The concrete evidence of my success as represented by my accumulated capital ­outside of my uptown dwelling house ­amounts, as I have previously said, to about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  This is invested principally in railroad and mining stocks, both of which are subject to considerable fluctuation; and I have also substantial holdings in industrial corporations.  Some of these companies I represent professionally.  As a whole, however, my investments may be regarded as fairly conservative.  At any rate they cause me little uneasiness.

My professional income is regular and comes with surprisingly little effort.  I have as clients six manufacturing corporations that pay me retainers of twenty-five hundred dollars each, besides my regular fees for services rendered.  I also represent two banks and a trust company.

All this is fixed business and most of it is attended to by younger men, whom I employ at moderate salaries.  I do almost no detail work myself, and my junior partners relieve me of the drawing of even important papers; so that, though I am constantly at my office, my time is spent in advising and consulting.

I dictate all my letters and rarely take a pen in my hand.  Writing has become laborious and irksome.  I even sign my correspondence with an ingenious rubber stamp that imitates my scrawling signature beyond discovery.  If I wish to know the law on some given point I press a button and tell my managing clerk what I want.  In an hour or two he hands me the authorities covering the issue in question in typewritten form.  It is extraordinarily simple and easy.  Yet only yesterday I heard of a middle-aged man, whom I knew to be a peculiarly well-equipped all-around lawyer, who was ready to give up his private practice and take a place in any reputable office at a salary of thirty-five hundred dollars!

Most of my own time is spent in untangling mixed puzzles of law and fact, and my clients are comparatively few in number, though their interests are large.  Thus I see the same faces over and over again.  I lunch daily at a most respectable eating club; and here, too, I meet the same men over and over again.  I rarely make a new acquaintance downtown; in fact I rarely leave my office during the day.  If I need to confer with any other attorney I telephone.  There are dozens of lawyers in New York whose voices I know well ­yet whose faces I have never seen.

My office is on the nineteenth floor of a white marble building, and I can look down the harbor to the south and up the Hudson to the north.  I sit there in my window like a cliffdweller at the mouth of his cave.  When I walk along Wall Street I can look up at many other hundreds of these caves, each with its human occupant.  We leave our houses uptown, clamber down into a tunnel called the Subway, are shot five miles or so through the earth, and debouch into an elevator that rushes us up to our caves.  Only between my house and the entrance to the Subway am I obliged to step into the open air at all.  A curious life!  And I sit in my chair and talk to people in multitudes of other caves near by, or caves in New Jersey, Washington or Chicago.

Louis XI used to be called “the human spider” by reason of his industry, but we modern office men are far more like human spiders than he, as we sit in the center of our webs of invisible wires.  We wait and wait, and our lines run out across the length and breadth of the land ­sometimes getting tangled, to be sure, so that it is frequently difficult to decide just which spider owns the web; but we sit patiently doing nothing save devising the throwing out of other lines.

We weave, but we do not build; we manipulate, buy, sell and lend, quarrel over the proceeds, and cover the world with our nets, while the ants and the bees of mankind labor, construct and manufacture, and struggle to harness the forces of Nature.  We plan and others execute.  We dicker, arrange, consult, cajole, bribe, pull our wires and extort; but we do it all in one place ­the center of our webs and the webs are woven in our caves.

I figure that I spend about six hours each day in my office; that I sleep nearly nine hours; that I am in transit on surface cars and in subways at least one hour and a half more; that I occupy another hour and a half in bathing, shaving and dressing, and an hour lunching at midday.  This leaves a margin of five hours a day for all other activities.

Could even a small portion of this time be spent consecutively in reading in the evening, I could keep pace with current thought and literature much better than I do; or if I spent it with my son and daughters I should know considerably more about them than I do now, which is practically nothing.  But the fact is that every evening from the first of November to the first of May the motor comes to the door at five minutes to eight and my wife and I are whirled up or down town to a dinner party ­that is, save on those occasions when eighteen or twenty people are whirled to us.

This short recital of my daily activities is sufficient to demonstrate that I lead an exceedingly narrow and limited existence.  I do not know any poor men, and even the charities in which I am nominally interested are managed by little groups of rich ones.  The truth is, I learned thirty years ago that if one wants to make money one must go where money is and cultivate the people who have it.  I have no petty legal business ­there is nothing in it.  If I cannot have millionaires for clients I do not want any.  The old idea that the young country lawyer could shove a pair of socks into his carpetbag, come to the great city, hang out his shingle and build up a practice has long since been completely exploded.  The best he can do now is to find a clerkship at twelve hundred dollars a year.

Big business gravitates to the big offices; and when the big firms look round for junior partners they do not choose the struggling though brilliant young attorney from the country, no matter how large his general practice may have become; but they go after the youth whose father is a director in forty corporations or the president of a trust.

In the same way what time I have at my disposal to cultivate new acquaintances I devote not to the merely rich and prosperous but to the multi-millionaire ­if I can find him ­who does not even know the size of his income.  I have no time to waste on the man who is simply earning enough to live quietly and educate his family.  He cannot throw anything worth while in my direction; but a single crumb from the magnate’s table may net me twenty or thirty thousand dollars.  Thus, not only for social but for business reasons, successful men affiliate habitually only with rich people.  I concede that is a rather sordid admission, but it is none the truth.

Money is the symbol of success; it is what we are all striving to get, and we naturally select the ways and means best adapted for the purpose.  One of the simplest is to get as near it as possible and stay there.  If I make a friend of a struggling doctor or professor he may invite me to draw his will, which I shall either have to do for nothing or else charge him fifty dollars for; but the railroad president with whom I often lunch, and who is just as agreeable personally, may perhaps ask me to reorganize a railroad.  I submit that, selfish as it all seems when I write it down, it would be hard to do otherwise.

I do not deliberately examine each new candidate for my friendship and select or reject him in accordance with a financial test; but what I do is to lead a social and business life that will constantly throw me only with rich and powerful men.  I join only rich men’s clubs; I go to resorts in the summer frequented only by rich people; and I play only with those who can, if they will, be of advantage to me.  I do not do this deliberately; I do it instinctively ­now.  I suppose at one time it was deliberate enough, but to-day it comes as natural as using my automobile instead of a street car.

