DRIFT-WOOD.
THE WILLS OF THE TRIUMVIRATE.
"Nothing so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind," says Sir William Blackstone, "as the right of property." Sure it is, that society palpitates whenever a great estate passes to a new owner, disclosing its vastness in the act of transit. Perhaps for this fact we may find another reason in Blackstone, where he says: "There is no foundation in nature why the son should have the right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground because his father had done so before him, or why the occupier of a particular field or of a jewel, when lying on his death-bed, and no longer able to maintain possession, should be entitled to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him." But since the law, to reward thrift and avoid strife, has established this artificial right of disposal, the disparities of fortune, on these signal occasions of transfer, always set us to pondering.
Vanderbilt, last of the three monstrously rich men of New York who have died within three years, furnishes in his will the now tripled evidence of a new ambition in American Crœsuses—an aim to keep their fortunes rolling and greatening for several generations in the exact paths where they were started. Supposing that Mr. Stewart's bequest to Judge Hilton was designed to purchase his entrance into the dry goods firm, we should have a common aim of the triumvirate, since each has put a chosen man into his shoes, as if with the hope to live on in this successor, like Mordecai in "Deronda." The master passion of acquisition is thus striving to outwit death. Astor and Vanderbilt found their second selves in favorite sons; childless Stewart could only take his confidential agent. Each conceivably died in the hope that a successor so carefully selected and endowed would in turn hand over the bulk of his gigantic wealth, in its original channel, to some steward chosen with equal care; so that ages hence the Astor fortune still in houses, the Stewart fortune still in trade, the Vanderbilt fortune still in railways, might flourish under successive guardians, faithful to their tradition and training. The John Jacob, the Cornelius, the Alexander of the past has been blessed with the vision of his millions multiplying as he would have them multiply, and haply has dreamed of accomplishing by his own foresight an entail which he could not create under the laws.
If this be the new tendency that American life is called upon to face, it is at least not hard to account for. The thirst for posthumous fame which inflamed old heroes and poets rages still in days when greatness collects rents, sells dry goods, and corners stocks. And after all, what is there stranger in struggling to prolong after death one's imperious railroad sway, his landlord laws, his massive trade monopolies, than in slaving out one's childless old age in the hard rut of traffic, in order to turn five surplus millions into ten?
To Dives, after a life of accretion, the prospect of frittering his wealth into fragments must be painful. Heirs will waste what he toiled to win. That fortune which grew so great while he rolled it on turns out, after all, but a snowball, to be broken apart and trampled by careless spoilers when he is gone. There are, to be sure, hard-headed philosophers who contemplate coolly the dispersion of their hoard. I remember from boyhood that when somebody rallied Squire Anthony Briggs, of Milldale, on his veteran vigilance in money-getting, saying, "Your children will spend as fast as you have made it," stanch old Tony answered: "If they get as much pleasure from spending my money as I have in making it, they are welcome." But with prodigious fortunes like Astor's and Vanderbilt's, the instinct of accumulation which increases what is already preposterously great may struggle to keep it accumulating after death. When Bishop Timothy sonorously declares from the desk that we brought nothing into this world, neither may we carry anything out, Crœsus in the pew below takes this as a very solemn warning to him—warning to secure betimes the utmost posthumous control of his money that the laws allow. Dombey's soul is not wrapt up in the miser's clutching love of money, but in the money-getting institution of Dombey & Son; and not only in the Dombey & Son of to-day, but the Dombeys & Sons of centuries hence. To found a dry-goods dynasty, a line of railway kings, a house of landed Astors, its owner puts the bulk of his vast wealth into a single hand—in that exegi monumentum spirit common to bard and broker, soldier and salesman. Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam, the millionaire may then triumphantly say.
On the other hand, the Cornells and Licks of our day, wonderfully numerous, have made America renowned by their public uses of wealth, either in lifetime gift or testamentary bequest; and this devotion of private fortune to the common weal is fostered by the observed independence of each generation in pursuing its own mode of life without regard to the customs of ancestors.
But the testamentary aim of the richest trio that ever lived in America was to escape this national trait of beneficence; to substitute the perpetuity of one's business monopoly or family trade; to struggle against any serious division of the enormous fortune, even at the cost of preferences among equal children; to spare not one dollar out of fifty millions for the public; to heap the gigantic hoard, save what for other legatees propriety demands, on some "chip of the old block" or business "bird of a feather." This purpose also influenced their lives. "Magnificence is the decency of the rich," but little magnificence marked the lives of those three rich New Yorkers. Powerful, self-willed, all-conquering they were, but hardly magnificent. Unprecedented and incredible thing in America, neither Stewart nor Vanderbilt left one poor dollar of his fifty or sixty millions to any municipal or charitable purpose. Filled with his posthumous business plans, neither cared for New York as Girard cared for Philadelphia and Hopkins for Baltimore. True, each of the Gotham triumvirate endowed in life an institution of public beneficence—Astor his library, Vanderbilt his college away in Tennessee, Stewart his hotel for women. It is further true that men who, like Vanderbilt and Stewart, give sure pay for many years to thousands of employees, are benefactors. But to do this, and then to leave besides some testamentary memorial to the city where one has heaped up his wealth, has hitherto been the aim of the rich men of America. Girard not only founded his orphan college, ornament and pride of Philadelphia, but left great sums to beautify and improve the city by removing wooden houses and widening thoroughfares. Stewart, scrupulously just in business dealings, deserves public gratitude as the apostle of "one price," and as the cash-selling reformer who protected prudent folk from the higher prices caused in trade by the allowances for bad debts; but, this apart, in the will of Stewart and the will of Stephen Girard, what a world-wide difference of public spirit! That one act of grace that might have tempered his forgetfulness toward New York—the gift of his picture gallery for public uses—even this act Stewart did not do. The contrast is startling between the bequests of an Astor, a Stewart, a Vanderbilt, and those of a Girard, a Peabody, and a Johns Hopkins.