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

by Arthur Cheney Train

By fifty-five he had his ten millions. It was comparatively easy, I believe, for him to get it. But still he was not satisfied. Now he has twenty. But apart from his millions, his house and his pictures, which are bought for him by an agent on a salary of ten thousand dollars a year, he has nothing! I dine with him out of charity.

Well, recently Johnson has gone into charity himself. I am told he has given away two millions! That is an exact tenth of his fortune. He is a religious man—in this respect he has outdone most of his brother millionaires. However, he still has an income of over a million a year—enough to satisfy most of his modest needs. Yet the frugality of a lifetime is hard to overcome, and I have seen Johnson walk home—seven blocks—in the rain from his club rather than take a cab, when the same evening he was giving his dinner guests peaches that cost—in December—two dollars and seventy-five cents apiece.

The question is: How far have Johnson's two millions made him a charitable man? I confess that, so far as I can see, giving them up did not cost him the slightest inconvenience. He merely bought a few hundred dollars' worth of reputation—as a charitable millionaire—at a cost of two thousand thousand dollars. It was—commercially—a miserable bargain. Only a comparatively few people of the five million inhabitants of the city of New York ever heard of Johnson or his hospital. Now that it has been built, he is no longer interested. I do not believe he actually got as much satisfaction out of his two-million-dollar investment as he would get out of an evening at the Hippodrome; but who can say that he is not charitable?

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I lay stress on this matter of charity because essentially the charitable man is the good man. And by good we mean one who is of value to others as contrasted with one who is working, as most of us are, only for his own pocket all the time. He is the man who is such an egoist that he looks on himself as a part of the whole world and a brother to the rest of mankind. He has really got an exaggerated ego and everybody else profits by it in consequence.

He believes in abstract principles of virtue and would die for them; he recognizes duties and will struggle along, until he is a worn-out, penniless old man, to perform them. He goes out searching for those who need help and takes a chance on their not being deserving. Many a poor chap has died miserably because some rich man has judged that he was not deserving of help. I forget what Lazarus did about the thirsty gentleman in Hades—probably he did not regard him as deserving either.

With most of us a charitable impulse is like the wave made by a stone thrown into a pool—it gets fainter and fainter the farther it has to go. Generally it does not go the length of a city block. It is not enough that there is a starving cripple across the way—he must be on your own doorstep to rouse any interest. When we invest any of our money in charity we want twenty per cent interest, and we want it quarterly. We also wish to have a list of the stockholders made public. A man who habitually smokes two thirty-cent cigars after dinner will drop a quarter into the plate on Sunday and think he is a good Samaritan.

The truth of the matter is that whatever instinct leads us to contribute toward the alleviation of the obvious miseries of the poor should compel us to go further and prevent those miseries—or as many of them as we can—from ever arising at all.

So far as I am concerned, the division of goodness into seven or more specific virtues is purely arbitrary. Virtue is generic. A man is either generous or mean—unselfish or selfish. The unselfish man is the one who is willing to inconvenience or embarrass himself, or to deprive himself of some pleasure or profit for the benefit of others, either now or hereafter.

By the same token, now that I have given thought to the matter, I confess that I am a selfish man—at bottom. Whatever generosity I possess is surface generosity. It would not stand the acid test of self-interest for a moment. I am generous where it is worth my while—that is all; but, like everybody else in my class, I have no generosity so far as my social and business life is concerned. I am willing to inconvenience myself somewhat in my intimate relations with my family or friends, because they are really a part of me—and, anyway, not to do so would result, one way or another, in even greater inconvenience to me.