And with a hatred of monarchy Mr Carnegie combines a childlike faith in the political power of money. Though his faith by this should be rudely shaken, he clings to it as best he may. Time was when he wished to buy the Philippines, and present them, a free gift, to somebody or other. Now he thinks that he may purchase the peace of the world for a round sum, and sees not the absurdity of his offer. Even his poor attempt to bribe the English-speaking peoples to forget their spelling-books was a happy failure, and he still cherishes an illusion of omnipotence. At the opening of his Institute at Pittsburg he was bold enough to declare that his name would be known to future ages "like the name of Harvard." He might remember that Harvard gave not of his abundance. He bequeathed for the use of scholars a scholar's books and a scholar's slender savings, and he won a gracious immortality. Mr Carnegie, in endowing education, is endowing that which he has publicly condemned. Desiring to teach the youth of his country how to become as wealthy as himself, he has poured contempt upon learning. He has declared that "the college-made" man had "little chance against the boy who swept the office." He is to be found, this victim of an intellectual ambition, in the salaried class, from which the aspiring millionaire is bidden to escape as quickly as possible by the customary methods of bluff and bounce. Why, then, if Mr Carnegie thinks so ill of colleges and universities does he inflict his millions upon them? He has known "few young men intended for business who were not injured by a collegiate education." And yet he has done his best to drive all the youth of Scotland within the gates of the despised universities, and he has forced upon his own Pittsburg the gift of "free education in art and literature." Is it cynicism, or vain inconsequence? Cynicism, probably. The man who, having devoted his whole career to the accumulation of superfluous wealth, yet sings a paean in praise of poverty, is capable of everything. "Abolish luxury, if you please,"—thus he rhapsodises,—"but leave us the soil upon which alone the virtues and all that is precious in human character grow,—poverty, honest poverty!" Has he shed the virtues, I wonder; or is he a peculiarly sanctified vessel, which can hold the poison of wealth without injury?
Of all millionaires, Mr Carnegie is at once the least picturesque and the most dangerous. He is the least picturesque, because he harbours in his heart the middle-class ambition of philanthropy. He would undertake a task for which he is manifestly unfit, in the spirit of provincial culture. For the same reason he is the most dangerous. He is not content to squander his immense wealth in race-horses and champagne. He employs it to interfere with the lives of others. He confers benefits with a ready hand which are benefits only when they are acquired by conquest. Of a very different kind is Mr Thomas W. Lawson. He, too, is a millionaire. He, too, has about him all the appurtenances of wealth. His fur-coats are mythical. He once paid 30,000 dollars for a pink. "He owns a palace in Boston," says his panegyrist, "filled with works of art; he has a six-hundred acre farm in Cape Cod, with seven miles of fences; three hundred horses, each one of whom he can call by name; a hundred and fifty dogs; and a building for training his animals larger than Madison Square Garden." These eloquent lines will prove to you more clearly than pages of argument the native heroism of the man. He was scarce out of his cradle when he began to amass vast sums of money, and he is now, after many years of adventure, a king upon Wall Street. He represents the melodrama of wealth. He seems to live in an atmosphere of mysterious disguises, secret letters, and masked faces. His famous contest with Mr H. H. Rogers, "the wonderful Rogers, the master among pirates, whom you have to salute even when he has the point of his cutlass at the small of your back and you're walking the plank at his order," was conducted, on Mr Lawson's part, in the spirited style of the old Adelphi. "Mr Rogers' eyes snapped just once," we are told, on a famous occasion; but Mr Lawson was not intimidated. "I held myself together," he says proudly, "with closed hands and clinched teeth." Indeed, these two warriors have never met without much snapping of eyes and closing of hands and clinching of teeth. Why they snapped and closed and clinched is uncertain. To follow their operations is impossible for an outsider, but Mr Lawson always succeeds in convincing you that on the pretence of money-making he is attacking some lofty enterprise. He would persuade you that he is a knight-errant of purity. "Tremendous issues" are always at stake. The heroes of Wall Street are engaged in never-ending "battles." They are "fighting" for causes, the splendour of which is not dimmed in Mr Lawson's lurid prose. They have Americanised the language of ancient chivalry, until it fits the operations of the modern market. They talk of honour and of "taking each other's word," as though they had never stooped to dollars in their lives. But of one thing you may be sure—they are always "on hand when a new melon is cut and the juice runs out."
