It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch with anxiety the power which employers possess of bringing about a revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an important factor in political questions.
Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England the political power which such a national employment of their wealth would give them—a blindness which is all the more wonderful in what is at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions, and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.
It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by "panem et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost, and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest music might be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the present cost of their stable. As yet however we must be content, we suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front—the purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort—these are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For nobler outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist.