The host was given to extravagance, was used to and in sympathy with the eccentric efforts of too-rich people to attract attention to themselves. But this insulting refinement “got” on his nerves. As his guest was a very rich man, and was therefore entitled to that reverential deference which only the rich are capable of feeling for and giving to the rich, the host let no outward sign of his state of mind appear. But he confided the insult to his other guests as a “joke,” and had them privately laughing and jeering at his young friend.
This young man is one of the small advance guard of the new generation of plutocrats—the generation that has about the same knowledge of life as it is lived by the great mass of Americans that we have of the mode of life in a Hottentot kraal. We shall soon be far better acquainted with these sons and grandsons of somebodies than we are at present. Soon the wealth and industrial energy of the country will be controlled by them, or, rather, through them by a clever and unscrupulous few. Let us therefore pause for a moment upon these American “born successes,” taking at random some one of them as a type—one we will call, for convenience, Jones.
His father was a great business man, and in forty years of intelligent, incessant and unscrupulous effort amassed a vast fortune so invested that it gave the possessor control of an enormous financial and industrial area. The father was a self-made man; he had a profound reverence for book-learning; he was resolved that none of his own deficiencies should be reproduced in his son. His boy was to be a “cultured gentleman,” moving in the “best society.” Also, the boy should have all the “fun” which first poverty and then business cares had denied to the old man. He sent young Jones to the most famous schools both here and abroad; and he gave him plenty of money. It is not definitely known whether the old man was proud of the results of his method of bringing up a boy so far as he saw them before he died; but there is reason to believe that he was. Certainly, the boy was as different as it is possible to imagine from his plain, rather coarse, very manly if also very unscrupulous father. The boy had all his father’s supreme contempt for the ordinary moral code and for the mass of “weaklings” who live under it and suffer themselves to be plucked. There the resemblance between the two ends. In place of a brain, the boy acquired at college and elsewhere a lump of vanities, affectations and poses. Surrounded by hirelings from infancy, he became convinced that he was the handsomest in body and the most brilliant in mind that the world had in recent centuries produced. He thought, having been assured of it by shopkeepers and agents, that his taste was almost too fine for a coarse, commercial era, that his nerves were almost too delicate even for the works of the greatest musicians and painters and sculptors and poets, that he was living both within and without a sort of tone-poem.
When he came into his own and descended to Wall street, he was gratified but not surprised to learn that Wall street entertained his own exalted opinion of himself. And when he heard on every side that, in addition to being such an exquisite as a Lucullus or a Louis XIV would have copied, he was the greatest financier that ever lived, a boy-wonder at high finance, a greater than his father, the brain of a Nathan Rothschild in the body of a young Apollo, he accepted it all as the matter-of-course. Like so many of our very rich, he had an economical streak in him—but this was a profound secret, hardly known even to himself. So, he readily fell in with Wall street’s pleasant way of saving its own money and living off the money of other people. He plunged into the wildest extravagances, imitating and striving to outdo the young scions of plutocracy with whom he associated uptown. And like them, he made the people of whose trust funds his wealth gave him control, pay the bills. It is vulgar to pay one’s own bills, but there is no objection to their being paid out of another’s pocket. It saves one from the degradation of counting the cost, of thinking about prices and limits of incomes and such low things.
No sooner was he fairly launched than a half dozen of the great plutocrats, with wild shouts of adulation, proclaimed him their leader, put him in a commanding position in all their big swindling schemes called “finance” in Wall street. “You’re it, my lad,” they cried. “We take a back seat. Go up front where you belong. We’ll do whatever you say.”
Is it strange that the young man went about as if he were Mercury of the winged feet? Is it strange that he got into the habit of greeting his fellow-men with that gracious sweetness which kings alone have—and they only on the stage or in novels? And when it is added that uptown the married women flattered him, all the girls languished upon him, everybody pronounced him a devil of a fellow, a heart-breaker, a real, twenty-four carat, all-wool “cuss,” is it not wonderful that he did not go quite mad and dress in purple and wear laces and a sword?
Indeed, he did have those moments of absolute mental aberration, and had to go to or give fancy balls to hide his lunacy from the world. At those balls he always dressed in some ancient kingly costume; and so evident was it that he thought himself indeed a king, holding a grand levee, that a smirk followed in his wake as he stepped grandly about—a smirk that burst into a titter as soon as he was out of ear-shot. Yet really he was not the least bit more ridiculous than the other sons and daughters of plutocracy, all dressed up as kings and queens and nobles and grandees, and wondering if the imaginary were not the real and their moments in ordinary clothes a nightmare.
On and on he went, madder and madder, so crazy about himself that even his plutocratic “lieutenants,” who were using him as a stool-pigeon, could hardly keep their faces straight. At last he got to the stage at which the old kings of France got just before the Revolution—the mental state superinduced by beginning their education by setting in their copy-books as a writing model, “Kings may do whatever they please.” He never had had any sense of trusteeship; he had been flattered into believing that the railway or manufactory in which he owned a large amount of stock was his very own, that wages and salaries paid and dividends declared were his royal and gracious largess. But he at first had a dim sense that this great truth must not be publicly aired, that it was prudent to let the common people believe they had some share in the enterprise. Now, however, this dim respect for, or, rather, tolerance of, a popular delusion vanished. With rolling eyes and haughty nose and lips and high-stepping legs he advanced boldly and publicly into his kingdom. A Russian grand-duke said of the Russian people, “These fleas imagine they are the dog.” Young Jones said in effect the same thing of the depositors and stockholders in “my” enterprises, and showed publicly that he thought it.
Great excitement. His plutocrat “lieutenants,” seeing that their graft through this joyous young ass was imperiled, tried to quiet him. Failing there, they tried to cajole, then to cow the insurgent “fleas.” But all in vain. The ears of Jones, attuned only to adulatory sounds, were assailed by such shuddering rudenesses as “Petty larceny thief! Jackass! Swindler! Puller-in for the big gamblers! Crazy numskull!”
Frightful, wasn’t it? Not that he was in the least disturbed in his own exalted opinion of himself. An angel come from heaven direct would have moved him only to light, incredulous laughter by telling him the plain truth about himself. Still, the clamor was unpleasant; the open sneers, the sly stabs. And, above all, the ingratitude! The ingratitude of his associates in “society” who had got so much expensive entertainment and so much inspiration from him. The ingratitude of the people, his vassals, whom he paid salaries and wages and dividends, whom he permitted to deposit in his banks and to invest in his enterprises!