Like the knights of old, they toil not neither do they spin. They make nothing, they produce nothing, they invent nothing. They merely gamble with the savings of others, and find the business infinitely profitable. Yet they, too, must cultivate the language of sentiment. Though the world is spared the incubus of their philanthropy, they must pretend, in phrase at least, that they are doing good, and their satisfaction proves that nothing so swiftly and tranquilly lulls the conscience to sleep as the dollar. But, as the actor of melodrama falls far below the finished tragedian, the heroes of the Street, typified by Mr Lawson, are mere bunglers compared with the greatest millionaire on earth—John D. Rockefeller. We would no more give him the poor title of "Mr" than we would give it to Shakespeare. Even "Rockefeller" seems too formal for his grandeur. Plain "John D." is best suited to express the admiration of his worshippers, the general fame that shines like a halo about his head. He is Plutus in human guise; he is Wealth itself, essential and concrete. A sublime unselfishness has marked his career. He is a true artist, who pursues his art for its own sake. Money has given him nothing. He asks nothing of her. Yet he woos her with the same devotion which a lover shows to his mistress. Like other great men, Rockefeller has concentrated all his thoughts, all his energies, upon the single object of his desire. He has not chattered of things which he does not understand, like Mr Carnegie. He has resolutely refrained from Mr Lawson's melodramatic exaggeration. Money has been the god of his idolatry,—"Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom he daily offers sacrifice, which steers his heart, hands, affections—all."
His silence and his concentration give him a picturesqueness which his rivals lack. He stands apart from the human race in a chill and solitary grandeur. He seeks advertisement as little as he hankers after pleasure. The Sunday-school is his dissipation. A suburban villa is his palace. He seldom speaks to the world, and when he breaks his habit of reticence it is to utter an aphorism, perfect in concision and cynicism. "Avoid all honorary posts that cost time"—this was one of his earliest counsels to the young. "Pay a profit to nobody" is perhaps his favourite maxim. "Nothing is too small, for small things grow," is another principle which he formulated at the outset of his career. "I have ways of making money that you know nothing of," he once told a colleague, and no one will doubt the truth of his assertion. It is said that when he was scarce out of his teens he would murmur, with the hope of almost realised ambition, "I am bound to be rich, bound to be rich, bound to be rich." He imposed upon all those who served him the imperative duty of secrecy. He was unwilling that any one should know the policy of the Trust. "Congress and the State legislature are after us," he once said. "You may be subpoenaed. If you know nothing, you can tell nothing. If you know about the business, you might tell something which would ruin us." The mere presence of a stranger has always been distasteful to him. The custom of espionage has made him suspect that others are as watchful as himself. He has been described erroneously as a master of complicated villainy. He is, for evil or for good, the most single-minded man alive. He looks for a profit in all things. Even his devotion to the Sunday-school is of a piece with the test. "Put something in," says he, speaking of the work, "and according as you put something in, the greater will be your dividends of salvation."
His triumphant capture of the oil trade is a twice-told tale. All the world knows how he crushed his rivals by excluding their wares from the rail-roads, which gave him rebates, and then purchased for a song their depreciated properties. At every point he won the battle. He laid stealthy hands upon the pipe-lines, designed to thwart his monopoly, as he had previously laid hands upon the railway lines. He discovered no new processes, he invented no new methods of transport. But he made the enterprise of others his own. The small refiner went the way of the small producer, and the energy of those who carried oil over the mountains helped to fill Rockefeller's pocket. The man himself spared no one who stood between him and the realisation of his dream. Friends and enemies fell down before him. He ruined the widow and orphan with the same quiet cheerfulness wherewith he defeated the competitors who had a better chance to fight their own battle. The Government was, and is, powerless to stay his advance. It has instituted prosecutions. It has passed laws directed at the Standard Oil Company. And all is of no avail. Before cross-examining counsel, in the face of the court, Rockefeller maintains an impenetrable silence. He admits nothing. He confesses nothing. "We do not talk much," he murmurs sardonically; "we saw wood." A year ago it was rumoured that he would be arrested when he returned to America from Europe. He is still at large. The body of a multi-millionaire is sacred.
He is master of the world's oil, and of much else beside. Having won the control of one market, he makes his imperial hand felt in many another. His boast that "money talks" is abundantly justified. The power of money in making money is the only secret that the millionaires of America discover for themselves. The man who makes a vast fortune by the invention or manufacture of something which the people thinks it wants, may easily take a pride in the fruit of his originality. The captains of American industry can seldom boast this cause of satisfaction. It is theirs to exploit, not to create. The great day in Mr Carnegie's life was that on which "the mysterious golden visitor" came to him, as a dividend from another's toil. Mr Rockefeller remembers with the greatest pleasure the lesson which he learned as a boy, "that he could get as much interest for $50, loaned at seven per cent, as he could earn by digging potatoes ten days." The lesson of Shylock is not profound, but its mastery saves a world of trouble. Combined with a light load of scruples, it will fill the largest coffers; and it has been sufficient to carry the millionaires of America to the highest pinnacle of fame.
