CHAPTER XVII.
A RETROSPECT, CONTINUED.
As I look over the changes that half a century has wrought in the social life of my beloved country, I see some which awaken satisfaction—others which are not so exhilarating. The enormous and rapid increase of wealth is unparalleled in human history. In my boyhood, millionaires were rare; there were hardly a score of them in any one of our cities. The two typical rich men were Stephen Girard in Philadelphia and John Jacob Astor in New York; and their whole fortunes were not equal to the annual income of several of the rich men of to-day. Some of our present millionaires are reservoirs of munificence, and the outflow builds churches, hospitals, asylums, and endows libraries—and sends broad streams of charity through places parched by destitution and suffering. Others are like pools at the base of a hill—they receive the inflow of every descending streamlet or shower, and stagnate into selfishness. Wealth is a tremendous trust; it becomes a dangerous one when it owns its owner. Our Brooklyn philanthropist, the late Mr. Charles Pratt, once said to me: "There is no greater humbug than the idea that the mere possession of wealth makes any man happy. I never got any happiness out of mine until I began to do good with it."
To the faithful steward there is a perpetual reward of good stewardship. No investments yield a more covetable dividend than those made in gifts of public beneficence. When Mr. Morris K. Jesup drives through New York his eyes are gladdened in one street by the "Dewitt Memorial Chapel" that he erected; in another by the Five Points House of Industry, of which he is the president, and in still others by the Young Men's Christian Association and kindred institutions, of which he is a liberal supporter.
Mr. John D. Rockefeller is reputed to have an annual income equal to that of three or four foreign sovereigns; but his inalienable assets are in the universities he has endowed, the churches he has helped to build, the useful societies he has aided, and in the gold mines of public gratitude which he has opened up.
Many of our most munificent millionaires have been the architects of their own fortunes. It is most commonly (with some happy exceptions) the earned wealth, and not the inherited wealth that is bestowed most freely for the public benefit. The Hon. William E. Dodge once stated in a popular lecture that he began his career as a boy on a salary of fifty dollars a year, and his board—part of his duty being to sweep out the store in which he was employed. He lived to distribute a thousand dollars a day to Christian missions, and otherwise objects of benevolence.
There are old men in Pittsburg (or were, not long ago), who remember the bright Scotch lad, Andrew Carnegie, to whom they used to give a dime for bringing telegraph messages from the office in which he was employed. The benefits which he then derived from the use of a free library in that city, have added to his good impulse, to create such a vast number of libraries in many lands that his honored name throws into the shade the names of Bodley and Radcliffe in England, and that of Astor in America. The mention of this latter name tempts me to narrate an amusing story of old John Jacob Astor, the founder of the fortune of that family, and a man who was more noted for acquiring money than for giving it away for any purpose. Mr. Astor came to New York a poor young man. His wealth consisted mainly in real estate, which he purchased at an early day. When the New York and Erie Railroad was projected (it was the first one ever coming directly into New York), my friend, Judge Joseph Hoxie, called on Mr. Astor to subscribe to the stock, telling him that it would add to the value of his real estate. "What do I care for that?" said the shrewd old German, "I never sells, I only buys." "Well," said Judge Hoxie, "your son, William, has subscribed for several shares." "He can do that," was the chuckling reply, "he has got a rich father." It is a fair problem how many such possessors of real estate it would take to build up the prosperity of a great city.
There is one temptation to which great wealth has sometimes subjected its possessors, which demands from me a word of patriotic protest. It is the temptation to use it for political advancement. No fact is more patent than the painful one that some ambitious men have secured public offices, and even bought their way into legislative bodies, by the abundancies of their purses united to skill in manipulating partisan machines. This is a most serious menace to honest popular government. It is one of the very worst forms of a plutocracy. I often think that if Webster and Clay and Calhoun and John Quincy Adams and Sumner and some other giants of a former era could enter the Congressional halls of our day, they might paraphrase the words of Holy Writ and exclaim: "Take the money-changers hence, and make not the temple of a nation's legislation a house of merchandise."
Foreign travel is no longer the novelty that it was once, and many wealthy folk spend much of their time abroad since the Atlantic Ocean has been reduced to a ferry. This growth of European travel has brought its increment of information and culture; but, with new ideas from abroad, have come also some new notions and usages that were better left behind. A prohibitory tariff in that direction would "protect" some of the unostentatiousness of social life that befits a republican people. No young man or woman, who desires to attain proficience in any department of scholarship, classical or scientific, need to betake themselves to the universities of Europe. Those universities have come to us in the shape of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell and our other most richly endowed institutions of learning for both sexes.
Quite too much of the social life of our country is more artificial than formerly, and one result is the growing passion for publicity. Plenty of ambitious people "make their beds in the face of the sun." Many things are now chronicled in the press that were formerly kept behind the closed doors of the home. The details of a dinner or a social company at the fireside become the topics for the gossip of strangers. I sometimes think that the young people of the present day lose much of the romance that used to belong to the halcyon period of courtship. In the somewhat primitive days of my youth, young lovers kept their own secrets, and were startled if their heart affairs were on other people's tongues; but now-a-days marriage engagements are matters of public announcement—not infrequently in the columns of a newspaper! It seems to be forgotten that an engagement to marry may not always end in a marriage. The usage of crowned heads abroad is no warrant for the new fashion, for royalty has no privacies, and queens and empresses choose their own husbands—a prerogative that the stoutest champion of woman's rights has not yet had the hardihood to advocate.