The Map of Life / Conduct and Character

by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

In all these ways the very rich can find ample opportunities for useful benevolence. It is the prerogative of great wealth that it can often cure what others can only palliate, and can establish permanent sources of good which will continue long after the donors have passed away. In dealing with individual cases of distress, rich men who have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate the special circumstances will do well to rely largely on the recommendation of others. If they choose trustworthy, competent and sensible advisers with as much judgment as they commonly show in the management of their private affairs, they are not likely to go astray. There never was a period when a larger amount of intelligent and disinterested labour was employed in careful and detailed examination of the circumstances and needs of the poor. The parish clergyman, the district visitor, the agents of the Charity Organization Society which annually selects its special cases of well-ascertained need, will abundantly furnish them with the knowledge they require.

The advantage or disadvantage of the presence in a country of a large class of men possessing fortunes far exceeding anything that can really administer to their enjoyment is a question which has greatly divided both political economists and moralists. The former were long accustomed to maintain somewhat exclusively that laws and institutions should be established with the object of furthering the greatest possible accumulation of wealth, and that a system of unrestricted competition, coupled with equal laws, giving each man the most complete security in the possession and disposal of his property, was the best means of attaining this end. They urged with great truth that, although under such a system the inequalities of fortune will be enormous, most of the wealth of the very rich will inevitably be distributed in the form of wages, purchases, and industrial enterprises through the community at large, and that, other things being equal, the richest country will on the whole be the happiest. They clearly saw the complete delusion of the common assertions that the more millionaires there are in a country the more paupers will multiply, and that society is dividing between the enormously rich and the abjectly poor. The great industrial communities, in which there are the largest number of very wealthy men, are also the centres in which we find the most prosperous middle class, and the highest and most progressive rates of wages and standards of comfort among the poor. Great corruption in many forms no doubt exists in them, but it can scarcely be maintained with confidence that the standard of integrity is on the whole lower in these than in other countries, and they at least escape what in many poor countries is one of the most fruitful causes of corruption in all branches of administration—the inadequate pay of the servants of the Crown. The path of liberty in the eyes of economists of this school is the path of wisdom, and they were profoundly distrustful of all legislative attempts to restrict or interfere with the course of industrial progress.

In our own generation a somewhat different tendency has manifestly strengthened. It has been said that past political economists paid too much attention to the accumulation and too little to the distribution of wealth. Men have become more sensible to the high level of happiness and moral well-being that has been attained in some of the smaller and somewhat stagnant countries of Europe, where wealth is more generally attained by thrift and steady industry than by great industrial or commercial enterprise, in which there are few large fortunes but little acute poverty, a low standard of luxury, but a high standard of real comfort. The enormous evils that have grown up in wealthy countries, in the form of company-mongering, excessive competition, extravagant and often vicious luxury, and dishonest administration of public funds, are more and more felt, and it is only too true that in these countries there are large and influential circles of society in which all considerations of character, intellect, or manners seem lost in an intense thirst for wealth and for the things that it can give. Sometimes we find vast fortunes in countries where there is but little enterprise and a very low standard of comfort among the people, and where this is the case it is usually due to unequal laws or corrupt administration. In the free, democratic, and industrial communities great fluctuations and disparities of wealth are inevitable, and some of the most colossal fortunes have, no doubt, been made by the evil methods I have described. They are, however, only a minority, and not a very large one. Like all the great successes of life, abnormal accumulation of wealth is usually due to the combination in different proportions of ability, character, and chance, and is not tainted with dishonesty. On the whole, the question that should be asked is not what a man has, but how he obtained it and how he uses it. When wealth is honestly acquired and wisely and generously used, the more rich men there are in a country the better.

There has probably never been a period in the history of the world when the conditions of industry, assisted by the great gold discoveries in several parts of the globe, were so favourable to the formation of enormous fortunes as at present, and when the race of millionaires was so large. The majority belong to the English-speaking race; probably most of their gigantic fortunes have been rapidly accumulated, and bring with them none of the necessary, hereditary, and clearly defined obligations of a great landowner, while a considerable proportion of them have fallen to the lot of men who, through their education or early habits, have not many cultivated or naturally expensive tastes. In England many of the new millionaires become great landowners and set up great establishments. In America, where country tastes are less marked and where the difficulties of domestic service are very great, this is less common. In both countries the number of men with immense fortunes, absolutely at their own disposal, has enormously increased, and the character of their expenditure has become a matter of real national importance.

