Not long ago the death was announced of M. Basilewski, the Rothschild of Russia, which took place at St. Petersburg, at the age of ninety-two. The deceased, who was the father of Princess Souvaroff, was the owner of gold mines in Siberia, which have already produced for him more than 100,000,000 of francs.
In America, even literary men, if they have luck, make money. It is reported of “Josh Billings” (Henry W. Shaw) that he made more money than almost any American author by persistent working of his peculiar vein of humour. Some years he got as much as 4,000 dollars from a weekly newspaper for exclusive contributions: he made 5,000 or 6,000 dollars by lecturing, and had a profit from his almanack of 8,000 or 9,000 dollars more—18,000 to 20,000 dollars per annum. That is five or six times as much as Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, or Holmes had ever made.
One of the most marvellous careers in London is that of Baron Grant, who commenced his city life as a clerk in a wine-merchant’s office in Mark Lane, and whose capacity in the way of “financing” and “promoting public companies” appears to have been unrivalled. Of course he made himself many enemies; but that is the way of the world. The men who are the first to fling stones at a successful rival, and to call him hard names, are the men who morally have no claim to be censors on the ground of higher principle or superior virtue. It is thus the unlucky ones revenge themselves on their luckier rivals. They are prone to hit a man when he is risen in the world. Nowhere is there more lack of charity, or more evil speaking of one another, than in the circles where Mammon is king, and where the great object of life is held to be the art of money-getting and money-making.
CHAPTER IX.
MORE MONEY-MAKING M.P.’S.
Let me, in this chapter, give the first place to Samuel Plimsoll, a man who, if he made money, spent it nobly, and deserved the peerage far more than many who have been elected to that honour—at any rate, from the time the Earl of Beaconsfield became Premier. He was down very low in the social scale, and it is thus he writes of his noble poverty and of his companions in misfortune, in that appeal on behalf of our seamen, which stirred up the community as with the voice of a trumpet, and actually forced parliament to legislate. “I don’t wish,” he writes, “to disparage the rich; but I think it may reasonably be doubted whether these qualities are so fully developed in them” (he had been writing of the honesty, of the strong aversion to idleness, of the generosity to one another in adversity, and of the splendid courage of the working classes); “for notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with the claims, reasonable and unreasonable, of poor relations, these qualities are not in such constant exercise, and riches seem, in so many cases, to smother the manliness of their possessors, that their sympathies become not so much narrowed as, so to speak, stratified; they are reserved for the sufferings of their own class, and also the woes of those above them. They seldom tend downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of high courage, like that of the engine-driver who saved his passengers lately from an awful collision by cool courage, than to admire the constantly-exercised fortitude and the tenderness which are the daily characteristics of a British workman’s life.
“You may doubt this. I should once have done so myself; but I have shared their lot; I have lived with them. For months and months I lived in one of the model lodging-houses, established mainly by the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury. There is one in Fetter Lane, another in Hatton Garden; and, indeed, they are scattered all over London. I went there simply because I could not afford a better lodging. I have had to make seven shillings and ninepence halfpenny (three shillings of which I paid for my lodging) last me a whole week, and did it. It is astonishing how little you can live on when you divest yourself of all fancied needs. I had plenty of good wheaten bread to eat all the week, and the half of a herring for a relish (less will do if you can’t afford half, for it is a splendid fish), and good coffee to drink; and I know how much, or rather how little, roast shoulder-of-mutton you can get for twopence for your Sunday’s dinner. Don’t suppose I went there from choice; I went from stern necessity (and this was promotion too), and I went with strong shrinking, with a sense of suffering great humiliation, regarding my being there as a thing to be kept carefully secret from all my old friends. In a word, I considered it only less degrading than spunging upon my friends, or borrowing what I saw no chance of ever being able to pay.
“Now, what did I see there? I found the workmen considerate for each other. I found that they would go out (those who were out of employment), day after day, and patiently trudge miles and miles seeking employment, returning, night after night, unsuccessful and dispirited. They would walk incredibly long distances to places where they heard of a job of work, and this not for a few days, but for very many days. And I have seen such a man sit down wearily by the fire (we had a common room for sitting, and cooking, and everything), with a hungry despondent look—he had not tasted food all day—and accosted by another scarcely less poor than himself, with—‘Here, mate, get this into thee,’ handing him, at the same time, a piece of bread and some cold meat, and afterwards some coffee; and adding, ‘Better luck to-morrow—keep up your pecker;’ and all this without any idea that they were practising the most splendid patience, fortitude, courage, and generosity I had ever seen. You would hear them talk of absent wife and children sometimes—there in a distant workhouse—trade was very bad then—with expressions of affection, and the hope of seeing them again, although the one was irreverently alluded to as my old woman, and the latter as the kids. I very soon got rid of miserable self-pity there, and came to reflect that Dr. Livingstone would probably be thankful for good wheaten bread; and if the bed was of flock and hay, and the sheets of cotton, that better men than I in the Crimea (the war was then going on) would think themselves very lucky to have as good; and then, too, I began to reflect, that when you come to think of it, such as these men were, so were the vast majority of the working classes; that the idle and the drunken we see about public-houses, are but a small minority of them made to appear more—because public-houses are all put in such places; that the great bulk are at home; for the man who has to be up at six in the morning can’t stay up at night; he is in bed early, and is as I found my fellow inmates. * * * Well, it was impossible to indulge in self-pity in circumstances like these; and emulous of the genuine manhood all around me, I set to work again; for what might not be done with youth and health; and simply by preparing myself rather more thoroughly for my business than had previously been considered necessary, I was soon strong enough to live more in accordance with my previous life, and am now able to speak a true word for the genuine men I left behind, simply because my dear parents had given me greater advantages than these men had.” In this confession we see the secrets of Mr. Plimsoll’s ultimate success—the better education his parents had given him, and the courage infused into him by the example of men lower down in the social scale. Under these circumstances he again went to work, and the result was fame and fortune.
The great railway king, Mr. G. Hudson, was, for a time, a money-making M.P., who rose from the linendraper’s shop at York, to be the observed of all observers, the lion of the day, to whom, while his money lasted, the oldest and the proudest aristocracy in the world stood cap in hand. Alas! however, he outlived his wealth. It took to itself wings, and flew away.
The mother of Joseph Hume, M.P., kept a small crockery shop at Montrose; and yet her son went out to India, made a large fortune, and came back to his native land to be a distinguished member of parliament, and a leader in political and economical reform.
Mr. I. Holden, when M.P. for the eastern division of the West Riding of Yorkshire, told a large meeting of the electors at Leeds about his earlier years. “I began life,” he said, “as an operative. I was a worker in a cotton-mill, and when I had worked fourteen hours a-day, I spent two in the evening school. I educated myself by that means till I was able to continue my education by assisting in the education of others; and I sometimes remember with intense emotion, entering, upon a stage-coach, the town of Leeds, unknown, and a perfect stranger, at twenty years of age, in order to be the mathematical master in one of the first schools then in Yorkshire, and almost one of the first in England. I spent many happy months in the town of Leeds.” When he began to take an interest in politics, he watched the course of the two great parties on the subject of Catholic emancipation and the emancipation of the slaves, and became a Liberal.