The millionaire, or the multi-millionaire, if the plainer term be inadequate to express his lofty condition, is the hero of democratic America. He has won the allegiance and captured the imagination of the people. His antics are watched with envy, and described with a faithful realism of which statesmen are thought unworthy. He is hourly exposed to the camera; he marches through life attended by a bodyguard of faithful reporters. The trappings of his magnificent, if vulgar, existence are familiar to all the readers of the Sunday papers. His silver cars and marble palaces are the wonder of a continent. If he condescend to play golf, it is a national event. “The Richest Man on Earth drives from, the Tee” is a legend of enthralling interest, not because the hero knows how to drive, but because he is the richest man on earth. Some time since a thoughtless headline described a poor infant as “The Ten-Million-Dollar Baby,” and thus made his wealth a dangerous incubus before he was out of the nursery. Everywhere the same tale is told. The dollar has a power of evoking curiosity which neither valour nor lofty station may boast. Plainly, then, the millionaire is not made of common day. Liquid gold flows in his veins. His eyes are made of precious jewels. It is doubtful whether he can do wrong. If by chance he does, it is almost certain that he cannot be punished. The mere sight and touch of him have a virtue far greater than that which kings of old claimed for themselves. He is at once the en-sample and the test of modern grandeur; and if, like a Roman emperor, he could be deified, his admiring compatriots would send him to the skies, and burn perpetual incense before his tomb.

Though all the millionaires of America are animated by the same desire, the collection of dollars, they regard their inestimable privileges with very different eyes. Mr Carnegie, for instance, adopts a sentimental view of money. He falls down in humble worship before the golden calf of his own making. He has pompously formulated a gospel of wealth. He piously believes that the millionaire is the greatest of God’s creatures, the eloquent preacher of a new evangel. If we are to believe him, there is a sacred virtue in the ceaseless accumulation of riches. It is the first article in his creed, that the millionaire who stands still is going back, from which it follows that to fall behind in the idle conflict is a cardinal sin. A simple man might think that when a manufacturer had made sufficient for the wants of himself and his family for all time he might, without a criminal intent, relax his efforts. The simple man does not understand the cult. A millionaire, oppressed beneath a mountain of gold, would deem it a dishonour to himself and his colleagues if he lost a chance of adding to the weight and substance of the mountain.

Mr Carnegie, then, is inspired not by the romance but by the sentiment of gold. He cannot speak of the enormous benefits conferred upon the human race by the vast inequalities of wealth and poverty without a tear. “Millionaires,” he says, “can only grow amid general prosperity.” In other words, if there be not millions in the country the millionaire cannot put his hand upon them. That is obvious enough. His second text cannot be so easily accepted. “Their wealth is not made,” he asserts dogmatically, “at the expense of their countrymen.” At whose expense then is it made? Does Mr Carnegie vouch for the probity of all his colleagues? Does he cover with the aegis of his gospel the magnates of the Standard Oil Company, and that happy firm which, with no other advantage than a service of cars, levies toll upon the fruit-growers of America? Was the Steel Combine established without inflicting hardships upon less wealthy rivals? An answer to these simple questions should be given before Mr Carnegie’s second text be inscribed upon the walls of our churches. It is not enough to say with Mr Carnegie that trusts obey “the law of aggregation.” You need not be a Socialist to withhold your approval from these dollar-making machines, until you know that they were not established upon ruin and plunder. Even if the millionaire be the self-denying saint of modern times, it is still possible to pay too high a price for his sanctity and sacrifice.

It is the favourite boast of the sentimental millionaire that he holds his wealth in trust for humanity, in other words, that he has been chosen by an all-wise Providence to be the universal almsgiver of mankind. The arrogance of this boast is unsurpassable. To be rich is within the compass of any man gifted or cursed with an acquisitive temperament. No one may give to another save in humbleness of spirit. And there is not a millionaire in America who does not think that he is fit to perform a delicate duty which has eluded the wise of all ages. In this matter Mr Carnegie is by far the worst offender. He pretends to take his “mission” very seriously. He does not tell us who confided the trust of philanthropy to him, but he is very sure that he has been singled out for special service. It is his modest pleasure to suggest a comparison with William Pitt. “He lived without ostentation and he died poor.” These are the words which Mr Carnegie quotes with the greatest relish. How or where Mr Carnegie lives is his own affair; and even if he die poor, he should remember that he has devoted his life, not to the service of his country, but to the amassing of millions which he cannot spend. It is obvious, therefore, that the noble words which Canning dedicated to the memory of Pitt can have no meaning for him, and he would be wisely guided if he left the names of patriots out of the argument.

