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

by Arthur Cheney Train

Brotherly love? How can there be such a thing when there is a single sick baby dying for lack of nutrition—a single convalescent suffocating for want of country air—a single family without fire or blankets? Suggest to your wife that she give up a dinner gown and use the money to send a tubercular office boy to the Adirondacks—and listen to her excuses! Is there not some charitable organization that does such things? Has not his family the money? How do you know he really has consumption? Is he a good boy? And finally: "Well, one can't send every sick boy to the country; if one did there would be no money left to bring up one's own children." She hesitates—and the boy dies perhaps! So long as we do not see them dying, we do not really care how many people die.

Our altruism, such as it is, has nothing abstract about it. The successful man does not bother himself about things he cannot see. Do not talk about foreign missions to him. Try his less successful brother—the man who is not successful because you can talk over with him foreign missions or even more idealistic matters; who is a failure because he will make sacrifices for a principle.

It is all a part of our materialism. Real sympathy costs too much money; so we try not to see the miserable creatures who might be restored to health for a couple of hundred dollars. A couple of hundred dollars? Why, you could take your wife to the theater forty times—once a week during the entire season—for that sum!

Poor people make sacrifices; rich ones do not. There is very little real charity among successful people. A man who wasted his time helping others would never get on himself.

* * * * *

It will, of course, be said in reply that the world is full of charitable institutions supported entirely by the prosperous and successful. That is quite true; but it must be remembered that they are small proof in themselves of the amount of real self-sacrifice and genuine charity existing among us.

Philanthropy is largely the occupation of otherwise ineffective people, or persons who have nothing else to do, or of retired capitalists who like the notoriety and laudation they can get in no other way. But, even with philanthropy to amuse him, an idle multi-millionaire in these United States has a pretty hard time of it. He is generally too old to enjoy society and is not qualified to make himself a particularly agreeable companion, even if his manners would pass muster at Newport. Politics is too strenuous. Desirable diplomatic posts are few and the choicer ones still require some dignity or educational qualification in the holders. There is almost nothing left but to haunt the picture sales or buy a city block and order the construction of a French château in the middle of it.

I know one of these men intimately; in fact I am his attorney and helped him make a part of his money. At sixty-four he retired—that is, he ceased endeavoring to increase his fortune by putting up the price of foodstuffs and other commodities, or by driving competitors out of business. Since then he has been utterly wretched. He would like to be in society and dispense a lavish hospitality, but he cannot speak the language of the drawing room. His opera box stands stark and empty. His house, filled with priceless treasures fit for the Metropolitan Museum, is closed nine months in the year.

His own wants are few. His wife is a plain woman, who used to do her own cooking and, in her heart, would like to do it still. He knows nothing of the esthetic side of life and is too old to learn. Once a month, in the season, we dine at his house, with a mixed company, in a desert of dining room at a vast table loaded with masses of gold plate. The peaches are from South Africa; the strawberries from the Riviera. His chef ransacks the markets for pheasants, snipe, woodcock, Egyptian quail and canvasbacks. And at enormous distances from each other—so that the table may be decently full—sit, with their wives, his family doctor, his clergyman, his broker, his secretary, his lawyer, and a few of the more presentable relatives—a merry party! And that is what he has striven, fought and lied for for fifty years.

Often he has told me of the early days, when he worked from seven until six, and then studied in night school until eleven; and of the later ones when he and his wife lived, like ourselves, in a Fourteenth Street lodging house and saved up to go to the theater once a month. As a young man he swore he would have a million before he died. Sunday afternoons he would go up to the Vanderbilt house on Fifth Avenue and, shaking his fist before the ornamental iron railing, whisper savagely that he would own just such a house himself some day. When he got his million he was going to retire. But he got his million at the age of forty-five, and it looked too small and mean; he would have ten—then he would stop!