When I was young, and millionaires were a rarity in my unassuming town, a local divine fluttered our habitual serenity by preaching an impassioned sermon upon a local Crœsus. He was but a moderate sort of Crœsus, a man of kindly nature and simple vanities, whom his townspeople had been in the habit of regarding with mirthful and tolerant eyes. Therefore it was a bit startling to hear—from the pulpit—that this amiable gentleman was “a crown of glory upon the city’s brow,” and that his name was honoured “from the Golden Gate to New Jersey’s silver sands.” It was more than startling to be called upon to admire the meekness with which he trod the common earth, and the unhesitating affability with which he bowed to all his acquaintances, “acknowledging every salute of civility or respect,” because, “like another Frederick II of Prussia,” he felt his fellow-citizens to be human beings like himself. This admission into the ranks of humanity, however gratifying to our self-esteem, was tempered by so many exhortations to breathe our millionaire’s name with becoming reverence, and was accompanied by such a curious medley of Bible texts, and lists of distinguished people whom the millionaire had entertained, that we hardly knew where we stood in the order of creation.
Copies of this sermon, which was printed “in deference to many importunities,” are now extremely rare. Reading its yellow pages, we become aware that the rites and ceremonies with which one generation worships its golden calf differ in detail from the rites and ceremonies with which another generation performs this pious duty. The calf itself has never changed since it was first erected in the wilderness,—the original model hardly admitting of improvement. Ruskin used to point out gleefully a careless couple who, in Claude’s picture of the adoration of the golden calf, are rowing in a pleasure boat on a stream which flows mysteriously through the desert. Indifferent to gold, uninterested in idolatry, this pair glide smoothly by; and perhaps the river of time bears them through centuries of greed and materialism to some hidden haven of repose.
Saint Thomas Aquinas defines the sin of avarice as a “desire to acquire or retain in undue measure, beyond the order of reason.” Possibly no one has ever believed that he committed this sin, that there was anything unreasonable in his desires, or undue in their measure of accomplishment. “Reason” is a word of infinite flexibility. The statisticians who revel in mathematical intricacies tell us that Mr. John D. Rockefeller’s income is one hundred dollars a minute, and that his yearly income exceeds the lifetime earnings of two thousand average American citizens, and is equivalent to the income of fifty average American citizens sustained throughout the entire Christian era. It sounds more bewildering than seductive, and the breathless rush of a hundred dollars a minute is a little like the seven dinners a day which Alice in Wonderland stands ready to forego as a welcome punishment for misbehaviour. But who shall say that a hundred dollars a minute is beyond the “order of reason”? Certainly Saint Thomas did not refer to incomes of this range, inasmuch as his mind (though not without a quality of vastness) could never have embraced their possibility.
On the other hand, Mr. Rockefeller is responsible for the suggestion that Saint Paul, were he living to-day, would be a captain of industry. Here again a denial is as valueless as an assertion. It is much the habit of modern propagandists—no matter what their propaganda may be—to say that the gap between themselves and the Apostles is merely a gap of centuries, and that the unlikeness, which seems to us so vivid, is an unlikeness of time and circumstance, not of the inherent qualities of the soul. The multiplication of assets, the destruction of trade-rivalry, formed—apparently—no part of the original apostolic programme. If the tent-maker of Tarsus coveted wealth, he certainly went the wrong way about getting it. If there was that in his spirit which corresponded to the modern instinct for accumulation, he did great injustice to his talents, wasting his incomparable energy on labours which—from his own showing—left him too often homeless, and naked, and hungry. Even the tent-making, by which he earned his bread, appears to have been valuable to him for the same reason that the bladebone of mutton was valuable to Andrew Marvell,—not so much because it filled his stomach, as because it insured his independence.
“L’amour d’argent a passé en dogme de morale publique,” wrote George Sand, whose words have now and then a strange prophetic ring. The “peril of prosperity,” to borrow President Hibben’s alliterative phrase, was not in her day the menace it is in ours, nor has it ever been in her land the menace it has been in ours, because of the many other perils, not to speak of other interests and other ideals, filling the Frenchman’s mind. But if George Sand perceived a growing candour in the deference paid to wealth, to wealth as an abstraction rather than to its possessor, a dropping of the old hypocrisies which made a pretence of doubt and disapproval, a development of honoured and authorized avarice, she was a close observer as well as a caustic commentator.