We have heard a great deal recently about a so-called Money Trust.  The truth of the matter is that the Money Trust is something vastly greater than any mere aggregation of banks; it consists in our fundamental trust in money.  It is based on our instinctive and ineradicable belief that money rules the destinies of mankind.

Everything is estimated by us in money.  A man is worth so and so much ­in dollars.  The millionaire takes precedence of everybody, except at the White House.  The rich have things their own way ­and every one knows it.  Ashamed of it?  Not at all.  We are the greatest snobs in the civilized world, and frankly so.  We worship wealth because at present we desire only the things wealth can buy.

The sea, the sky, the mountains, the clear air of autumn, the simple sports and amusements of our youth and of the comparatively poor, pleasures in books, in birds, in trees and flowers, are disregarded for the fierce joys of acquisition, of the ownership in stocks and bonds, or for the no less keen delight in the display of our own financial superiority over our fellows.

We know that money is the key to the door of society.  Without it our sons will not get into the polo-playing set or our daughters figure in the Sunday supplements.  We want money to buy ourselves a position and to maintain it after we have bought it.

We want house on the sunny side of the street, with façades of graven marble; we want servants in livery and in buttons ­or in powder and breeches if possible; we want French chefs and the best wine and tobacco, twenty people to dinner on an hour’s notice, supper parties and a little dance afterward at Sherry’s or Delmonico’s, a box at the opera and for first nights at the theaters, two men in livery for our motors, yachts and thirty-footers, shooting boxes in South Carolina, salmon water in New Brunswick, and regular vacations, besides, at Hot Springs, Aiken and Palm Beach; we want money to throw away freely and like gentlemen at Canfield’s, Bradley’s and Monte Carlo; we want clubs, country houses, saddle-horses, fine clothes and gorgeously dressed women; we want leisure and laughter, and a trip or so to Europe every year, our names at the top of the society column, a smile from the grand dame in the tiara and a seat at her dinner table ­these are the things we want, and since we cannot have them without money we go after the money first, as the sine qua non.

We want these things for ourselves and we want them for our children.  We hope our grandchildren will have them also, though about that we do not care so much.  We want ease and security and the relief of not thinking whether we can afford to do things.  We want to be lords of creation and to pass creation on to our descendants, exactly as did the nobility of the Ancien Regime.

At the present time money will buy anything, from a place in the vestry of a swell church to a seat in the United States Senate ­an election to Congress, a judgeship or a post in the diplomatic service.  It will buy the favor of the old families or a decision in the courts.  Money is the controlling factor in municipal politics in New York.  The moneyed group of Wall Street wants an amenable mayor ­a Tammany mayor preferred ­so that it can put through its contracts.  You always know where to find a regular politician.  One always knew where to find Dick Croker.  So the Traction people pour the contents of their coffers into the campaign bags.

Until very recently the Supreme Court judges of New York bought their positions by making substantial contributions to the Tammany treasury.  The inferior judgeships went considerably cheaper.  A man who stood in with the Big Boss might get a bargain.  I have done business with politicians all my life and I have never found it necessary to mince my words.  If I wanted a favor I always asked exactly what it was going to cost ­and I always got the favor.

No one needs to hunt very far for cases where the power of money has influenced the bench in recent times.  The rich man can buy his son a place in any corporation or manufacturing company.  The young man may go in at the bottom, but he will shoot up to the top in a year or two, with surprising agility, over the heads of a couple of thousand other and better men.  The rich man can defy the law and scoff at justice; while the poor man, who cannot pay lawyers for delay, goes to prison.  These are the veriest platitudes of demagogy, but they are true ­absolutely and undeniably true.

We know all this and we act accordingly, and our children imbibe a like knowledge with their mother’s or whatever other properly sterilized milk we give them as a substitute.  We, they and everybody else know that if enough money can be accumulated the possessor will be on Easy Street for the rest of his life ­not merely the Easy Street of luxury and comfort, but of security, privilege and power; and because we like Easy Street rather than the Narrow Path we devote ourselves to getting there in the quickest possible way.

We take no chances on getting our reward in the next world.  We want it here and now, while we are sure of it ­on Broadway, at Newport or in Paris.  We do not fool ourselves any longer into thinking that by self-sacrifice here we shall win happiness in the hereafter.  That is all right for the poor, wretched and disgruntled.  Even the clergy are prone to find heaven and hell in this world rather than in the life after death; and the decay of faith leads us to feel that a purse of gold in the hand is better than a crown of the same metal in the by-and-by.  We are after happiness, and to most of us money spells it.

The man of wealth is protected on every side from the dangers that beset the poor.  He can buy health and immunity from anxiety, and he can install his children in the same impregnable position.  The dust of his motor chokes the citizen trudging home from work.  He soars through life on a cushioned seat, with shock absorbers to alleviate all the bumps.  No wonder we trust in money!  We worship the golden calf far more than ever did the Israelites beneath the crags of Sinai.  The real Money Trust is the tacit conspiracy by which those who have the money endeavor to hang on to it and keep it among themselves.  Neither at the present time do great fortunes tend to dissolve as inevitably as formerly.

Oliver Wendell Holmes somewhere analyzes the rapid disintegration of the substantial fortunes of his day and shows how it is, in fact, but “three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.”  A fortune of two hundred thousand dollars divided among four children, each of whose share is divided among four grandchildren, becomes practically nothing at all ­in only two.  But could the good doctor have observed the tendencies of to-day he would have commented on a new phenomenon, which almost counteracts the other.

It may be, and probably is, the fact that comparatively small fortunes still tend to disintegrate.  This was certainly the rule during the first half of the nineteenth century in New England, when there was no such thing as a distinctly moneyed class, and when the millionaire was a creature only of romance.  But when, as to-day, fortunes are so large that it is impossible to spend or even successfully give away the income from them, a new element is introduced that did not exist when Doctor Holmes used to meditate in his study on the Back Bay overlooking the placid Charles.

At the present time big fortunes are apt to gain by mere accretion what they lose by division; and the owner of great wealth has opportunities for investment undreamed of by the ordinary citizen who must be content with interest at four per cent and no unearned increment on his capital.  This fact might of itself negative the tendency of which he speaks; but there is a much more potent force working against it as well.  That is the absolute necessity, induced by the demands of modern metropolitan life, of keeping a big fortune together ­or, if it must be divided, of rehabilitating it by marriage.

