There seems to be something unfinished and stolid and brutal about a Carnegie Library now. The spirit of the garden and the sea, of the spring and the light, and of the child, is not in it. They have come to seem to some of us mere huge Pittsburgs of brains—all these impervious, unwieldy, rolling-mills of knowledge. I should think it would be a terrible prospect to grow old with, just to sit and see them flocking across the country from your window, all these huge smoke-stacks of books in their weary, sordid cities; and the boys who might be great men, the small Lincolns with nations in their pockets, the little Bells with worlds in their ears, the Pinchots with their forests, the McAdoos and Roosevelts, the young Carnegies and Marconis in the streets!
CHAPTER V
THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE
Mr. Israel Zangwill in presiding at the meeting of the Sociological Society the other night remarked, in referring to inspired millionaires, that as a rule in the minds of most people nowadays a millionaire seemed to be a kind of broken-off person, or possibly two persons. There always seemed to have to be a violent change in a millionaire somewhere along the middle of his life. The change seemed to be associated in some way, Mr. Zangwill thought with his money. He reminded one of the patent-medicine advertisements, "Before and After Taking."
I have been trying to think why it is that the average millionaire reminds people—as Mr. Zangwill says he does—of a patent-medicine advertisement, "Before and After Taking."
I have thought, since Mr. Zangwill made this remark, of getting together a small collection of pictures of millionaires—two pictures of each, one before and the other after taking—and having them mounted in the most approved patent-medicine style, and taking them down to Far End and asking Mr. Zangwill to look them over with me and see if he thought—he, Israel Zangwill, the novelist, the play-wright, the psychologist—really thought, that millionaires "Before and After" were as different as they looked.
I imagine he would say—and practically without looking at the pictures—that of course to him or to me perhaps, or to any especially interested student of human nature, millionaires are not really different at all "Before and After Taking"; that they merely had a slightly different outer look. They would merely look different, Mr. Zangwill would say, to the common run or majority of people—the people one meets in the streets.
But would they?
One of the most hopeful things that I have been thinking of lately is that the people—the ordinary people one meets in the streets—are beginning quite generally to see through their millionaires, and to see that their money almost never really cures them. Most very rich men, indeed, are having their times now, of even seeing through themselves; and it brings me up abruptly with a shock to think that the ordinary people who pass in the streets would be deceived by these simple little pictures Before and After. They have been deceived until lately, but are they being deceived now? I would like to see the matter tested, and I have thought it would be a good idea to take my small collection of pictures of millionaires—two pictures of each, one Before and the other After Taking—to a millionaire—of course some really reformed or cured one—and ask him to pay the necessary expenses in the columns of the Times, and of the Westminster Gazette, and the Daily Chronicle, and other representative London journals (all on the same morning), of having the pictures published. We could then take what might be called a social, human, economic inventory of London: ask people to send in their honest opinions, on looking at the pictures, as to whether Money, Before and After Taking, does or does not produce these remarkable cures in millionaires. I very much doubt if Mr. Zangwill would be found to be right in his estimate of our common people to-day.