The artlessness of our American attitude might disarm criticism were anything less than public sanity at stake. We appeal simply and robustly to the love of gain, and we seldom appeal in vain. It is not only that education has substituted the principle of getting on for less serviceable values; but we are bidden to purchase marketable knowledge, no less than marketable foodstuffs, as an easy avenue to fortune. If we will eat and drink the health-giving comestibles urged upon us, our improved digestions will enable us to earn larger incomes. If we will take a highly commended course of horse-shoeing or oratorio-writing, prosperity will be our immediate reward. If we will buy some excellent books of reference, they will teach us to grow rich.
“There are one thousand more millionaires in the United States than there were ten years ago,” say the purveyors of these volumes. “At the present rate of increase, the new millionaires in the next few years will be at least twelve hundred. Will you be one of them?” There is a question to ask a young American at the outset of his career! There is an incentive to study! And by way of elucidating a somewhat doubtful situation, the advertisers go on to say: “Typical men of brains are those who have dug large commercial enterprises out of a copper mine, or transformed buying and selling into an art. You must take a leaf from the experience of such men if you would hold positions of responsibility and power.”
Just how the reference books—chill avenues of universal erudition—are going to give us control of a copper mine or of a department store is not made clear; but their vendors know that there is no use in offering anything less than wealth, or, as it is sometimes spelled, “success,” as a return for the price of the volumes. And if a tasteful border design of fat money-bags scattering a cascade of dollars fails to quicken the sales, there is no tempting the heart of man. Our covetousness is as simple and as easily played upon as was the covetousness of the adventurers who went digging for buried treasures on the unimpeachable authority of a soothsayer. The testimony offered in a New Jersey court that a man had bought some farmland because the spirit of a young negro girl had indicated that there was money hidden beneath the soil; the arraignment before a Brooklyn magistrate of two Gipsy women, charged with stealing the cash they had been commissioned to “bless,” are proof, if proof were needed, that intelligence has not kept pace with cupidity.
The endless stories about messenger boys and elevator men who have been given a Wall Street “tip,” and who have become capitalists in a day, are astonishingly like the stories which went their round when the South-Sea Bubble hung iridescent over London. Mankind has never wearied of such tales since Aladdin (one of Fortune’s fools) won his easy way to wealth. Even the old dime novel with “Dare-Devil Dick,” or “Jasper, the Boy Detective,” for a hero, has been transmogrified into a “Fame and Fortune,” series, with “Boys That Make Money,” figuring vaingloriously on the title-page. Gone is the Indian brave, the dauntless young seaman who saved the American navy, the calm-eyed lad who held up a dozen masked ruffians with one small pistol. In their place we have the boy in the broker’s office who finds out that “A. and C.” stock will double its value within ten days; or the exploits of a group of juvenile speculators, who form a “secret syndicate,” and outwit the wisest heads on Wall Street. The supremacy of youth—a vital feature of such fiction—is indicated when the inspired messenger boy gives a “pointer” to an old and influential firm of brokers, who receive it with glistening eyes and respectful gratitude. “I did not tip you in expectation of any compensation,” observes the magnanimous and up-to-date young hero. “I simply felt it was my duty to prevent you from losing the profit that was bound to come your way if you held on a few days longer.”
Our newspapers have told us (we should like to know who told the newspapers) that high prices are popular prices. It is fitting and proper that people who own the wealth of the world should pay a great deal for everything they buy. Shoppers with their purses full of money are affronted by any hint of cheapness or economy. This may be true, though it reminds me a little of a smiling Neapolitan who once assured me that his donkey liked to be beaten. One cannot, without entering into the mind of a donkey or of a rich American, deny the tastes imputed to them; but one may cherish doubts. It is true that “record prices” have been paid for every luxury, that the sales of furriers and jewellers have been unprecedented in the annals of our commerce, that the eager buying of rare books, pictures, and curios, flung on the markets by the destitution of Europe, has never been surpassed. One might wish that destitution anywhere (Vienna is not so far from New York that no cry of pain can reach us) would dim our pleasure in such purchases. This does not seem to be the case. “’Tis man’s perdition to be safe,” and ’tis his deepest and deadliest perdition to profit by the misfortunes of others.