There was a time not very long ago when one rarely heard of a young man or young woman of great wealth marrying anybody with an equal fortune.  To do so was regarded with disapproval, and still is in some communities.  To-day it is the rule instead of the exception.  Now we habitually speak in America of the “alliances of great families.”  There are two reasons for this ­first, that being a multi-millionaire is becoming, as it were, a sort of recognized profession, having its own sports, its own methods of business and its own interests; second, that the luxury of to-day is so enervating and insidious that a girl or youth reared in what is called society cannot be comfortable, much less happy, on the income of less than a couple of million dollars.

As seems to be demonstrated by the table of my own modest expenditure in a preceding article, the income of but a million dollars will not support any ordinary New York family in anything like the luxury to which the majority of our young people ­even the sons and daughters of men in moderate circumstances ­are accustomed.

Our young girls are reared on the choicest varieties of food, served with piquant sauces to tempt their appetites; they are permitted to pick and choose, and to refuse what they think they do not like; they are carried to and from their schools, music and dancing lessons in motors, and are taught to regard public conveyances as unhealthful and inconvenient; they never walk; they are given clothes only a trifle less fantastic and bizarre than those of their mothers, and command the services of maids from their earliest years; they are taken to the theater and the hippodrome, and for the natural pleasures of childhood are given the excitement of the footlights and the arena.

As they grow older they are allowed to attend late dances that necessitate remaining in bed the next morning until eleven or twelve o’clock; they are told that their future happiness depends on their ability to attract the right kind of man; they are instructed in every art save that of being useful members of society; and in the ease, luxury and vacuity with which they are surrounded their lives parallel those of demi-mondaines.  Indeed, save for the marriage ceremony, there is small difference between them.  The social butterfly flutters to the millionaire as naturally as the night moth of the Tenderloin.  Hence the tendency to marry money is greater than ever before in the history of civilization.

Frugal, thrifty lives are entirely out of fashion.  The solid, self-respecting class, which wishes to associate with people of equal means, is becoming smaller and smaller.  If an ambitious mother cannot afford to rent a cottage at Newport or Bar Harbor she takes her daughter to a hotel or boarding house there, in the hope that she will be thrown in contact with young men of wealth.  The young girl in question, whose father is perhaps a hardworking doctor or business man, at home lives simply enough; but sacrifices are made to send her to a fashionable school, where her companions fill her ears with stories of their motors, trips to Europe, and the balls they attend during the vacations.  She becomes inoculated with the poison of social ambition before she comes out.

Unable by reason of the paucity of the family resources to buy luxuries for herself, she becomes a parasite and hanger-on of rich girls.  If she is attractive and vivacious so much the better.  Like the shopgirl blinded by the glare of Broadway, she flutters round the drawing rooms and country houses of the ultra-rich seeking to make a match that will put luxury within her grasp; but her chances are not so good as formerly.

To-day the number of large fortunes has increased so rapidly that the wealthy young man has no difficulty in choosing an equally wealthy mate whose mental and physical attractions appear, and doubtless are, quite as desirable as those of the daughter of poorer parents.  The same instinct to which I have confessed myself, as a professional man, is at work among our daughters and sons.  They may not actually judge individuals by the sordid test of their ability to purchase ease and luxury, but they take care to meet and associate with only those who can do so.

In this their parents are their ofttimes unconscious accomplices.  The worthy young man of chance acquaintance is not invited to call ­or, if he is, is not pressed to stay to dinner.  “Oh, he does not know our crowd!” explains the girl to herself.  The crowd, on analysis, will probably be found to contain only the sons and daughters of fathers and mothers who can entertain lavishly and settle a million or so on their offspring at marriage.

There is a constant attraction of wealth for wealth.  Poverty never attracted anything.  If our children have money of their own that is a good reason to us why they should marry more money.  We snarl angrily at the penniless youth, no matter how capable and intelligent, who dares cast his eyes on our daughter.  We make it quite unambiguous that we have other plans for her ­plans that usually include a steam yacht and a shooting box north of Inverness.

There is nothing more vicious than the commonly expressed desire of parents in merely moderate circumstances to give their children what are ordinarily spoken of as “opportunities.”  “We wish our daughters to have every opportunity ­the best opportunities,” they say, meaning an equal chance with richer girls of qualifying themselves for attracting wealthy men and of placing themselves in their way.  In reality opportunities for what? ­of being utterly miserable for the rest of their lives unless they marry out of their own class.

The desire to get ahead that is transmitted from the American business man to his daughter is the source of untold bitterness ­for, though he himself may fail in his own struggle, he has nevertheless had the interest of the game; but she, an old maid, may linger miserably on, unwilling to share the domestic life of some young man more than her equal in every respect.

There is a subtle freemasonry among those who have to do with money.  Young men of family are given sinécures in banks and trust companies, and paid many times the salaries their services are worth.  The inconspicuous lad who graduates from college the same year as one who comes from a socially prominent family will slave in a downtown office eight hours a day for a thousand dollars a year, while his classmate is bowing in the ladies at the Fifth Avenue Branch ­from ten to three o’clock ­at a salary of five thousand dollars.  Why?  Because he knows people who have money and in one way or another may be useful sometime to the president in a social way.

The remuneration of those of the privileged class who do any work at all is on an entirely different basis from that of those who need it.  The poor boy is kept on as a clerk, while the rich one is taken into the firm.  The old adage says that “Kissing goes by favor”; and favors, financial and otherwise, are given only to those who can offer something in return.  The tendency to concentrate power and wealth extends even to the outer rim of the circle.  It is an intangible conspiracy to corner the good things and send the poor away empty.  As I see it going on round me, it is a heartless business.

Society is like an immense swarm of black bees settled on a honey-pot.  The leaders, who flew there first, are at the top, gorged and distended.  Round, beneath and on them crawl thousands of others thirsting to feed on the sweet, liquid gold.  The pot is covered with them, layer on layer ­buzzing hungrily; eager to get as near as possible to the honey, even if they may not taste it.  A drop falls on one and a hundred fly on him and lick it off.  The air is alive with those who are circling about waiting for an advantageous chance to wedge in between their comrades.  They will, with one accord, sting to death any hapless creature who draws near.

