“Then I looked on all these works that my hands had wrought and on the labour that I had laboured to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”
Our rich men are largely responsible for the misconception that the American people have no ideal higher than that of money-making. The following remarks once made by a rich philanthropist are interesting because they are typical of the thought of a great number of persons who speak in public to-day:
“In contributing to the education of the suffrage the rich are but building for their own protection. If they neglect so to build, barbarism, anarchy, plunder will be the inevitable result. If the spirit of commercialism and greed continues to grow stronger, then the Twentieth Century will witness a social cataclysm unparalleled in history.”
Is all this true? Does the future of civilization depend upon the generosity of rich men? If the rich men do not awaken as a class and give more largely to the uplifting of their fellow-men, shall we have a carnival of barbarism, anarchy and plunder?
The speaker and his kind of social students mean well. They are right in arousing the rich to a deeper sense of duty to mankind. But they think so intently upon their pet theory that they lose their point of view. They exaggerate to hysteria the importance of the rich. They are infected with the dollar-worshiping craze which they profess to abhor. They vastly over-estimate concentrated wealth as a factor in human progress. They erect money into a powerful deity, just as do all other worshipers of the dollar. The difference is that they wish to make it a benevolent deity.
It is an excellent thing that the rich should be aroused. A rich man who does nothing for his brother-man is a contemptible fellow—almost as contemptible as a poor man who does nothing for his brother-man. The selfish rich man can plead in extenuation that temptations, beyond human nature’s power to combat, have narrowed and chilled and withered him. But, save ignorance, what excuse has the poor man for selfishness? However, if by chance the selfish rich man become aroused and give—give manlily, democratically—of his riches, he must not be excited about the importance to others of what he has done. Its main importance is purely personal. He is a better man for doing it and has a stronger title to self-respect. But if he had not done it, the poor, old, stupid, blundering human race would have managed to stagger along somehow.
By all means let the rich give. For their own self-respect, for their own self-satisfaction, they ought to give largely and intelligently. Let the honest rich give in sympathy—let the dishonest give in humility. But we must remember that all such gifts put together are as a mere drop in the ocean so far as the effect upon civilization is concerned.
We have not reached our present estate through the generosity of any class of men. And we shall not advance to our destined higher estate because of the generosity and benevolence of any class. The benevolence of the rich may earn for them an honorable place in the procession of humanity ever toiling upward, and may enable laggards or the too heavily handicapped to keep in line. But this procession, that has marched on over kings and emperors, over tyrants and oppressors and false teachers, that has met and swept away army after army of embattled wrong, is not to be perceptibly retarded or accelerated by the errors or the virtues of a class of men who are merely rich.
Rich men did not implant in the human heart the all but universal passion for progress. Rich men did not put into the human skull the marvelous mechanism of the human mind. Rich men did not endow that mind with the body to carry out its will. Wealth has not made the great pictures or paintings, has not written the great books nor achieved the great discoveries, nor erected the great institutions, nor evolved any of the glories of the emancipation of man, social, political, industrial, intellectual. All these we owe to men in whom the wealth-getting instinct was at most a shriveled rudiment. Wealth did not build this Republic in its present majesty; Pliny the younger said—and said truly—that wealth had ruined Rome. Concentrated wealth, breeder of parasitism and patronage, has shriveled and rotted—always, everywhere. If history had not been written by snobs and persons tainted with aristocratic error, this fact would be as clear as print could make it.
The real wealth, the real riches of humanity are these capable minds and capable bodies, the creators of intelligent, progress-producing thought and action.