A Certain Rich Man

by William Allen White

Barclay closed his eyes a moment, in contemplation of the figure, and then broke out in a roaring laugh, "Hanno is a god! Hanno is a god!—get out of here, Henry Myton,—get out of here, I say—this is my busy day," and he laughed the young senator out of the room. But he sat alone in his office grinning, as over and over in his mind his own words rang, "Hanno is a god!" And the foolish parrot of his other self cackled the phrase in his soul for days and days!

It is our high privilege thus to stand close by and watch the wheels of the world go around. In those days of the late nineties Barclay travelled up and down the earth so much in his private car that Jane used to tell Molly Brownwell that living with John was like being a travelling man's wife. But Jane did not seem to appreciate her privilege. She managed to stay at home as much as possible, and sometimes he took the Masons along for company. Mrs. Mason gloried in it, and lived at the great hotels and shopped at the highest-priced antique stores to her heart's delight. Lycurgus' joy was in being interviewed, and the Barclay secretaries got so that they could edit the Mason interviews and keep out the poison, and let the old man swell and swell until the people at home thought he must surely burst with importance at the next town.

One day in the nineties Barclay appropriated a half-million dollars to advertise "Barclay's Best" and a cracker that he was pushing. When the man who placed the business in the newspaper had gone, Barclay sat looking out of the window and said to his advertising manager: "I've got an idea. Why should I pay a million dollars to irresponsible newspapers? I won't do it."

"But we must advertise, Mr. Barclay—you've proved it pays."

"Yes," he returned, "you bet it pays, and I might just as well get something out of it besides advertising. Take this; make five copies of it; I'll give you the addresses later." Barclay squared himself to a stenographer to dictate:—

"Dear Sir: I spend a million dollars a year advertising grain products; you and the packers doubtless spend that much advertising your products and by-products; the railroads spend as much more, and the Oil people probably half as much more. Add the steel products and the lumber products, and we have ten million dollars going into the press of this country. In a crisis we cannot tell how these newspapers will treat us. I think we should organize so that we will know exactly where we stand. Therefore it is necessary absolutely to control the trade advertising of this country. A company to take over the five leading advertising agencies could be formed, for half as much as we spend every year, and we could control nine-tenths of the American trade advertising. We could then put an end to any indiscriminate mobbing of corporations by editors. I will be pleased to hear from you further upon this subject."

A day or two later, when the idea had grown and ramified itself in his mind, he talked it all out to Jane and exclaimed, "How will old Phil Ward's God manage to work it out, as he says, against that proposition? Brains," continued Barclay, "brains—that's what counts in this world. You can't expect the men who dominate this country—who make its wealth, and are responsible for its prosperity, to be at the mercy of a lot of long-nosed reformers who don't know how to cash their own checks."

How little this rich man knew of the world about him! How circumscribed was his vision! With all his goings up and down the earth, with all of his great transactions, with all of his apparent power, how little and sordid was his outlook on life. For he thought he was somebody in this universe, some one of importance, and in his scheme of things he figured out a kind of partnership between himself and Providence—a partnership to run the world in the interests of John Barclay, and of course, wherever possible, with reasonable dividends to Providence.

But a miracle was coming into the world. In the under-consciousnesses of men, sown God only knows how and when and where, sown in the weakness of a thousand blind prophets, the seeds of righteous wrath at greed like John Barclay's were growing during all the years of his triumph. Men scarcely knew it themselves. Growth is so simple and natural a process that its work is done before its presence is known. And so this arrogant man, this miserable, little, limping, brass-eyed, leather-skinned man, looked out at the world around him, and did not see the change that was quickening the hearts of his neighbours.

And yet change was in everything about him. A thousand years are as but a watch in the night, and tick, tock, tick, tock, went the great clock, and the dresses of little Jeanette Barclay slipped down, down, down to her shoe-tops, and as the skirts slipped down she went up. And before her father knew it her shoe-tops sank out of sight, and she was a miss at the last of her teens. But he still gave her his finger when they walked out together, though she was head and shoulders above him.