Frankly I should not be enough of a man to say these things if my identity were disclosed, however much they ought to be said.  Neither should I make the confessions concerning my own career that are to follow; for, though they may evidence a certain shrewdness on my own part, I do not altogether feel that they are to my credit.

When my wife and I first came to New York our aims and ideals were simple enough.  I had letters to the head of a rather well-known firm on Wall Street and soon found myself its managing clerk at one hundred dollars a month.  The business transacted in the office was big business ­corporation work, the handling of large estates, and so on.  During three years I was practically in charge of and responsible for the details of their litigations; the net profit divided by the two actual members of the firm was about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  The gross was about one hundred and eighty thousand, of which twenty thousand went to defray the regular office expenses ­including rent, stenographers and ordinary law clerks ­while ten thousand was divided among the three men who actually did most of the work.

The first of these was a highly trained lawyer about forty-five years of age, who could handle anything from a dog-license matter before a police justice to the argument of a rebate case in the United States Supreme Court.  He was paid forty-five hundred dollars a year and was glad to get it.  He was the active man of the office.  The second man received thirty-five hundred dollars, and for that sum furnished all the special knowledge needed in drafting railroad mortgages and intricate legal documents of all sorts.  The third was a chap of about thirty who tried the smaller cases and ran the less important corporations.

The two heads of the firm devoted most of their time to mixing with bankers, railroad officials and politicians, and spent comparatively little of it at the office; but they got the business ­somehow.  I suppose they found it because they went out after it.  It was doubtless quite legitimate.  Somebody must track down the game before the hunter can do the shooting.  At any rate they managed to find plenty of it and furnished the work for the other lawyers to do.

I soon made up my mind that in New York brains were a pretty cheap commodity.  I was anxious to get ahead; but there was no opening in the firm and there were others ready to take my place the moment it should become vacant.  I was a pretty fair lawyer and had laid by in the bank nearly a thousand dollars; so I went to the head of the firm and made the proposition that I should work at the office each day until one o’clock and be paid half of what I was then getting ­that is, fifty dollars a month.  In the afternoons an understudy should sit at my desk, while I should be free.

I then suggested that the firm might divide with me the proceeds of any business I should bring in.  My offer was accepted; and the same afternoon I went to the office of a young stockbroker I knew and stayed there until three o’clock.  The next day I did the same thing, and the day after.  I did not buy any stocks, but I made myself agreeable to the group about the ticker and formed the acquaintance of an elderly German, who was in the chewing-gum business and who amused himself playing the market.

It was not long before he invited me to lunch with him and I took every opportunity to impress him with my legal acumen.  He had a lawyer of his own already, but I soon saw that the impression I was making would have the effect I desired; and presently, as I had confidently expected, he gave me a small legal matter to attend to.  Needless to say it was accomplished with care, celerity and success.  He gave me another.  For six months I dogged that old German’s steps every day from one o’clock in the afternoon until twelve at night.  I walked, talked, drank beer and played pinochle with him, sat in his library in the evenings, and took him and his wife to the theater.

At the end of that period he discharged his former attorney and retained me.  The business was easily worth thirty-five hundred dollars a year, and within a short time the Chicle Trust bought out his interests and I became a director in it and one of its attorneys.

I had already severed my connection with the firm and had opened an office of my own.  Among the directors in the trust with whom I was thrown were a couple of rich young men whose fathers had put them on the board merely for purposes of representation.  These I cultivated with the same assiduity as I had used with the German.  I spent my entire time gunning for big game.  I went after the elephants and let the sparrows go.  It was only a month or so before my acquaintance with these two boys ­for they were little else ­had ripened into friendship.  My wife and I were invited to visit at their houses and I was placed in contact with their fathers.  From these I soon began to get business.  I have kept it ­kept it to myself.  I have no real partners to steal it away from me.

I am now the same kind of lawyer as the two men who composed the firm for which I slaved at a hundred dollars a month.  I find the work for my employees to do.  I am now an exploiter of labor.  It is hardly necessary for me to detail the steps by which I gradually acquired what is known as a gilt-edged practice; but it was not by virtue of my legal abilities, though they are as good as the average.  I got it by putting myself in the eye of rich people in every way open to me.  I even joined a fashionable church ­it pains me to write this ­for the sole purpose of becoming a member of the vestry and thus meeting on an intimate footing the half-dozen millionaire merchants who composed it.  One of them gave me his business, made me his trustee and executor; and then I resigned from the vestry.

I always made myself persona grata to those who could help me along, wore the best clothes I could buy, never associated with shabby people, and appeared as much as possible in the company of my financial betters.  It was the easier for me to do this because my name was not Irish, German or Hebraic.  I had a good appearance, manners and an agreeable gloss of culture and refinement.  I was tactful, considerate, and tried to strike a personal note in my intercourse with people who were worth while; in fact I made it a practice ­and still do so ­to send little mementos to my newer acquaintances ­a book or some such trifle ­with a line expressing my pleasure at having met them.

I know a considerable number of doctors, as well as lawyers, who have built up lucrative practices by making love to their female clients and patients.  That I never did; but I always made it a point to flatter any women I took in to dinner, and I am now the trustee or business adviser for at least half a dozen wealthy widows as a direct consequence.

One reason for my success is, I discovered very early in the game that no woman believes she really needs a lawyer.  She consults an attorney not for the purpose of getting his advice, but for sympathy and his approval of some course she has already decided on and perhaps already followed.  A lawyer who tells a woman the truth thereby loses a client.  He has only to agree with her and compliment her on her astuteness and sagacity to intrench himself forever in her confidence.

A woman will do what she wants to do ­every time.  She goes to a lawyer to explain why she intends to do it.  She wants to have a man about on whom she can put the blame if necessary, and is willing to pay ­moderately ­for the privilege.  She talks to a lawyer when no one else is willing to listen to her, and thoroughly enjoys herself.  He is the one man who ­unless he is a fool ­cannot talk back.

Another fact to which I attribute a good deal of my professional eclat is, that I never let any of my social friends forget that I was a lawyer as well as a good fellow; and I always threw a hearty bluff at being prosperous, even when a thousand or two was needed to cover the overdraft in my bank account.  It took me about ten years to land myself firmly among the class to which I aspired, and ten years more to make that place impregnable.

