Memoirs of a millionaire

by Lucia True Ames Mead

... “Your letter has deeply stirred me. Not that anything you say surprises me, or is new to me; but behind the words, I know, are the sad, dreadful facts for which they stand; and, being a creature endowed with some imagination, I can in some measure realize what that simple statement means, when you say that six millions of your people are on the brink of pauperism.

“Good God! what endless heartaches, what physical misery, what degradation of mind and soul is implied in those few words! I am glad you do not envy me my wealth. I am beginning to think that I am not so much to be envied as I thought at first I might be. I have been amazed, in these last few weeks, to learn from numberless sources of the chagrin, disappointment, and perplexity of many rich men and women who have thought to benefit the world by the ‘charity’ which you so despise. They have put up great institutions, only to find that in many cases it was the least helpful thing that they could do; that a large part of the money was spent on taxes, insurance, agents, servants, go-betweens; that, after all, when they had gathered their orphans or cripples or old women together, they had brought about an utterly cheerless, artificial state of things, and have proved that for the average human being with natural human instincts the poorest home is often more preferable than the most palatial asylum.

“So, set your heart at rest. I am not going to spend my money in that way. Whatever may be the political and social changes which will take place in the next twenty years,—and doubtless they will be many and great,—of one thing I am sure, no new condition of things can be made permanent or harmonious except by means of two things. The first of these is moral character. The second is intellectual insight into cause and effect and relation. In any condition of things we must have righteousness, and we must have trained minds. You will doubtless agree with me that selfishness and ignorance are the two monster dragons that are threatening now, as they always have done, to devour us, only we should differ as to the way in which they are to be slain. You have a definite theory as to how this is to be done, which I do not yet thoroughly understand. I see your goal, but I do not understand how you propose to reach it without doing away with individuality and crushing out some of the deepest human instincts. True, many of our instincts are brutish. There is still the tiger and the ape within us, which, as John Fiske says, is our inheritance of ‘original sin’ from our brute ancestors. I agree with you that such instincts must be eliminated, but how? By dynamite, fear, revolution, legislation?

“You are right: we may make the selfish fear, and that is often a very salutary thing to do if nothing better can be done. A business man was telling me only the other day of the different relations between employers and employees in Fall River and other manufacturing places since the strikes of the last few years.

“But, after all, though fear and legislation can do something to convert a brutal man into a decent man for a time, there must needs be something else,—the gospel of love and humanity, which of his own free will he must choose to accept and apply understandingly.

“I shall not attempt to palliate any of the existing evils, nor, on the other hand, shall I attempt to undermine our present social and political system even if I could. Certainly I shall not try to do this until I am very certain that I see the right method of substituting something better in its place.

“By the way, have you read Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward’? It is very suggestive, and Nationalization of Industries is getting to be more of a fad in Boston than Esoteric Buddhism or Christian Science. Bellamy tells us what we must try to attain; but, alas! he gives little hint of what must be our first step toward the attainment. This is the problem which you and I must help our generation to solve.

“Go on with your socialistic schemes. I believe they contain a half truth; at all events, to talk about them as you do will make people think, for you speak from the deepest conviction. Out of all this sturm und drang period must surely come clear insight and right action: at least I am optimist enough to hope so; and my work shall be to think out the solution, as far as I may, but at all events to do what in me lies to set people to thinking; to make life a little sweeter and better; to infuse into it more hope for a few of my generation, and thus help to make their children ready for the new order of things if it comes.

“In this great city money flows like water. There are streets where, for a mile, every house must be the home of a millionaire, for no one else could afford to live in such a one. Yet, within two miles of these palaces there is the direst want, the most frightful squalor, and the problem of New York is fast getting to be like the problem of London.

“Most of our women dabble a little in charity now and then. They get up charity balls and fairs to satisfy their consciences in that way, and flatter themselves when they spend their money lavishly in luxuries for their own pleasure that they are giving employment to the poor and doing God service. They will sometimes give their money; they will sometimes give a little time to cut out garments at a sewing circle; but not one in five hundred will give her personal service even for a half day a week in coming face to face with those who need the help of her intelligence and her human sympathy.