A STAR-SPANGLED SCOT

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 4473, 21 November 1933, Page 7

A STAR-SPANGLED SCOT

ANDREW CARNEGIE. AMERICAN RICHEST MAN AND ORIGINAL PHILANTHROPIST. As we see him in perspective, it is clearer than ever that Andrew Car--1 negie was one of the representative men of the nineteenth century. He was an incarnation of two of its great governing ideals, self-help and philanthropy; he raised them, it is the bare arithmetical truth, to the highest power the world had yet seen (writes H. C. Bailey in the London Daily Telegraph). When he sold his business in 1901, Pierpont Morgan, a competent judge in such matters, pronounced him “the richest man in the world.” Carnegie himself wrote to the late Lord Morley, “I’ll have at least £50,000,000 sterling”—it worked out at some £60,000,000 —“I could as well have had £100,000,000 in a few years.” Gifts in Millions. Even in America there had been nothing like this. Before Carnegie, accoridng to his new biographer, Mr. Burton He'ndrick, the largest American fortune was William Vanderbilt’s £40,000,000. Mr. Hendrick quotes a comment of the late Lord Rothschild: “One of the most I'emarkable phenomena of our time is the fact that Mr. Andrew Carnegie should in the brief period of one generation have amassed a fortune exceeding in size that of all the Rothschilds combined, which they have been a century in accumulating.” It was not much less remarkable that, having amassed this historic wealth, Carnegie proceeded to ensure that it should be devoted, not to his family, not to establish a financial dynasty, but to “the improvement of ma'nkind.” Charity in the ordinary sense did not appeal to him. He declared that nine-tenths of the money spent on it was being unwisely spent.

His millions were assigned to libraries, to educational endowments, to the foundation of the Carnegie Institution as an international force for the elevation of the human race by the advance of knowledge. He held with intense conviction the simple faith of his century, that scientific research will make an easier and a better world, and that the human race can be raised out of its perverse follies by wiser education. Carnegie was a very human creature, and here in Mr. Burton Hendrick’s enthusiastic pages we have him vigorously alive. The book is best considered in two parts, first the story of Carnegie’s making of his millions, secondly the account of his relations with the eminent, from Herbert Spencer to the Kaiser. Founding a Fortune. “I was brought up among Chartists and Republicans,” Carnegie wrote. He was, in fact, the son of a Dunfermline weaver, who neither in his own country nor in America could make a living. Politically Carnegie remained to the end of his life just such a Scottish Radical of the forties as the adults he knew in boyhood. He became, in the neat phrase of his friend, the novelist, William Black, “a starspangled Scotsman,” with grandiose ideas and a sanguine faith which are rather of the land of his adoption. He was twelve years old when his family fled from the privations of Scotland to seek fortune i’n Pennsylvania. It was the year of European revolution, 1848. What is more to the point, it was the eve of the industrial development of the United States. Carnegie found the States iron and wood; he left them steel. His first job in America was worth 1 dollar 20 cents a week. He was 20 when he made his first investment. By the time he was 27 he was earning £IO,OOO a year, and at that date —lB63 —such income “made him an outstanding man.” In 1887, when he was 52, he told Gladstone (adding that he would thing it disgraveful to die a rich man), the he was receiving £370,000 per a’nnum. What that amount had grown to on his retirement with a capital of £60,000,000 does not appear. Later his secretary reported that he had already given away nearly £65,000,000. “Good heaven,” Carnegie chuckled, “where did I ever get all the money?” He could hardly have got it, of course, without favourable economic conditions. There has seldom in the world’s history been such a vast manufacture of wealth as in the swift exploitation of United States in the last half of the nineteenth century. Carnegie was in at the start. He had money in sleeping-cars before Pullman. He was investing in the Pennsylvanian oilfields as soon as Rockefeller.

Personal Stories. Then he discovered that iron making offered scope for his energies. As soon as he had established himself as an iron master, Bessemer invented the first process for making cheap steel, and Carnegie grasped the ojp-i

portunities, though not too quickly. He had, of course, in its highest development a shrewd business man’s eye to the future, but it does not appear that he saw very far ahead, and indeed, his biographer admits that he saw his long range predictions were apt to be fallible. He was bold even to audicity. He was, though the kindest of men in private, ruthless in competition, and a hard driver of his staff. There are good stories about that. “Oh, Bill,” he said to his best lieutenant, “when get on a steamer for a long vacation you do'n’t know what a relief it is to me.” “And you, Andy,” said Bill, “you don’t know what a relief it is to all of us.” He was explaining to English visitors the methods of his board of directors. “We are all a happy and harmonious family,” he said, “nothing important is do'ne except by unanimous vote.” “ God help the man who isn’t unanimous!” one of the happy family murmured. Of all his faculties, Mr. Hendrick seems inclined to lay must stress on his judgment in the choice of able employees. Not less important, perhaps, was his share of the ability, which most great men of action have shown, for interesting able and useful people in himself and his affairs. As soon as he had the resources, Carnegie was studious to renew his association with Great Britain, and in particular to make himself known to her eminent people. He was the most successful of lion hunters, but all through his dealings with the lions is the conviction that he could not give them advice they needed. He began, oddly enough, with Matthew Arnold, whom he failed to persuade that the social life of the United States fifty years ago was interesting. Later Carnegie offered Gladstone the loan of “any sum needful to place him in a state of abundance. Financial provision for political leaders to whom he was sympathetic was a favourite form of philanthropy with Carnegie. The late Lord Morley and Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. John Burns were left annuities in his will. Mr. Gladstone, however, preferred to suggest a donation to the Libeial party funds. He got it. Of Carnegie’s English friends Lord Morley was much the closest, and here we have some letters which throw interesting light on Morley s character. The bond of sympathy was the nineteenth century radicalism of both. It seems not to have crossed the mind of either that their politics might he something less than the last word of political wisdom and justice. Cobden’s principles, Morley assures Carnegie, stand for ever, and Carnegie is furious at the Chamberlain scheme of Colonial Preference. He rages against it to the Prime Minister, the late Lord Balfour, who midly reminds him that the United States have not framed their own tariffs to please other countries. Advice to the Kaiser. In 1907 Carnegie sent the Kaiser a queer admonitory homily on his duty to keep the peace. They met, and the Kaiser was “chuck full of fun,” and Carnegie “could not help liking him.” But next year, though Carnegie still heard something tell him that sooner of later the Kaiser would become the world’s peacemaker, he evidently had his doubts, which led him to decline an Imperial invitation that Kaiser and Carnegie meet again. The crash came. Morley wrote again and again to the Carnegies, saying how dreadful the war was, and how right he had been to decline responsibility for it. But Carnegie had discovered that Germany was “beyond reason,” and when Congress declared war in 1917, “You have triumphed at last,” he telegraphed to President Wilson. “God bless you. You will give the world peace, and rank the greatest hero of all.” The nineteenth century was ever hopeful.