To-day we are regarded as one of the older if not one of the old families in New York.  I no longer have to lick anybody’s boots, and until I began to pen these memoirs I had really forgotten that I ever had.  Things come my way now almost of themselves.  All I have to do is to be on hand in my office ­cheerful, hospitable, with a good story or so always on tap.  My junior force does the law work.  Yet I challenge anybody to point out anything dishonorable in those tactics by which I first got my feet on the lower rungs of the ladder of success.

It may perhaps be that I should prefer to write down here the story of how, simply by my assiduity and learning, I acquired such a reputation for a knowledge of the law that I was eagerly sought out by a horde of clamoring clients who forced important litigations on me.  Things do not happen that way in New York to-day.

Should a young man be blamed for getting on by the easiest way he can?  Life is too complex; the population too big.  People have no accurate means of finding out who the really good lawyers or doctors are.  If you tell them you are at the head of your profession they are apt to believe you, particularly if you wear a beard and are surrounded by an atmosphere of solemnity.  Only a man’s intimate circle knows where he is or what he is doing at any particular time.

I remember a friend of mine who was an exceedingly popular member of one of the exclusive Fifth Avenue clubs, and who, after going to Europe for a short vacation, decided to remain abroad for a couple of years.  At the end of that time he returned to New York hungry for his old life and almost crazy with delight at seeing his former friends.  Entering the club about five o’clock he happened to observe one of them sitting by the window.  He approached him enthusiastically, slapped him on the shoulder, extended his hand and cried: 

“Hello, old man!  It’s good to see you again!”

The other man looked at him in a puzzled sort of way without moving.

“Hello, yourself!” he remarked languidly.  “It’s good to see you, all right ­but why make so much damned fuss about it?”

The next sentence interchanged between the two developed the fact that he was totally ignorant that his friend had been away at all.  This is by no means a fantastic illustration.  It happens every day.  That is one of the joys of living in New York.  You can get drunk, steal a million or so, or run off with another man’s wife ­and no one will hear about it until you are ready for something else.  In such a community it is not extraordinary that most people are taken at their face value.  Life moves at too rapid a pace to allow us to find out much about anybody ­even our friends.  One asks other people to dinner simply because one has seen them at somebody’s else house.

I found it at first very difficult ­in fact almost impossible ­to spur my wife on to a satisfactory cooperation with my efforts to make the hand of friendship feed the mouth of business.  She rather indignantly refused to meet my chewing-gum client or call on his wife.  She said she preferred to keep her self-respect and stay in the boarding-house where we had resided since we moved to the city; but I demonstrated to her by much argument that it was worse than snobbish not to be decently polite to one’s business friends.  It was not their fault if they were vulgar.  One might even help them to enlarge their lives.  Gradually she came round; and as soon as the old German had given me his business she was the first to suggest moving to an apartment hotel uptown.

For a long time, however, she declined to make any genuine social effort.  She knew two or three women from our neighborhood who were living in the city, and she used to go and sit with them in the afternoons and sew and help take care of the children.  She said they and their husbands were good enough for her and that she had no aspirations toward society.  An evening at the theater ­in the balcony ­every two weeks or so, and a rubber of whist on Saturday night, with a chafing-dish supper afterward, was all the excitement she needed.  That was twenty-five years ago.  To-day it is I who would put on the brakes, while she insists on shoveling soft coal into the social furnace.

Her metamorphosis was gradual but complete.  I imagine that her first reluctance to essay an acquaintance with society arose out of embarrassment and bashfulness.  At any rate she no sooner discovered how small a bluff was necessary for success than she easily outdid me in the ingenuity and finesse of her social strategy.  It seemed to be instinctive with her.  She was always revising her calling lists and cutting out people who were no longer socially useful; and having got what she could out of a new acquaintance, she would forget her as completely as if she had never made her the confidante of her inmost thoughts about other and less socially desirable people.

It seems a bit cold-blooded ­this criticism of one’s wife; but I know that, however much of a sycophant I may have been in my younger days, my wife has outdone me since then.  Presently we were both in the swim, swept off our feet by the current and carried down the river of success, willy-nilly, toward its mouth ­to a safe haven, I wonder, or the deluge of a devouring cataract?

The methods I adopted are those in general use, either consciously or unconsciously, among people striving for success in business, politics or society in New York.  It is a struggle for existence, precisely like that which goes on in the animal world.  Only those who have strength or cunning survive to achieve success.  Might makes right to an extent little dreamed of by most of us.  Nobody dares to censure or even mildly criticize one who has influence enough to do him harm.  We are interested only in safeguarding or adding to the possessions we have already secured.  We are wise enough to “play safe.”  To antagonize one who might assist in depriving us of some of them is contrary to the laws of Nature.

Our thoughts are for ourselves and our children alone.  The devil take everybody else!  We are safe, warm and comfortable ourselves; we exist without actual labor; and we desire our offspring to enjoy the same ease and safety.  The rest of mankind is nothing to us, except a few people it is worth our while to be kind to ­personal servants and employees.  We should not hesitate to break all ten of the Commandments rather than that we and our children should lose a few material comforts.  Anything, save that we should have really to work for a living!

There are essentially two sorts of work:  first ­genuine labor, which requires all a man’s concentrated physical or mental effort; and second ­that work which takes the laborer to his office at ten o’clock and, after an easy-going administrative morning, sets him at liberty at three or four.

The officer of an uptown trust company or bank is apt to belong to the latter class.  Or perhaps one is in real estate and does business at the dinner tables of his friends.  He makes love and money at the same time.  His salary and commissions correspond somewhat to the unearned increment on the freeholds in which he deals.  These are minor illustrations, but a majority of the administrative positions in our big corporations carry salaries out of all proportion to the services rendered.

These are the places my friends are all looking for ­for themselves or their children.  The small stockholder would not vote the president of his company a salary of one hundred thousand dollars a year, or the vice-president fifty thousand dollars; but the rich man who controls the stock is willing to give his brother or his nephew a soft snap.  From what I know of corporate enterprise in these United States, God save the minority stockholder!  But we and our brothers and sons and nephews must live ­on Easy Street.  We must be able to give expensive dinners and go to the theater and opera, and take our families to Europe ­and we can’t do it without money.

We must be able to keep up our end without working too hard, to be safe and warm, well fed and smartly turned out, and able to call in a specialist and a couple of trained nurses if one of the children falls ill; we want thirty-five feet of southerly exposure instead of seventeen, menservants instead of maid-servants, and a new motor every two years.

