Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 45, 8 November 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

Lectures on health by a consumptive, on millionaires temperance by a dipsomaniac, on consistency

and by a politician, and on the folly of wealth by their ways, a millionaire — they are all much of a piece.

An Australian contemporary has just favored us with a brief homily on wealth and its dangers by 'the blind millionaire,' Mr. Charles Broadway Rouss, who began his career of money-getting by serving out tinned sardines and boot laces and clothes pegs and smoked bacon over the counter of a country grocery store somewhere in the United States. This is the third sermonette of the kind that has been preached out of a golden pulpit within the past 12 months.

Lord RoseberyS speech on the folly of wealth and its anxieties is, perhaps, well within the memory of our readers : Amidst the elation of a Derby win he doubted if, on the whole, the poor man had not a more agreeable life than the modern Dives who commanded millions and stood on Persian rugs and ' owned ' a £2000 <//<■/ and clothed himself in line Inn n and dined sumptuously every day and washed down his' wittles' with iced champagne. Governor Roosevelt struck home much more squarely against that worship of wealth which, unfortunately, is not confined to the dominions ot Uncle Sam, but which is, in effect, inculcated among ourselves by a system of public instruction from which the knowledge and love of God are excluded, and which makes the be-all and the end-all of the training of the child practically that which is laid down in the old line : ' Get money, boy, — no matter by what means.' Governor Roosevelt said in his noted speech :—: —

I wish I could warn all my countrymen against that most degrading of processes, the process of deification of any man for what we are pleased to term smartness, the deification of mere intellectual acuteneas, wholly unaccompanied by moral responsibility, wholly without reference to whether it ii exercised in accordance with the elementary rules of morality. If there is one thing which I should like to eradicate from the character of any American, it is the dreadful practice of paying a certain mean admiration and homage to the man who, whether in business or in politics, achieves success at the cost of sacrificing all those principles for the lack of which, in the eye of any righteous man, no positive achievement of success can in any way compensate. That applies juat as much to the smart politician as it applies to the unBcrupulous man of affairs who makes a fortune, not legitimately, but illegitimately, in some form of gambling, which is not merely gambling, but gambling with loaded dice, and who can count upon having from no inconsiderable section of the people the same admiring homage that would be gained by the most respected business man whose success has been even more beneficial to the community than to himself.

Secularised education has placed the Almighty Dollar in the place of the Almighty God, made ' getting- on ' in the world — alias mere money-grubbing — the chief business of life, done much to create the ' smart fellow,' and contributed greatly to that disappearance of business integrity which James Anthony Froude denounced in terms of such withering indignation.

This is, of all others, the age of millionaires and of wealth - worship. America is, par excellence, the land of millionaires.

But great Britain has a goodly share of gold-bugs. A return published some time ago gives the following account of a number of them who ' passed in their checks ' during the past year : —

The list of millionaires who died in Great Britain during the year 1899 is a lengthy one. Some details as to the amount of property which they disposed of by their wills may be of interest. During 1899, amongst the wills reported have been seven whioh disposed of more than £1,000,000 each, with a total valuation of £10,273,055. Eleven other estates between £500.000 and £1,000,000 each have been reported, with an aggregate of £7,071,225 ; and nine more between £400,000 and £500,000 each, aggregating £3,923,911, make up a total of £21,2(58,191 left by 27 testators, of whom three were under 50 years of age at death ; 1 other was under 60, seven between 70 and 80, and seven over 80 years of age. The average of the age at death of these 27 testators was 73 years. With one eioeption the richest estates charged with the death duties in 1899 have been, as in former years, those of men who inherited wealth and added to it, or of men who, having had to make their own way in the world, had slowly built up large fortunes. It is not surprising to find that the biggest of the English millionaires is a brewer, the late Mr John Grettoa, of the Barton-on-Trent firm, whose estate wai valued for the purpose of assessment to the death duties at <!2.Ss.{ (>lo. Next comes a Jewish stockbroker wich over a million and a half, and he is followed clo^e by a shipbuilder, the late Sir William Gray, of Hartlepool. A marmalade manufacturer stands for nearly half a million. The Chancellor of the Exchequer may look forward to a great windfall when the e->tate of the Duke of Wei.tminhter, who died the other day, is assessed for the purpose of taxation. The Duke is reported to have said that the whole of the estate, of which he was a life tenant, would probably be valued at £12 000,000.

Of living British millionaires, Earl Percy — the heir to the Dukedom of Northumberland— is a human tag tied on to 186,400 acres of land and five magnificent residences ; the Earl ot Dalhousie is owned by 138,000 acres and three residences ; the Hon. Lionel Rothschild — heir to the Rothschild's, wealth and titles — is lord of only 15,000 broad acres and three mansions, but his fortune is variously estimated at from £12,000,000 to £14,000,000; the future Lord Iveagh — a scion of the firm of Guinness and Co., of Dublin stout fame — will possess ' wealth beyond the dreams of avarice ' ; Lord Hindlip possesses much of the vast fortune created by Allsop's ales ; and the new Duke of Westminster — -formerly Lord Belgrave— is owner of some 30,000 acres in Flint and Cheshire, almost a square mile of London, and three homes fit for the wearer of a royal crown. The joint wealth of the Duke of Westminster, Lord Iveagh, Lord Hindhp, and the Hon. Lionel Rothschild is estimated at £40,000,000 sterling.

