I would advise bairns to save when they have a definite object in view. To lay up treasure in the Post Office Savings Bank is, for a bairn, about as tempting as laying up treasure in heaven. Bairns can't entertain remote possibilities. You can tell a boy that a sum in the bank will help him to buy clothes or a bicycle when he is a man, and the prospect does not thrill him. You can't persuade a boy to cast his eyes on the years to come when his eyes are rivetted on a cake of chewing-gum in the village shop window. If he saves it should be for a direct tangible object. He takes up a Gamage catalogue (the most delightful of books to a boy), and he sees an illustration of a water-pistol costing a shilling. If he is a boy of spirit he will deny himself sweeties for a month in order to get that pistol. The self-discipline necessary to enable a village boy to buy a water-pistol will do him infinitely more good than all the discipline of all the Macdonalds in Scotland. I would have all children poor in money, but I would give them the opportunity of earning enough money to buy their toys. A little poverty is good for anybody; I would recommend a young man to live on twelve shillings a week for a year or two; he would begin to see things in proportion.
A friend of mine bases his antipathy to Socialism on this view of poverty. He argues that poverty brings out self-reliance, pluck, grit. When I ask him why he doesn't support Socialism as a means of bringing all these advantages to the poor wealthy folk, he is at a loss. In a manner I agree with him; poverty will often give a race splendid characteristics. But Socialism recognises that the wealth of the world is divided most unequally. At one end you have luxury that makes men degenerate; at the other end you have poverty that makes men swine. If Shaw's idea of equal incomes could be carried out each person would be in the position of a member of the present lower middle class; he would be rich enough to be well-fed and happy, and he would be poor enough to discipline himself to make sacrifices to attain an object. I don't think that any man should satisfy more than one desire at a time. If Andrew Carnegie wants a motor-car and a four manual organ he has simply to tell his secretary to write out two cheques. But if I want a motor-cycle and an Angelus player-piano I've got to give up one desire. I know that I'll tire of either, and all I have to do is to sit down and wonder which novelty will last the longer. I want both very much. A 2¾-h.p. Douglas would be delightful, and an Angelus with lots of rolls would charm the long nights away. But ... there is Margaret. I begin to think of blankets and sheets and pots and pans. I don't want any of these plebeian articles, but I want Margaret very much, and I know that along with her I must take the whole bunch of kitchen utensils.
I begin to feel sorry for millionaires. One of the finer pleasures of life is the desiring of a thing you can't buy. The sorriest man in story is the millionaire who arrived at a big hotel very late, so late that he couldn't be served with supper. He straightway sent for the proprietor and asked the price of the hotel. He wrote out a cheque on the spot ... and called for his sausage and mashed—or whatever the dish was. No wonder that millionaires complain of indigestion.
That story contains a fine moral. I don't exactly know what the moral is, but I hazard the opinion that the moral is this:—Never buy a hotel in order to get a plate of sausage and mashed. Millionaires might be defined as men who buy hotels in order to get sausage and mashed ... and they can't digest the sausage when they have got it. When a Carnegie builds a great organ in a great hall he is really buying the whole hotel. He is taking an unfair advantage of his fellow music-lovers. A plate of sausage and mashed would be of far greater moment to G. K. Chesterton than to the millionaire, but G. K. couldn't buy the whole hotel; he would merely swear volubly and tighten the belt of his waistcoat ... if that were possible. The millionaire should not have this advantage over Chesterton. So a millionaire should not have any advantage over a music-lover. Collinson, the Edinburgh University organist, has no doubt a greater appreciation of organ music than a Carnegie, but he has to go down to his church organ on a winter night if he wants to play a Bach fugue. Money is power, they say, but money is worse than power; it is tyranny. A successful pork-merchant whose one talent is his ability to tell at a glance how much pig it takes to fill a thousand tins of lamb cutlet, may buy up half the treasures of the world if he likes. Priceless pictures and violins lie in millionaires' halls, while students of genius study prints and practise on two guinea fiddles. At first sight this seems a problem that Horatio Bottomley would handle eagerly and popularly, but the problem is really a deep one. When humanity abolishes the power to amass millions who is to have the priceless treasures? In the case of art the community of course. (I see in to-day's paper that Rodin has bequeathed all his works to France.) But what of the Stradivarius violins? I would have them lent to the geniuses. Who is to decide who the geniuses are? That is a question of fundamentals, and if I had left the question to Mr. Bottomley I think he would have recommended his readers to "write to John Bull about it."
I begin to feel that I am talking through my hat as the vulgar phrase has it. My baccy's finished, and I can't concentrate my attention on any subject. What I meant to do was to show that a millionaire is a man to be pitied. To buy a Titian painting when your tastes lie in the direction of Heath Robinson's Frightful War Pictures is as pathetic a thing to do as to sit out a classical concert when your tastes lead you to a passionate love for ragtime. And buying a Titian is a simple case of buying the hotel in order to get the sausage and mashed that you can't eat.
Millionaires ... no, it's no good; I'll have to fold up my typewriter till I get some more baccy.
XV.
Margaret was reading a few pages of my diary to-night.