We do not object to working ­that is to say, we pride ourselves on having a job.  We like to be moderately busy.  We would not have enough to amuse us all day if we did not go to the office in the morning; but what we do is not work!  It is occupation perhaps ­but there is no labor about it, either of mind or body.  It is a sinecure ­a “cinch.”  We could stay at home and most of us would not be missed.  It is not the seventy-five-hundred-dollar-a-year vice-president but the eight-hundred-and-fifty-dollar clerk for want of whom the machine would stop if he were sick.  Our labor is a kind of masculine light housework.

We probably have private incomes, thanks to our fathers or great uncles ­not large enough to enable us to cut much of a dash, to be sure, but sufficient to give us confidence ­and the proceeds of our daily toil, such as it is, go toward the purchase of luxuries merely.  Because we are in business we are able to give bigger and more elegant dinner parties, go to Palm Beach in February, and keep saddle-horses; but we should be perfectly secure without working at all.

Hence we have a sense of independence about it.  We feel as if it were rather a favor on our part to be willing to go into an office; and we expect to be paid vastly more proportionately than the fellow who needs the place in order to live:  so we cut him out of it at a salary three times what he would have been paid had he got the job, while he keeps on grinding at the books as a subordinate.  We come down late and go home early, drop in at the club and go out to dinner, take in the opera, wear furs, ride in automobiles, and generally boss the show ­for the sole reason that we belong to the crowd who have the money.  Very likely if we had not been born with it we should die from malnutrition, or go to Ward’s Island suffering from some variety of melancholia brought on by worry over our inability to make a living.

I read the other day the true story of a little East Side tailor who could not earn enough to support himself and his wife.  He became half-crazed from lack of food and together they resolved to commit suicide.  Somehow he secured a small 22-caliber rook rifle and a couple of cartridges.  The wife knelt down on the bed in her nightgown, with her face to the wall, and repeated a prayer while he shot her in the back.  When he saw her sink to the floor dead he became so unnerved that, instead of turning the rifle on himself, he ran out into the street, with chattering teeth, calling for help.

This tragedy was absolutely the result of economic conditions, for the man was a hardworking and intelligent fellow, who could not find employment and who went off his head from lack of nourishment.

Now “I put it to you,” as they say in the English law courts, how much of a personal sacrifice would you have made to prevent this tragedy?  What would that little East Side Jewess’ life have been worth to you?  She is dead.  Her soul may or may not be with God.  As a suicide the Church would say it must be in hell.  Well, how much would you have done to preserve her life or keep her soul out of hell?

Frankly, would you have parted with five hundred dollars to save that woman’s life?  Five hundred dollars?  Let me tell you that you would not voluntarily have given up smoking cigars for one year to avoid that tragedy!  Of course you would have if challenged to do so.  If the fact that the killing could be avoided in some such way or at a certain price, and the discrepancy between the cost and the value of the life were squarely brought to your particular attention, you might and probably would do something.  How much is problematical.

Let us do you the credit of saying that you would give five hundred dollars ­and take it out of some other charity.  But what if you were given another chance to save a life for five hundred dollars?  All right; you will save that too.  Now a third!  You hesitate.  That will be spending fifteen hundred dollars ­a good deal.  Still you decide to do it.  Yet how embarrassing!  You find an opportunity to save a fourth, a fifth ­a hundred lives at the same price!  What are you going to do?

We all of us have such a chance in one way or another.  The answer is that, in spite of the admonition of Christ to sell our all and give to the poor, and others of His teachings as contained in the Sermon on the Mount, you probably, in order to save the lives of persons unknown to you, would not sacrifice a single substantial material comfort for one year; and that your impulse to save the lives of persons actually brought to your knowledge would diminish, fade away and die in direct proportion to the necessity involved of changing your present luxurious mode of life.

Do you know any rich woman who would sacrifice her automobile in order to send convalescents to the country?  She may be a very charitable person and in the habit of sending such people to places where they are likely to recover health; but, no matter how many she actually sends, there would always be eight or ten more who could share in that blessed privilege if she gave up her motor and used the money for the purpose.  Yet she does not do so and you do not do so; and, to be quite honest, you would think her a fool if she did.

What an interesting thing it would be if we could see the mental processes of some one of our friends who, unaware of our knowledge of his thoughts, was confronted with the opportunity of saving a life or accomplishing a vast good at a great sacrifice of his worldly possessions!

Suppose, for instance, he could save his own child by spending fifty thousand dollars in doctors, hospitals and nurses.  Of course he would do so without a moment’s hesitation, even if that was his entire fortune.  But suppose the child were a nephew?  We see him waver a little.  A cousin ­there is a distinct pause.  Shall he pauperize himself just for a cousin?  How about a mere social acquaintance?  Not much!  He might in a moment of excitement jump overboard to save somebody from drowning; but it would have to be a dear friend or close relative to induce him to go to the bank and draw out all the money he had in the world to save that same life.

The cities are full of lives that can be saved simply by spending a little money; but we close our eyes and, with our pocket-books clasped tight in our hands, pass by on the other side.  Why?  Not because we do not wish to deprive ourselves of the necessaries of life or even of its solid comforts, but because we are not willing to surrender our amusements.  We want to play and not to work.  That is what we are doing, what we intend to keep on doing, and what we plan to have our children do after us.

Brotherly love?  How can there be such a thing when there is a single sick baby dying for lack of nutrition ­a single convalescent suffocating for want of country air ­a single family without fire or blankets?  Suggest to your wife that she give up a dinner gown and use the money to send a tubercular office boy to the Adirondacks ­and listen to her excuses!  Is there not some charitable organization that does such things?  Has not his family the money?  How do you know he really has consumption?  Is he a good boy?  And finally:  “Well, one can’t send every sick boy to the country; if one did there would be no money left to bring up one’s own children.”  She hesitates ­and the boy dies perhaps!  So long as we do not see them dying, we do not really care how many people die.

Our altruism, such as it is, has nothing abstract about it.  The successful man does not bother himself about things he cannot see.  Do not talk about foreign missions to him.  Try his less successful brother ­the man who is not successful because you can talk over with him foreign missions or even more idealistic matters; who is a failure because he will make sacrifices for a principle.

