Fifty years in Wall Street

by Henry Clews

He is said to be extensively read in literature for his age, and has written some essays on various subjects, which give considerable promise of success with perseverance in that line. He is a lover of the fine-arts, knows the history of all the pictures in the great gallery which his father collected, and like that revered parent, whose constant companion he was during the last few years of his life, he is very fond of the opera. His grandfather, the Commodore, left him a million dollars, to which his father added another million on his twenty-first birthday.

George W. has recently made a handsome present to the Bond street free public library, donating thereto $40,000 to build a branch of that institution at 251 West Thirteenth street. He bids fair to be a liberal patron of letters, and no doubt his gifts in this way will be prudently directed and made with good judgment. The man who can appreciate learning, as George Vanderbilt has proved he can, will never be likely to leave the terms of an endowment to a public library, for instance, which he intended for the benefit of the whole community, so loose that a clique of trustees can restrict all its privileges to a limited number of ladies and gentlemen of leisure, by narrowing the hours of keeping the institution open, as has been done with those two fine libraries intended by the donors for the people at large, namely, the Astor and the Lenox.

New York is comparatively poor in its libraries, even on the supposition that these public trusts should not be tampered with, and their original object defeated; but when the best of them are diverted from the purpose originally intended by the philanthropists who presented them to the public, a great wrong is inflicted on the citizens of New York.

There has been a great deal said and written during the past few years about the Vanderbilt system of railroads being a great monopoly. I am not in favor of monopolies. On the contrary, I have, in this book, as well as through other mediums of reaching the public, and in interviews published all over the country, denounced monopolies in very strong terms. I regard the Vanderbilt properly, however, in the light of a great trust, the four young men above referred to, with Chauncey M. Depew, the President of New York Central, being the trustees, and I question very much if that eminent team of honest and able reformers, Henry George and the Rev. Dr. Edward McGlynn, with other minor lights of the Anti-Poverty Society, could administer that trust with greater benefit to the public, nor could they employ a greater army of well-paid, easy-worked, and well-fed men by any State or National supervision or management, or by breaking up the great corporation into probably a hundred or more small companies.

The Vanderbilt system employs 200,000 people at better wages than they can obtain elsewhere, any place in the world. It pays over $150 an hour for taxes. The State is paid $1 for every $2.70 received by the stockholders.

Nor can I think it possible that the paternal system of Government proposed by the Socialists, with all the modern discoveries and appliances of dynamite to aid them, could accomplish as much in a century for the well-being and advantage of the people of this State and of the whole country as the Vanderbilt system of railroads has done in half that time. I see no reason, therefore, to regard the present Vanderbilt regime as a grinding monopoly.

Until the Georgeites, the McGlynnites, and the Socialists demonstrate that their untried systems will confer greater happiness on humanity than honest enterprise in the best circumstances, under our present social system, with all its defects, has developed, I shall be tardy in subscribing my adhesion to the new order of things.

I don’t wish to be understood for a moment as implying that I am averse to free thought, the highest development of humanity, mentally and physically, and the most advanced evolution in the same direction. I aim at keeping abreast of all these within the free exercise of my own judgment, and it is thus that I can heartily applaud Dr. McGlynn for his polite but firm refusal to visit the Eternal City for the purpose of being corrected or regulated in regard to free thought and free speech, as viewed from the American standpoint, by a foreign potentate, who assumes the guardianship and governorship of all human affairs, both from a spiritual and secular point of view.

The days of Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII.) are gone for ever, and Leo XIII. should have sense enough to know it. McGlynn will never stand, like Henry IV., shivering in his shirt at the door of the Vatican, awaiting his sentence of penance to Canossa. Bismarck, however, came pretty near repeating this little historical episode not long since, but the great Chancellor of the German Empire, unlike McGlynn, did not have the advantage of an American education, and the independence which it confers. He may, therefore, to some extent be excused. I think, however, that McGlynn will stick, and I admire his firmness. No church, no matter how powerful its foreign allies may be, can suppress free speech in the home of the brave and the land of the free.

So, in their battle for freedom of speech, I admire the pluck of the George-McGlynn party, but as regards their social theories, I shall remain in a waiting mood until I see them more fully demonstrated.