Much of it, no doubt, goes in simple luxury and ostentation, or in mere speculation, or in restoring old and dilapidated fortunes through the marriages of rank with money which are so characteristic of our time; but much also is devoted to charitable or philanthropic purposes. In this, as in most things, motives are often very blended. To men of such fortunes, such expenditure, even on a large scale, means no real self-sacrifice, and the inducements to it are not always of the highest kind. To some men it is a matter of ambition—a legitimate and useful ambition—to obtain the enduring and honourable fame which attaches to the founder of a great philanthropic or educational establishment. Others find that, in England at least, large philanthropic expenditure is one of the easiest and shortest paths to social success, bringing men and women of low extraction and bad manners into close and frequent connection with the recognised leaders of society; while others again have discovered that it is the quickest way of effacing the stigma which still in some degree attaches to wealth which has been acquired by dishonourable or dubious means. Fashion, social ambition, and social rivalries are by no means unknown in the fields of charity. There are many, however, in whose philanthropy the element of self has no place, and whose sole desire is to expend their money in forms that can be of most real and permanent benefit to others.

Such men have great power, and, if their philanthropic expenditure is wisely guided, it may be of incalculable benefit. I have already indicated many of the channels in which it may safely flow, but one or two additional hints on the subject may not be useless. Perhaps as a general rule these men will find that they can act most wisely by strengthening and enlarging old charities which are really good, rather than by founding new ones. Competition is the soul of industry, but certainly not of charity, and there is in England a deplorable waste of money and machinery through the excessive multiplication of institutions intended for the same objects. The kind of ambition to which I have just referred tends to make men prefer new charities which can be identified with their names; the paid officials connected with charities have become a large and powerful profession, and their influence is naturally used in the same direction; the many different religious bodies in the country often refuse to combine, and each desires to have its own institutions; and there are fashions in charity which, while they greatly stimulate generosity, have too often the effect of diverting it from the older and more unobtrusive forms. On the other hand, one of the most important facts in our present economical condition is that an extraordinary and almost unparalleled development of industrial prosperity has been accompanied by extreme and long-continued agricultural depression and by a great fall in the rate of interest. Wealth in many forms is accumulating with wonderful rapidity, and the increased rate of wages is diffusing prosperity among the working classes; but those who depend directly or indirectly on agricultural rents or on interest of money invested in trust securities have been suffering severely, and they comprise some of the most useful, blameless, and meritorious classes in the community. The same causes that have injured them have fallen with crushing severity on old-established institutions which usually derive their income largely or entirely from the rent of land or from money invested in the public funds. The bitter cry of distress that is rising from the hospitals and many other ancient charities, from the universities, from the clergy of the Established Church, abundantly proves it.

The preference, however, to be given to old charities rather than to new ones is subject to very many exceptions. It does not apply to new countries or to the many cases in which changes and developments of industry have planted vast agglomerations of population in districts which were once but thinly populated, and therefore but little provided with charitable or educational institutions. Nor does it apply to the many cases in which the circumstances of modern life have called into existence new forms of charity, new wants, new dangers and evils to be combated, new departments of knowledge to be cultivated. One of the greatest difficulties of the older universities is that of providing, out of their shrinking endowments, for the teaching of branches of science and knowledge which have only come into existence, or at least into prominence, long after these universities were established, and some of which require not only trained teachers but costly apparatus and laboratories. Increasing international competition and enlarged scientific knowledge have rendered necessary an amount of technical and agricultural education never dreamed of by our ancestors; and the rise of the great provincial towns and the greater intensity of provincial life and provincial patriotism, as well as the changes that have passed over the position both of the working and middle classes, have created a genuine demand for educational establishments of a different type from the older universities. The higher education of women is essentially a nineteenth-century work, and it has been carried on without the assistance of old endowments and with very little help from modern Parliaments. In the distribution of public funds a class which is wholly unrepresented in Parliament seldom gets its fair share; and higher education, like most forms of science, like most of the higher forms of literature, and like many valuable forms of research, never can be self-supporting. There are great branches of knowledge which without established endowments must remain uncultivated, or be cultivated only by men of considerable private means. Some invaluable curative agencies, such as convalescent homes in different countries and climates and for different diseases, have grown up in our own generation, as well as some of the most fruitful forms of medical research and some of the most efficacious methods of giving healthy change and brightness to the lives that are most monotonous and overstrained. Every great revolution in industry, in population, and even in knowledge, brings with it new and special wants, and there are cases in which assisted emigration is one of the best forms of charity.

These are but a few illustrations of the directions in which the large surplus funds which many of the very rich are prepared to expend on philanthropic purposes may profitably go. There is a marked and increasing tendency in our age to meet all the various exigencies of Society, as they arise, by State aid resting on compulsory taxation. In countries where the levels of fortune are such that few men have incomes greatly in excess of their real or factitious wants, this method will probably be necessary; but many of the wants I have described can be better met by the old English method of intelligent private generosity, and in a country in which the number of the very rich is so great and so increasing, this generosity should not be wanting.

FOOTNOTE:

[67] Notes on Life.