheim, and be made quite early in life a third fortune in Belgium in his business as a banker, but he seems from the first to have determined to increase his wealth to colossal proportions. His opportunity came in 1866, thirty years ago, when he bought up the whole assets of an insolvent firm in order to obtain a concession which they had purchased, but were unable to use, of the right to make all the railways in the Balkans. Armed with this concession and his wealth Baron Hirsch " conciliated " Pashas and even the Sultan, he obtained extensions of time, he formed construction companies, he sold the unprofitable sections of the lines— or at least his enemies said so—to rival speculators, and he emerged, at the end of the vast transaction, with a fortune of from fifteen to twenty millions, most of it yielding an average of at least 7 per cent. He had con- trived in the course of his operations to quarrel with many of his own tribe, and their relentless libelling makes it difficult to ascertain exact facts ; but it is probable that he never stepped over the rather wide law by which such men are guided, and that the fierce enmity he excited was due much more to his exceptional success than to any wrongdoing of his own, or even to any ruin he had brought upon his opponents and his rivals. However that may have been, after his success he revealed other sides of his character than his business acumen, one being an amazing liberality, the other an equally amazing thirst for a grand position among the upper classes of Europe. Condemned by the aristocracy of Austria, and hated by the official magnates of Prussia, he determined to make himself a social grandee in many countries of Europe. He would always help a dynasty, throned or disinherited, and he did, it is known or believed, help several at " crises" when, in pursuit of their plans or in consequence of their debts, the members of royal families sorely needed help. According to the Daily News, he on one occasion paid £28,000 to clear an Orleanist Prince from a gambling debt; he is believed to have risked much more than that for other Princes ; he found the funds for re-establishing the throne in Spain, and in France he twice, if not oftener, sup- plied resources for what, though made in monarchical interests, were really revolutionary attempts. With the same social object in view, he purchased great houses and estates in many countries of Europe, and though personally a man of simple tastes, he maintained great establishments, invited Princes to stay with him, and set up racing-studs which by a miracle of good-fortune paid their expenses, or rather would have paid them but for another practice of the Baron. His magnificent ostenta- tion was surpassed by his magnificent generosity. He gave as probably no man in his lifetime has ever given, and he took trouble about his gifts, insisted on evidence that they were carefully used, and on occasion organised his charities as he had organised his railways. He spent three millions sterling, a mighty sum even for a millionaire, to settle poor Russian Jews in Argentina, and it is said his colonies are succeeding; he gave £600,000 to the poor Jews of Galicia, and £500,000 to the same race in Roumania ; he distributed all his winnings on the turf, which in one year amounted to £42,000, among the London hospitals ; he paid £1,000 a month regularly for the relief of the poor of Vienna, £1,000 more for the same purpose in Budapest, again £1,000 for the poor of Cracow, and yet again £1,000 for the same class in New York, making in all an annual benefaction of £48,000 distributed without distinction of creed among men the majority of whom he could never by possibility see. All this while his benevolence to individuals flowed forth in an endless stream, so that the sum total of his charities must have exceeded at least three millions and a half, all parted with by a man who loved money and money's worth exceedingly, who was believed, truly or falsely, to be ready to make it by every means tolerated by the laws which _govern Stock Exchanges, and whose idea of buying his way to the very top of society necessitated enormous and un- ceasing outlays for purposes that yielded, in cash, no kind of return.
It is difficult in presence of such benefactions not to admire, for generosity, whatever its motive, has in it something which proves largeness of mind, but yet there is something even in a Baron Hirsch, and a Baron Hirsch after he bad sated himself with money, which prevents admiration from becoming absolutely cordial. There is a trace of the East and its unrestrained and dangerous will even about such munificence. One thinks involun- tarily of the Roman patrician, who plundered provinces in order that he might feed some thousands of Roman electors, who doomed one thousand two hundred slaves to die in the arena in order that he might become popular, and who fed the while on peacocks' tongues and fish brought by relays of couriers, or of Wallenstein raising and paying great armies out of his own revenues, or of Fouquet dazzling Louis XIV. by a glitter which made Versailles seem ill-appointed. There is something bizarre about it all, as there was about the gloomy Duke of Friedland, something unconditioned, something which has in it a note of menace audible to the spirit if not to the senses. There is no conceivable reason, moral or in- tellectual, why any man should not accumulate twenty millions as well as twenty thousand pounds, provided only that the method of accumulation is justifiable and not injurious to the community ; but it is very difficult to forget entirely the evil a man so armoured in wealth might do, his irresponsibility, his entire freedom from most of the checks which constrain the statesman and, in modern times, the soldier. We do not much mind the elevation of the billionaire in the social world, indeed we are not sure that it is not the best way to load exceptional wealth with exceptional rank, and so bind its possessor in irresistible social withes; but we shudder to think of him as a political power raising troops as he does in Africa, preparing insurrections as Baron Hirsch was ready to do in France, buying legislatures as he has done in America, lending to Royal houses, bribing statesmen, as in the Panama incident, mastering, as he easily could, all the sources of information for the people. If there is hardly a limit to the good which a man with fifty millions might do, there is hardly a limit also to the mischief, to the disturbance which -he might pro- duce in politics, to the embarrassments he might bring upon a dynasty, or to the demoralisation he might spread through a province. We can see something of what he might do by what has recently occurred in South Africa, where a group of millionaires with insufficient political brain to guide them have almost succeeded in deflecting the course of British policy, and there is nothing to protect us from the chance of a millionaire with genius, or one with the motives attributed to Catiline. Nothing is sacred to ambition, and if there is one thing certain about million- aires it is that within the tribe are men in whom ambition is as strong a motive-power as it ever was among soldiers or among Kings. It is true that hitherto this ambition has been usually an ambition of social success, which seems to draw them as light draws moths, and which is comparatively harmless ; and it is also true that most millionaires are weighted by their wealth, and devote themselves exclusively to its management and increase, becoming, like the one said at this moment to be the largest possessor of personalty in Britain, the quietest and least obtrusive of mankind. But that will not last for ever ; indeed " society " has had no power over the most conspicuous of English millionaires. Some day or other we shall see in some European State a millionaire like Baron Hirsch with a mischievous idea in his head, and carrying it out with palpable success. The nations will then have to decide whether they muatnot limit the money- power as they have in the West gradually limited every other power, whether, in fact, if millionaires are reser- voirs of energy, they must not be. guarded like other reservoirs from the dangers of over-spill and leakage. We have had, it must be remembered, but fifty years of such men in the modern world as yet, and have still to watch what the much greater accumulators whom the next century will produce may do. Twice already in history the world has thrown up classes whose wealth, as compared with the wealth around them, was of the dreamy kind, and it is curious that the names which have survived in the general memory, Crassus and Lucullns among the patricians of Rome, and Fouquet among the Farmers- General of France, have not been exactly names which the wise agree to esteem. We honour the charity of Baron Hirsch, but we must not forget that in the thirty years of his active life, the sum he contributed, large as it seems, was not equal to one year's revenue of the charities of London, supplied one hardly knows whence or by whom.
Previous page
