On a Certain Lack of Originality Millionaires

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

I AM not a millionaire myself. I am not even worried by the prospect having eventually to face the millionaires’ responsibilities, but I do not fail, as I hope, to appreciate their good points. They are, taken as a whole, unostentatious. They are indisputably generous. They are eminently patriotic. But not even their most uncritical admirers can deny that they are sadly deficient in originality. One ought perhaps to qualify this word of disparagement. In the game of Commerce they commonly evince an appalling fertility of resource. But if they showed no more originality in making money than they do in giving it away for charitable purposes they would have remained paupers along with the rest of us. In their philanthropic essays they follow one another like lost sheep, in the same beaten track, endlessly endowing universities, and forever founding public libraries. Their imagination seems atrophied except on the acquisitive side. One picks up the Morning Light only to read that Millionaire A has given two hundred thousand, to build a biological laboratory. One glances at the Evening Shade only to find that Millionaire B has donated another million for a school of veterinary surgery.

The benumbing effect of riches upon the millionaire’s faculty of initiative was illustrated recently in striking fashion in the case of Mr. Cecil Rhodes. Here was a man who had, we are told, a genuine contempt for riches merely as riches. His imagination blocked out the map of South Africa before the Muse of History had dipped her pen in her ink bottle. His possessions lifted him beyond “ the dreams of avarice.” Moreover, he cherished the far-reaching hope of “ working ” his fellow beings “ a perpetual peace.” Surely we might expect as the result of Mr. Rhodes’s bequests a veritable Jameson raid upon the anti-social foes of humanity. What does he enjoin upon his trustees ? To send half a hundred American boys and half a dozen German youths to be educated at that “ home of lost causes,” the University of Oxford ! Somehow or other, benevolence seems to take the nerve out of the millionaire. Sooner or later they all reëcho Robert Morris’s plaint, — “ Experience hath taught me to be cautious even when trying to do good.”

Is there, then, no opportunity for originality or noble venturesomeness in the domain of philanthropy ? May the lover of his kind never

Are colleges and libraries and hospitals and missions to monopolize the business of social betterment ? Why not found an independent Theatre or an incorruptible Press ? If the popular æsthetic sense must needs be cultivated, why not found a national Anti-Landscape Advertising League ? Are none of the approaches to Utopia untried ? Why not institute a propaganda against the use of patent medicines ? They are said on good authority to absorb more money annually than the national drink bill ; and they fail to give even the momentary exhilaration that must be set to the credit of that poor creature, small beer.

Indeed, the only likely capacity for promising social experimentation that any millionaire has shown of late is Mr. Carnegie’s offer to pay the Philippine solatium of twenty millions for the privilege of assuring the Filipinos that they should be free. Mr. Carnegie is on the right track. The big profits from altruistic investments are coming only to those who take big risks, not to those who are content with such Savings Bank interest as the orphan’s gratitude or the widow’s prayers.

If all this be insufficient to move the phlegmatic millionaire philanthropists, let them reflect upon the history of benevolent and educational foundations. How many of these foundations have outlived a century ? Did the French Revolution spare the pious donations of ecclesiastical patrons ? How many millions of pounds have been given to benefices in England, and yet how many donors have thereby won themselves an everlasting name ? Who besides William of Wykeham ? Moth may fret and rust ruin, but the ravages of Confiscation are greater than all. Will our friends, the Socialists, if once they get into the saddle, hesitate to confiscate wealth because it is in the hands of universities, or in the trust funds of public libraries ?

The moral of all this is, my dear millionaires, that Fame is difficult to secure and harder to perpetuate ; and that Fame builded on the lines of conventional benevolence cannot be said to be perennius ære.