Mr Carnegie’s choice of an epitaph is easily explained. He is wont to assert, without warrant, that “a man who dies rich dies disgraced.” He does not tell us how the rich man shall escape disgrace. Not even the master of millions, great and good as he is reputed to be, knows when his hour comes. There is a foresight which even money cannot buy. Death visits the golden palace of the rich and the hovel of the poor with equal and unexpected foot. The fact that Mr Carnegie is still distributing libraries with both hands seems to suggest that, had he been overtaken during the last twenty years, he would not have realised his ideal. There is but one method by which a rich man may die poor, and that is by disencumbering himself of his wealth the very day that it is acquired. And he who is not prepared for this sacrifice does but waste his breath in celebrating the honour of a pauper’s grave.

As there is no merit in living rich, so there is no virtue in dying poor. That a millionaire should desert his money-bags at his death is not a reproach to him if they be honestly filled. He has small chance of emptying them while he is on the earth. But Mr Carnegie has a reason for his aphorism. He aspires to be a philosopher as well as a millionaire, and he has decided that a posthumous bequest is of no value, moral or material. “Men who leave vast sums,” says he, “may fairly be thought men who would not have left it at all had they been able to take it with them.” On such a question as this the authority of Mr Carnegie is not absolute. Let the cobbler stick to his last. The millionaire, no doubt, is more familiar with account-books than with the lessons of history; and the record of a thousand pious benefactors proves the worth of wise legacies. Nor, indeed, need we travel beyond our own generation to find a splendid example of wealth honourably bestowed. The will of Cecil Rhodes remains a tribute to the generosity and to the imagination of a great man, and is enough of itself to brush aside the quibbles of Mr Carnegie.

The sentiment of “doing good” and of controlling great wealth leads rapidly to megalomania, and Mr Carnegie cannot conceal the pride of omniscience. He seems to think that his money-bags give him the right to express a definite opinion upon all things. He has distributed so many books, that perhaps he believes himself master of their contents. Though he has not devoted himself to politics or literature, he is always prepared to advise those who give themselves to these difficult arts. He has discovered that Greek and Latin are of no more practical use than Choctaw which is perfectly true, if the useless money-bag be our summum bonum. With the indisputable authority of a man who keeps a large balance at his bank, he once dismissed the wars of the Greeks as “petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages.” Poor Greeks! They did not pay their bills in dollars or buy their steel at Pittsburg. The chief article in his political creed is that monarchy is a crime. In his opinion, it is a degradation to kiss the King’s hand. “The first man who feels as he ought to feel,” says Mr Carnegie, “will either smile when the hand is extended at the suggestion that he could so demean himself, and give it a good hearty shake, or knock his Royal Highness down.” In the same spirit of sturdy “independence” he urged the United States some years since to tax the products of Canada, because she “owes allegiance to a foreign power founded upon monarchical institutions.” “I should use the rod,” says the moneybag, “not in anger, but in love; but I should use it.” Fortunately, it is not his to use; and his opinions are only memorable, since the country which he insults with his words is insulted also by his gifts. We may make too great a sacrifice in self-esteem, even for the boon of free libraries.

