“Seventy millions; eighty; a hundred; three hundred; I don't just know.”
“I don't suppose you've always felt your great wealth a great blessing?”
“A blessing? There have been times when I felt it a millstone hanged about my neck, and could have wished nothing so much as that I were thrown into the sea. Man, you don't know what a curse I have felt my money to be at such times. When I have given it away, as I have by millions at a time, I have never been sure that I was not doing more harm than good with it. I have hired men to seek out good objects for me, and I have tried my best to find for myself causes and institutions and persons who might be helped without hindering others as worthy, but sometimes it seems as if every dollar of my money carried a blight with it, and infected whoever touched it with a moral pestilence. It has reached a sum where the wildest profligate couldn't spend it, and it grows and grows. It's as if it were a rising flood that had touched my lips, and would go over my head before I could reach the shore. I believe I got it honestly, and I have tried to share it with those whose labor earned it for me. I have founded schools and hospitals and homes for old men and old women, and asylums for children, and the blind, and deaf, and dumb, and halt, and mad. Wherever I have found one of my old workmen in need, and I have looked personally into the matter, I have provided for him fully, short of pauperization. Where I have heard of some gifted youth, I have had him educated in the line of his gift. I have collected a gallery of works of art, and opened it on Sundays as well as week-days to the public free. If there is a story of famine, far or near, I send food by the shipload. If there is any great public calamity, my agents have instructions to come to the rescue without referring the case to me. But it is all useless! The money grows and grows, and I begin to feel that my efforts to employ it wisely and wholesomely are making me a public laughing-stock as well as an easy mark for every swindler with a job or a scheme.” He turned abruptly to me. “But you must often have heard the same from my old friend Strange. We used to talk these things over together, when our money was not the heap that mine is now; and it seems to me I can hear his voice saying the very words I have been using.”
I, too, seemed to hear his voice in the words, and it was as if speaking from his grave.
I looked at Aristides, and read compassion in his dear face; but the face of Cyril remained severe and judicial. He said: “Then, if what you say is true, you cannot think it a hardship if we remove your burden for the time you remain with us. I have consulted with the National and Regional as well as the Communal authorities, and we cannot let you continue to live in the manner you are living here. You must pay your way.”
“I shall be only too glad to do that,” Mr. Thrall returned, more cheerfully. “We have not a great deal of cash in hand, but I can give you my check on London or Paris or New York.”
“In Altruria,” Cyril returned, “we have no use for money. You must pay your way as soon as your present provision from your yacht is exhausted.”
Mr. Thrall turned a dazed look on the young lord, who suggested: “I don't think we follow you. How can Mr. Thrall pay his way except with money?”
“He must pay with work. As soon as you come upon the neighbors here for the necessities of life you must all work. To-morrow or the next day or next week at the furthest you must go to work, or you must starve.”
Then he came out with that text of Scripture which had been so efficient with the crew of the Little Sally: “For even when we were with you this we commanded you, that if any would not work neither should he eat.”