It is all a part of our materialism.  Real sympathy costs too much money; so we try not to see the miserable creatures who might be restored to health for a couple of hundred dollars.  A couple of hundred dollars?  Why, you could take your wife to the theater forty times ­once a week during the entire season ­for that sum!

Poor people make sacrifices; rich ones do not.  There is very little real charity among successful people.  A man who wasted his time helping others would never get on himself.

It will, of course, be said in reply that the world is full of charitable institutions supported entirely by the prosperous and successful.  That is quite true; but it must be remembered that they are small proof in themselves of the amount of real self-sacrifice and genuine charity existing among us.

Philanthropy is largely the occupation of otherwise ineffective people, or persons who have nothing else to do, or of retired capitalists who like the notoriety and laudation they can get in no other way.  But, even with philanthropy to amuse him, an idle multi-millionaire in these United States has a pretty hard time of it.  He is generally too old to enjoy society and is not qualified to make himself a particularly agreeable companion, even if his manners would pass muster at Newport.  Politics is too strenuous.  Desirable diplomatic posts are few and the choicer ones still require some dignity or educational qualification in the holders.  There is almost nothing left but to haunt the picture sales or buy a city block and order the construction of a French chateau in the middle of it.

I know one of these men intimately; in fact I am his attorney and helped him make a part of his money.  At sixty-four he retired ­that is, he ceased endeavoring to increase his fortune by putting up the price of foodstuffs and other commodities, or by driving competitors out of business.  Since then he has been utterly wretched.  He would like to be in society and dispense a lavish hospitality, but he cannot speak the language of the drawing room.  His opera box stands stark and empty.  His house, filled with priceless treasures fit for the Metropolitan Museum, is closed nine months in the year.

His own wants are few.  His wife is a plain woman, who used to do her own cooking and, in her heart, would like to do it still.  He knows nothing of the esthetic side of life and is too old to learn.  Once a month, in the season, we dine at his house, with a mixed company, in a desert of dining room at a vast table loaded with masses of gold plate.  The peaches are from South Africa; the strawberries from the Riviera.  His chef ransacks the markets for pheasants, snipe, woodcock, Egyptian quail and canvasbacks.  And at enormous distances from each other ­so that the table may be decently full ­sit, with their wives, his family doctor, his clergyman, his broker, his secretary, his lawyer, and a few of the more presentable relatives ­a merry party!  And that is what he has striven, fought and lied for for fifty years.

Often he has told me of the early days, when he worked from seven until six, and then studied in night school until eleven; and of the later ones when he and his wife lived, like ourselves, in a Fourteenth Street lodging house and saved up to go to the theater once a month.  As a young man he swore he would have a million before he died.  Sunday afternoons he would go up to the Vanderbilt house on Fifth Avenue and, shaking his fist before the ornamental iron railing, whisper savagely that he would own just such a house himself some day.  When he got his million he was going to retire.  But he got his million at the age of forty-five, and it looked too small and mean; he would have ten ­then he would stop!

By fifty-five he had his ten millions.  It was comparatively easy, I believe, for him to get it.  But still he was not satisfied.  Now he has twenty.  But apart from his millions, his house and his pictures, which are bought for him by an agent on a salary of ten thousand dollars a year, he has nothing!  I dine with him out of charity.

Well, recently Johnson has gone into charity himself.  I am told he has given away two millions!  That is an exact tenth of his fortune.  He is a religious man ­in this respect he has outdone most of his brother millionaires.  However, he still has an income of over a million a year ­enough to satisfy most of his modest needs.  Yet the frugality of a lifetime is hard to overcome, and I have seen Johnson walk home ­seven blocks ­in the rain from his club rather than take a cab, when the same evening he was giving his dinner guests peaches that cost ­in December ­two dollars and seventy-five cents apiece.

The question is:  How far have Johnson’s two millions made him a charitable man?  I confess that, so far as I can see, giving them up did not cost him the slightest inconvenience.  He merely bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of reputation ­as a charitable millionaire ­at a cost of two thousand thousand dollars.  It was ­commercially ­a miserable bargain.  Only a comparatively few people of the five million inhabitants of the city of New York ever heard of Johnson or his hospital.  Now that it has been built, he is no longer interested.  I do not believe he actually got as much satisfaction out of his two-million-dollar investment as he would get out of an evening at the Hippodrome; but who can say that he is not charitable?

I lay stress on this matter of charity because essentially the charitable man is the good man.  And by good we mean one who is of value to others as contrasted with one who is working, as most of us are, only for his own pocket all the time.  He is the man who is such an egoist that he looks on himself as a part of the whole world and a brother to the rest of mankind.  He has really got an exaggerated ego and everybody else profits by it in consequence.

He believes in abstract principles of virtue and would die for them; he recognizes duties and will struggle along, until he is a worn-out, penniless old man, to perform them.  He goes out searching for those who need help and takes a chance on their not being deserving.  Many a poor chap has died miserably because some rich man has judged that he was not deserving of help.  I forget what Lazarus did about the thirsty gentleman in Hades ­probably he did not regard him as deserving either.

With most of us a charitable impulse is like the wave made by a stone thrown into a pool ­it gets fainter and fainter the farther it has to go.  Generally it does not go the length of a city block.  It is not enough that there is a starving cripple across the way ­he must be on your own doorstep to rouse any interest.  When we invest any of our money in charity we want twenty per cent interest, and we want it quarterly.  We also wish to have a list of the stockholders made public.  A man who habitually smokes two thirty-cent cigars after dinner will drop a quarter into the plate on Sunday and think he is a good Samaritan.

The truth of the matter is that whatever instinct leads us to contribute toward the alleviation of the obvious miseries of the poor should compel us to go further and prevent those miseries ­or as many of them as we can ­from ever arising at all.

So far as I am concerned, the division of goodness into seven or more specific virtues is purely arbitrary.  Virtue is generic.  A man is either generous or mean ­unselfish or selfish.  The unselfish man is the one who is willing to inconvenience or embarrass himself, or to deprive himself of some pleasure or profit for the benefit of others, either now or hereafter.