In other words, the sole test of their success is not their achievement, but their money-bags. And when, with cynical egoism, they have collected their unnumbered dollars, what do they do with them? What pleasures, what privileges, does their wealth procure? It is their fond delusion that it brings them power. What power? To make more money and to defy the laws. In England a wealthy man aspires to found a family, to play his part upon the stage of politics, to serve his country as best he may, and to prepare his sons for a like honourable service. The American millionaire does not share this ambition. Like Mr Rockefeller, he avoids "honorary posts." If he were foolish enough to accept them, he would not be loyal to the single desire of adding to his store. Perhaps we may best express his triumph in terms of champagne and oysters, of marble halls and hastily gathered collections. But even here the satisfaction is small. The capacity of the human throat is limited, and collections, made by another and partially understood, pall more rapidly than orchid-houses and racing-stables.
This, then, is the tragedy of the American multi-millionaires. They are doomed to carry about with them a huge load of gold which they cannot disperse. They are no wiser than the savages, who hide and hoard their little heaps of cowrie-shells. They might as well have filled their treasuries with flint-stones or scraps of iron. They muster their wealth merely to become its slave. They are rich not because they possess imagination, but because they lack it. Their bank-books are the index of their folly. They waste their years in a vain pursuit, which they cannot resist. They exclude from their lives all that makes life worth living, that they may acquire innumerable specimens of a precious metal. Gold is their end, not the gratification it may bring. Mr Rockefeller will go out of the world as limited in intelligence, as uninstructed in mind, as he was when he entered it. The lessons of history and literature are lost upon him. The joys for which wise men strive have never been his. He is the richest man on earth, and his position and influence are the heaviest indictment of wealth that can be made. His power begins and ends at the curbstone of Wall Street. His painfully gathered millions he must leave behind. Even the simple solace of a quiet conscience is denied to the most of his class. Is there one of them who is not haunted in hours of depression by the memory of bloody strikes, of honest men squeezed out, of rival works shut down?
In a kind of dread they turn to philanthropy. They fling from their chariots bundles of bank-notes to appease the wolves of justice. Universities grow ignobly rich upon their hush-money. They were accurately described three centuries ago by Robert Burton as "gouty benefactors, who, when by fraud and rapine they have extorted all their lives, oppressed whole provinces, societies, &c., give something to pious uses, build a satisfactory almshouse, school, or bridge, &c, at their last end, or before perhaps, which is no otherwise than to steal a goose and stick down a feather, rob a thousand to relieve ten." If America were wise she would not accept even the feather without the closest scrutiny. Money never loses the scent of its origin, and when the very rich explain how much they ought to give to their fellows, they should carry back their inquiry a stage farther. They should tell us why they took so much, why they suppressed the small factory, why they made bargains with railways to the detriment of others, why they used their wealth as an instrument of oppression. If their explanation be not sufficient, they should not be permitted to unload their gold upon a stricken country; they should not buy a cheap reputation for generosity with money that is not their own.
It may be said that the millionaire decrees the punishment for his own crimes. That is true enough, but the esteem in which America holds him inflicts a wrong upon the whole community. Where Rockefeller is a hero, a false standard of morals is set up. For many years he has preached a practical sermon upon the text, "The end justifies the means." How great are the means! How small the end! He has defended his harshest dealings on the ground that "it is business," and so doing has thrown a slur upon the commerce of his country. And, worse than this, the wonder and curiosity which cling about the dollar have created a new measure of life and character. A man is judged not by his attainments, his courage, his energy, but by his wealth. It is a simple test, and easily applied. It is also the poorest encouragement for the civic virtues. In England we help to correct the vulgarity of wealth by the distribution of titles, and a better aid than this could not be devised. Though the champions of democracy, who believe in equality of names as devoutly as in inequality of wealth, deem this old-fashioned artifice a shameful crime, it is not without its uses. It suggests that public service is worth a higher distinction than a mass of money. And, titles apart, it is happily not in accord with the traditions of our life to regard the rich man and the poor man as beings of a different clay and a different destiny. We may still echo without hypocrisy the words of Ben Jonson, "Money never made any man rich, but his mind."