And with a hatred of monarchy Mr Carnegie combines a childlike faith in the political power of money. Though his faith by this should be rudely shaken, he clings to it as best he may. Time was when he wished to buy the Philippines, and present them, a free gift, to somebody or other. Now he thinks that he may purchase the peace of the world for a round sum, and sees not the absurdity of his offer. Even his poor attempt to bribe the English-speaking peoples to forget their spelling-books was a happy failure, and he still cherishes an illusion of omnipotence. At the opening of his Institute at Pittsburg he was bold enough to declare that his name would be known to future ages “like the name of Harvard.” He might remember that Harvard gave not of his abundance. He bequeathed for the use of scholars a scholar’s books and a scholar’s slender savings, and he won a gracious immortality. Mr Carnegie, in endowing education, is endowing that which he has publicly condemned. Desiring to teach the youth of his country how to become as wealthy as himself, he has poured contempt upon learning. He has declared that “the college-made” man had “little chance against the boy who swept the office.” He is to be found, this victim of an intellectual ambition, in the salaried class, from which the aspiring millionaire is bidden to escape as quickly as possible by the customary methods of bluff and bounce. Why, then, if Mr Carnegie thinks so ill of colleges and universities does he inflict his millions upon them? He has known “few young men intended for business who were not injured by a collegiate education.” And yet he has done his best to drive all the youth of Scotland within the gates of the despised universities, and he has forced upon his own Pittsburg the gift of “free education in art and literature.” Is it cynicism, or vain inconsequence? Cynicism, probably. The man who, having devoted his whole career to the accumulation of superfluous wealth, yet sings a pæan in praise of poverty, is capable of everything. “Abolish luxury, if you please,” thus he rhapsodises, “but leave us the soil upon which alone the virtues and all that is precious in human character grow, poverty, honest poverty!” Has he shed the virtues, I wonder; or is he a peculiarly sanctified vessel, which can hold the poison of wealth without injury?

Of all millionaires, Mr Carnegie is at once the least picturesque and the most dangerous. He is the least picturesque, because he harbours in his heart the middle-class ambition of philanthropy. He would undertake a task for which he is manifestly unfit, in the spirit of provincial culture. For the same reason he is the most dangerous. He is not content to squander his immense wealth in race-horses and champagne. He employs it to interfere with the lives of others. He confers benefits with a ready hand which are benefits only when they are acquired by conquest. Of a very different kind is Mr Thomas W. Lawson. He, too, is a millionaire. He, too, has about him all the appurtenances of wealth. His fur-coats are mythical. He once paid 30,000 dollars for a pink. “He owns a palace in Boston,” says his panegyrist, “filled with works of art; he has a six-hundred acre farm in Cape Cod, with seven miles of fences; three hundred horses, each one of whom he can call by name; a hundred and fifty dogs; and a building for training his animals larger than Madison Square Garden.” These eloquent lines will prove to you more clearly than pages of argument the native heroism of the man. He was scarce out of his cradle when he began to amass vast sums of money, and he is now, after many years of adventure, a king upon Wall Street. He represents the melodrama of wealth. He seems to live in an atmosphere of mysterious disguises, secret letters, and masked faces. His famous contest with Mr H. H. Rogers, “the wonderful Rogers, the master among pirates, whom you have to salute even when he has the point of his cutlass at the small of your back and you’re walking the plank at his order,” was conducted, on Mr Lawson’s part, in the spirited style of the old Adelphi. “Mr Rogers’ eyes snapped just once,” we are told, on a famous occasion; but Mr Lawson was not intimidated. “I held myself together,” he says proudly, “with closed hands and clinched teeth.” Indeed, these two warriors have never met without much snapping of eyes and closing of hands and clinching of teeth. Why they snapped and closed and clinched is uncertain. To follow their operations is impossible for an outsider, but Mr Lawson always succeeds in convincing you that on the pretence of money-making he is attacking some lofty enterprise. He would persuade you that he is a knight-errant of purity. “Tremendous issues” are always at stake. The heroes of Wall Street are engaged in never-ending “battles.” They are “fighting” for causes, the splendour of which is not dimmed in Mr Lawson’s lurid prose. They have Americanised the language of ancient chivalry, until it fits the operations of the modern market. They talk of honour and of “taking each other’s word,” as though they had never stooped to dollars in their lives. But of one thing you may be sure they are always “on hand when a new melon is cut and the juice runs out.”

