The "Goldfish" / Being the Confessions af a Successful Man

by Arthur Cheney Train

Until very recently the Supreme Court judges of New York bought their positions by making substantial contributions to the Tammany treasury. The inferior judgeships went considerably cheaper. A man who stood in with the Big Boss might get a bargain. I have done business with politicians all my life and I have never found it necessary to mince my words. If I wanted a favor I always asked exactly what it was going to cost—and I always got the favor.

No one needs to hunt very far for cases where the power of money has influenced the bench in recent times. The rich man can buy his son a place in any corporation or manufacturing company. The young man may go in at the bottom, but he will shoot up to the top in a year or two, with surprising agility, over the heads of a couple of thousand other and better men. The rich man can defy the law and scoff at justice; while the poor man, who cannot pay lawyers for delay, goes to prison. These are the veriest platitudes of demagogy, but they are true—absolutely and undeniably true.

We know all this and we act accordingly, and our children imbibe a like knowledge with their mother's or whatever other properly sterilized milk we give them as a substitute. We, they and everybody else know that if enough money can be accumulated the possessor will be on Easy Street for the rest of his life—not merely the Easy Street of luxury and comfort, but of security, privilege and power; and because we like Easy Street rather than the Narrow Path we devote ourselves to getting there in the quickest possible way.

We take no chances on getting our reward in the next world. We want it here and now, while we are sure of it—on Broadway, at Newport or in Paris. We do not fool ourselves any longer into thinking that by self-sacrifice here we shall win happiness in the hereafter. That is all right for the poor, wretched and disgruntled. Even the clergy are prone to find heaven and hell in this world rather than in the life after death; and the decay of faith leads us to feel that a purse of gold in the hand is better than a crown of the same metal in the by-and-by. We are after happiness, and to most of us money spells it.

The man of wealth is protected on every side from the dangers that beset the poor. He can buy health and immunity from anxiety, and he can install his children in the same impregnable position. The dust of his motor chokes the citizen trudging home from work. He soars through life on a cushioned seat, with shock absorbers to alleviate all the bumps. No wonder we trust in money! We worship the golden calf far more than ever did the Israelites beneath the crags of Sinai. The real Money Trust is the tacit conspiracy by which those who have the money endeavor to hang on to it and keep it among themselves. Neither at the present time do great fortunes tend to dissolve as inevitably as formerly.

Oliver Wendell Holmes somewhere analyzes the rapid disintegration of the substantial fortunes of his day and shows how it is, in fact, but "three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves." A fortune of two hundred thousand dollars divided among four children, each of whose share is divided among four grandchildren, becomes practically nothing at all—in only two. But could the good doctor have observed the tendencies of to-day he would have commented on a new phenomenon, which almost counteracts the other.

It may be, and probably is, the fact that comparatively small fortunes still tend to disintegrate. This was certainly the rule during the first half of the nineteenth century in New England, when there was no such thing as a distinctly moneyed class, and when the millionaire was a creature only of romance. But when, as to-day, fortunes are so large that it is impossible to spend or even successfully give away the income from them, a new element is introduced that did not exist when Doctor Holmes used to meditate in his study on the Back Bay overlooking the placid Charles.

At the present time big fortunes are apt to gain by mere accretion what they lose by division; and the owner of great wealth has opportunities for investment undreamed of by the ordinary citizen who must be content with interest at four per cent and no unearned increment on his capital. This fact might of itself negative the tendency of which he speaks; but there is a much more potent force working against it as well. That is the absolute necessity, induced by the demands of modern metropolitan life, of keeping a big fortune together—or, if it must be divided, of rehabilitating it by marriage.

There was a time not very long ago when one rarely heard of a young man or young woman of great wealth marrying anybody with an equal fortune. To do so was regarded with disapproval, and still is in some communities. To-day it is the rule instead of the exception. Now we habitually speak in America of the "alliances of great families." There are two reasons for this—first, that being a multi-millionaire is becoming, as it were, a sort of recognized profession, having its own sports, its own methods of business and its own interests; second, that the luxury of to-day is so enervating and insidious that a girl or youth reared in what is called society cannot be comfortable, much less happy, on the income of less than a couple of million dollars.

As seems to be demonstrated by the table of my own modest expenditure in a preceding article, the income of but a million dollars will not support any ordinary New York family in anything like the luxury to which the majority of our young people—even the sons and daughters of men in moderate circumstances—are accustomed.