By the same token, now that I have given thought to the matter, I confess that I am a selfish man ­at bottom.  Whatever generosity I possess is surface generosity.  It would not stand the acid test of self-interest for a moment.  I am generous where it is worth my while ­that is all; but, like everybody else in my class, I have no generosity so far as my social and business life is concerned.  I am willing to inconvenience myself somewhat in my intimate relations with my family or friends, because they are really a part of me ­and, anyway, not to do so would result, one way or another, in even greater inconvenience to me.

Once outside my own house, however, I am out for myself and nobody else, however much I may protest that I have all the civic virtues and deceive the public into thinking I have.  What would become of me if I did not look out for my own interests in the same way my associates look out for theirs?  I should be lost in the shuffle.  The Christian virtues may be proclaimed from every pulpit and the Banner of the Cross fly from every housetop; but in business it is the law of evolution and not the Sermon on the Mount that controls.

The rules of the big game are the same as those of the Roman amphitheater.  There is not even a pretense that the same code of morals can obtain among corporations and nations as among private individuals.  Then why blame the individuals?  It is just a question of dog eat dog.  We are all after the bone.

No corporation would shorten the working day except by reason of self-interest or legal compulsion.  No business man would attack an abuse that would take money out of his own pocket.  And no one of us, except out of revenge or pique, would publicly criticize or condemn a man influential enough to do us harm.  The political Saint George usually hopes to jump from the back of the dead dragon of municipal corruption into the governor’s chair.

We have two standards of conduct ­the ostensible and the actual.  The first is a convention ­largely literary.  It is essentially merely a matter of manners ­to lubricate the wheels of life.  The genuine sphere of its influence extends only to those with whom we have actual contact; so that a breach of it would be embarrassing to us.  Within this qualified circle we do business as “Christians & Company, Limited.”  Outside this circle we make a bluff at idealistic standards, but are guided only by the dictates of self-interest, judged almost entirely by pecuniary tests.

I admit, however, that, though I usually act from selfish motives, I would prefer to act generously if I could do so without financial loss.  That is about the extent of my altruism, though I concede an omnipresent consciousness of what is abstractly right and what is wrong.  Occasionally, but very rarely, I even blindly follow this instinct irrespective of consequences.

There have been times when I have been genuinely self-sacrificing.  Indeed I should unhesitatingly die for my son, my daughters ­and probably for my wife.  I have frequently suffered financial loss rather than commit perjury or violate my sense of what is right.  I have called this sense an instinct, but I do not pretend to know what it is.  Neither can I explain its origin.  If it is anything it is probably utilitarian; but it does not go very far.  I have manners rather than morals.

Fundamentally I am honest, because to be honest is one of the rules of the game I play.  If I were caught cheating I should not be allowed to participate.  Honesty from this point of view is so obviously the best policy that I have never yet met a big man in business who was crooked.  Mind you, they were most of them pirates ­frankly flying the black flag and each trying to scuttle the other’s ships; but their word was as good as their bond and they played the game squarely, according to the rules.  Men of my class would no more stoop to petty dishonesties than they would wear soiled linen.  The word lie is not in their mutual language.  They may lie to the outside public ­I do not deny that they do ­but they do not lie to each other.

There has got to be some basis on which they can do business with one another ­some stability.  The spoils must be divided evenly.  Good morals, like good manners, are a necessity in our social relations.  They are the uncodified rules of conduct among gentlemen.  Being uncodified, they are exceedingly vague; and the court of Public Opinion that administers them is apt to be not altogether impartial.  It is a “respecter of persons.”

One man can get away with things that another man will hang for.  A Jean Valjean will steal a banana and go to the Island, while some rich fellow will put a bank in his pocket and everybody will treat it as a joke.  A popular man may get drunk and not be criticized for it; but the sour chap who does the same thing is flung out of the club.  There is little justice in the arbitrary decisions of society at large.

In a word we exact a degree of morality from our fellowmen precisely in proportion to its apparent importance to ourselves.  It is a purely practical and even a rather shortsighted matter with us.  Our friend’s private conduct, so far as it does not concern us, is an affair of small moment.  He can be as much of a roue as he chooses, so long as he respects our wives and daughters.  He can put through a gigantic commercial robbery and we will acclaim his nerve and audacity, provided he is on the level with ourselves.  That is the reason why cheating one’s club members at cards is regarded as worse than stealing the funds belonging to widows and orphans.

So long as a man conducts himself agreeably in his daily intercourse with his fellows they are not going to put themselves out very greatly to punish him for wrongdoing that does not touch their own bank accounts or which merely violates their private ethical standards.  Society is crowded with people who have been guilty of one detestable act, have got thereby on Easy Street and are living happily ever after.

I meet constantly fifteen or twenty men who have deliberately married women for their money ­of course without telling them so.  According to our professed principles this is ­to say the least ­obtaining money under false pretenses ­a crime under the statutes.  These men are now millionaires.  They are crooks and swindlers of the meanest sort.  Had they not married in this fashion they could not have earned fifteen hundred dollars a year; but everybody goes to their houses and eats their dinners.

There are others, equally numerous, who acquired fortunes by blackmailing corporations or by some deal that at the time of its accomplishment was known to be crooked.  To-day they are received on the same terms as men who have been honest all their lives.  Society is not particular as to the origin of its food supply.  Though we might refuse to steal money ourselves we are not unwilling to let the thief spend it on us.  We are too busy and too selfish to bother about trying to punish those who deserve punishment.

On the contrary we are likely to discover surprising virtues in the most unpromising people.  There are always extenuating circumstances.  Indeed, in those rare instances where, in the case of a rich man, the social chickens come home to roost, the reason his fault is not overlooked is usually so arbitrary or fortuitous that it almost seems an injustice that he should suffer when so many others go scot-free for their misdeeds.

Society has no conscience, and whatever it has as a substitute is usually stimulated only by motives of personal vengeance.  It is easier to gloss over an offense than to make ourselves disagreeable and perhaps unpopular.

We have not even the public spirit to have a thief arrested and appear against him in court if he has taken from us only a small amount of money.  It is too much trouble.  Only when our pride is hurt do we call loudly on justice and honor.

Even revenge is out of fashion.  It requires too much effort.  Few of us have enough principle to make ourselves uncomfortable in attempting to show disapproval toward wrongdoers.  Were this not so, the wicked would not be still flourishing like green bay trees.  So long as one steals enough he can easily buy our forgiveness.  Honesty is not the best policy ­except in trifles.