Like the knights of old, they toil not neither do they spin. They make nothing, they produce nothing, they invent nothing. They merely gamble with the savings of others, and find the business infinitely profitable. Yet they, too, must cultivate the language of sentiment. Though the world is spared the incubus of their philanthropy, they must pretend, in phrase at least, that they are doing good, and their satisfaction proves that nothing so swiftly and tranquilly lulls the conscience to sleep as the dollar. But, as the actor of melodrama falls far below the finished tragedian, the heroes of the Street, typified by Mr Lawson, are mere bunglers compared with the greatest millionaire on earth John D. Rockefeller. We would no more give him the poor title of “Mr” than we would give it to Shakespeare. Even “Rockefeller” seems too formal for his grandeur. Plain “John D.” is best suited to express the admiration of his worshippers, the general fame that shines like a halo about his head. He is Plutus in human guise; he is Wealth itself, essential and concrete. A sublime unselfishness has marked his career. He is a true artist, who pursues his art for its own sake. Money has given him nothing. He asks nothing of her. Yet he woos her with the same devotion which a lover shows to his mistress. Like other great men, Rockefeller has concentrated all his thoughts, all his energies, upon the single object of his desire. He has not chattered of things which he does not understand, like Mr Carnegie. He has resolutely refrained from Mr Lawson’s melodramatic exaggeration. Money has been the god of his idolatry, Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom he daily offers sacrifice, which steers his heart, hands, affections all.”

His silence and his concentration give him a picturesqueness which his rivals lack. He stands apart from the human race in a chill and solitary grandeur. He seeks advertisement as little as he hankers after pleasure. The Sunday-school is his dissipation. A suburban villa is his palace. He seldom speaks to the world, and when he breaks his habit of reticence it is to utter an aphorism, perfect in concision and cynicism. “Avoid all honorary posts that cost time” this was one of his earliest counsels to the young. “Pay a profit to nobody” is perhaps his favourite maxim. “Nothing is too small, for small things grow,” is another principle which he formulated at the outset of his career. “I have ways of making money that you know nothing of,” he once told a colleague, and no one will doubt the truth of his assertion. It is said that when he was scarce out of his teens he would murmur, with the hope of almost realised ambition, “I am bound to be rich, bound to be rich, bound to be rich.” He imposed upon all those who served him the imperative duty of secrecy. He was unwilling that any one should know the policy of the Trust. “Congress and the State legislature are after us,” he once said. “You may be subpoenaed. If you know nothing, you can tell nothing. If you know about the business, you might tell something which would ruin us.” The mere presence of a stranger has always been distasteful to him. The custom of espionage has made him suspect that others are as watchful as himself. He has been described erroneously as a master of complicated villainy. He is, for evil or for good, the most single-minded man alive. He looks for a profit in all things. Even his devotion to the Sunday-school is of a piece with the test. “Put something in,” says he, speaking of the work, “and according as you put something in, the greater will be your dividends of salvation.”

His triumphant capture of the oil trade is a twice-told tale. All the world knows how he crushed his rivals by excluding their wares from the rail-roads, which gave him rebates, and then purchased for a song their depreciated properties. At every point he won the battle. He laid stealthy hands upon the pipe-lines, designed to thwart his monopoly, as he had previously laid hands upon the railway lines. He discovered no new processes, he invented no new methods of transport. But he made the enterprise of others his own. The small refiner went the way of the small producer, and the energy of those who carried oil over the mountains helped to fill Rockefeller’s pocket. The man himself spared no one who stood between him and the realisation of his dream. Friends and enemies fell down before him. He ruined the widow and orphan with the same quiet cheerfulness wherewith he defeated the competitors who had a better chance to fight their own battle. The Government was, and is, powerless to stay his advance. It has instituted prosecutions. It has passed laws directed at the Standard Oil Company. And all is of no avail. Before cross-examining counsel, in the face of the court, Rockefeller maintains an impenetrable silence. He admits nothing. He confesses nothing. “We do not talk much,” he murmurs sardonically; “we saw wood.” A year ago it was rumoured that he would be arrested when he returned to America from Europe. He is still at large. The body of a multi-millionaire is sacred.

He is master of the world’s oil, and of much else beside. Having won the control of one market, he makes his imperial hand felt in many another. His boast that “money talks” is abundantly justified. The power of money in making money is the only secret that the millionaires of America discover for themselves. The man who makes a vast fortune by the invention or manufacture of something which the people thinks it wants, may easily take a pride in the fruit of his originality. The captains of American industry can seldom boast this cause of satisfaction. It is theirs to exploit, not to create. The great day in Mr Carnegie’s life was that on which “the mysterious golden visitor” came to him, as a dividend from another’s toil. Mr Rockefeller remembers with the greatest pleasure the lesson which he learned as a boy, “that he could get as much interest for $50, loaned at seven per cent, as he could earn by digging potatoes ten days.” The lesson of Shylock is not profound, but its mastery saves a world of trouble. Combined with a light load of scruples, it will fill the largest coffers; and it has been sufficient to carry the millionaires of America to the highest pinnacle of fame.

In other words, the sole test of their success is not their achievement, but their money-bags. And when, with cynical egoism, they have collected their unnumbered dollars, what do they do with them? What pleasures, what privileges, does their wealth procure? It is their fond delusion that it brings them power. What power? To make more money and to defy the laws. In England a wealthy man aspires to found a family, to play his part upon the stage of politics, to serve his country as best he may, and to prepare his sons for a like honourable service. The American millionaire does not share this ambition. Like Mr Rockefeller, he avoids “honorary posts.” If he were foolish enough to accept them, he would not be loyal to the single desire of adding to his store. Perhaps we may best express his triumph in terms of champagne and oysters, of marble halls and hastily gathered collections. But even here the satisfaction is small. The capacity of the human throat is limited, and collections, made by another and partially understood, pall more rapidly than orchid-houses and racing-stables.

This, then, is the tragedy of the American multi-millionaires. They are doomed to carry about with them a huge load of gold which they cannot disperse. They are no wiser than the savages, who hide and hoard their little heaps of cowrie-shells. They might as well have filled their treasuries with flint-stones or scraps of iron. They muster their wealth merely to become its slave. They are rich not because they possess imagination, but because they lack it. Their bank-books are the index of their folly. They waste their years in a vain pursuit, which they cannot resist. They exclude from their lives all that makes life worth living, that they may acquire innumerable specimens of a precious metal. Gold is their end, not the gratification it may bring. Mr Rockefeller will go out of the world as limited in intelligence, as uninstructed in mind, as he was when he entered it. The lessons of history and literature are lost upon him. The joys for which wise men strive have never been his. He is the richest man on earth, and his position and influence are the heaviest indictment of wealth that can be made. His power begins and ends at the curbstone of Wall Street. His painfully gathered millions he must leave behind. Even the simple solace of a quiet conscience is denied to the most of his class. Is there one of them who is not haunted in hours of depression by the memory of bloody strikes, of honest men squeezed out, of rival works shut down?

In a kind of dread they turn to philanthropy. They fling from their chariots bundles of bank-notes to appease the wolves of justice. Universities grow ignobly rich upon their hush-money. They were accurately described three centuries ago by Robert Burton as “gouty benefactors, who, when by fraud and rapine they have extorted all their lives, oppressed whole provinces, societies, &c., give something to pious uses, build a satisfactory almshouse, school, or bridge, &c, at their last end, or before perhaps, which is no otherwise than to steal a goose and stick down a feather, rob a thousand to relieve ten.” If America were wise she would not accept even the feather without the closest scrutiny. Money never loses the scent of its origin, and when the very rich explain how much they ought to give to their fellows, they should carry back their inquiry a stage farther. They should tell us why they took so much, why they suppressed the small factory, why they made bargains with railways to the detriment of others, why they used their wealth as an instrument of oppression. If their explanation be not sufficient, they should not be permitted to unload their gold upon a stricken country; they should not buy a cheap reputation for generosity with money that is not their own.

It may be said that the millionaire decrees the punishment for his own crimes. That is true enough, but the esteem in which America holds him inflicts a wrong upon the whole community. Where Rockefeller is a hero, a false standard of morals is set up. For many years he has preached a practical sermon upon the text, “The end justifies the means.” How great are the means! How small the end! He has defended his harshest dealings on the ground that “it is business,” and so doing has thrown a slur upon the commerce of his country. And, worse than this, the wonder and curiosity which cling about the dollar have created a new measure of life and character. A man is judged not by his attainments, his courage, his energy, but by his wealth. It is a simple test, and easily applied. It is also the poorest encouragement for the civic virtues. In England we help to correct the vulgarity of wealth by the distribution of titles, and a better aid than this could not be devised. Though the champions of democracy, who believe in equality of names as devoutly as in inequality of wealth, deem this old-fashioned artifice a shameful crime, it is not without its uses. It suggests that public service is worth a higher distinction than a mass of money. And, titles apart, it is happily not in accord with the traditions of our life to regard the rich man and the poor man as beings of a different clay and a different destiny. We may still echo without hypocrisy the words of Ben Jonson, “Money never made any man rich, but his mind.”