Of the American Crcesuses ' the blind millionaire,' Mr. Charles Broadway Rouss — who began his career as clerk in a country grocery store — is worth £ 1,200,000; Mr. John Wanamaker started as a clerk at 12s a week and is now worth £3,000,000; Mr. D. O. Mills began his chase of the dollars as a small country merchant and now commands £3,000,000; Mr. Collis P. Huntingdon entered upon active life in the same way and amassed £10,000,000; Miss Hetty Green is the richest woman in the world and has command of some £ 12,000,000, raked together and piled up by her own brain and hand ; Mr. Andrew Carnegie, * the Iron King,' began the battle of life as a telegraph operator and contrived to get together a fortune of £14,000,000 ; and the Astor wealth is estimated at £80,000,000

«— evolved out of a cartful of flutes and clarionets sent out to America by Jacob Astor, the 'founder* of the family, about the year 1789. 'The Big Four' mining millionaires of California and Virginia City — Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien — are all of Irish birth with the exception of the lastnamed who was born in New York of Irish parents. The working of the Comstock and other mines left them, in 1882, with the following fortunes : Fair, 48,000,000 dollars ; Mackay a still greater sum, which he subsequently increased ; Flood, 18,000,000 dollars; O'Brien, n.000.u00 dollars. The millions piled up by Fair — the once tattered Irish boy ot Calaverns County, California — were subsequently united to those of the Vanderbilt's when Miss Virginia Fair was married to William K. Vanderbilt, who had previously presented his prospective bride with the most expensive engagement ring ever made — for the modest trifle contained a great solitaire diamond and cost the tidy little sum of £8000. Macdonald, of Dawson City, probably holds the ' record ' for rapid accumulation of wealth. He reached the Alaskan goldfields in 1896 almost penniless. Last year (1899) his wealth was assessed at and in the purchase of some of his 80 mines he is said to have made over £1,000,000 sterling in a single deal. Miss Hetty Green has proved the capacity of her sex for piling coin upon coin. An American negro has evidenced the power of his race to add bawbee to bawbee. His name is Juan Knight — formerly the slave of Daniel Upton, the owner of a tobacco plantation in Alabama, afterwards a wharf-laborer in New Orleans, next fruit-packer, fruit-shipper, fruit-grower, and now the proprietor of hundreds of square miles of tobacco and coffee plantations and mahogany forests in Guatemala and owner of a fortune of close on £2,000,000.

Australia's chief millionaire passed to the great Beyond nearly two years ago. He was ex-drover Tyson, and, like the Caliph's treasure-donkey, he was famous, not for what he was, but for the golden load he carried. He was an ordinary, deadlevel sample of humanity, with but two instincts strongly cultivated — the art of collecting ' bawbees ' and the finer art of keeping them. The dual art overspread and smothered whatever else of instinct or of passion the man may have had. He lodged in a mean hut on one of his many estates, lived in penury on the merest fringe of his piles of gold, and left over /^2,000,000 of property, without a will, for needy relatives and lawyers to struggle over. He once gave Lady Carnngton a big cheque for one of her charities, and, after vast persuasion, erected a little church for his men, most of whom were Presbyterians. ( A few weeks later,' says a writer in the Sjdiuy Freeman, ' the church was struck by lightning, but wis only slightly damaged. A deputation waited on the millionaire with a request that he would fix up a lightning-conductor. Tvson objected strongly to the additional expense. " You asked for a church," he said, " and I built one for you. You say it is the House of the Lord. Well, the Lord must take care of His own property." ' This story prepares us for the statement of the same writer that ' he was a sort of sentimental savage in religion, and never allowed piety to interfere with business.' One other of the many stones circulating about him will suffice to paint the man of many shekels : ' One day,' says the same writer, ' when returning home on one of his Queensland stations he overtook a couple of swagmen, who asked him the distance to the homestead. He told them. "It belongs to hungry Tyson, doesn't it?" said one. "Any chance of a feed there ?" " You'll get a night's shelter there," said Tyson, riding on, when one called out : " Got any matches or tobacco on you ?" Tyson had both, although he did not smoke (all the same, it was his delight to cut up tobacco, at which he sniffed lovingly, as if he did indulge in the weed). He gave the men a fig of tobacco and some matches. At sundown the swagmen turned up and the storekeeper gave them the usual rations. Just as he had finished, Tyson came into the store and remarked : " These men owe me 8d — 6d for tobacco, and 2d for matches." " Who the carnation are you ?" "I'm hungry Tyson," he replied. "If you had been civil you might have had the tobacco and welcome, but now you can pay for it." And they did.'

The well-known schoolboy answer makes the chief evil of wealth consist in its scarcity. Another is, its rank uncertainty. The romance of million-getting and million-spending has yet to be written, and when it appears — if ever does — it will be one of the strangest stories of human chance and human folly on record. A sound thrashing set Jay Gould on the gold-paved road to wealth. His story — as told by htmselt — runneth thus : — ' It was a churn that really laid the foundation of my fortune, and this is how it came to pass. My father had a rotary churn, which was operated by a treadmill, on which we worked a large dog and sometimes a sheep. When the dog or sheep was not to be found (and this olten happened) the duty fell to me; and I had, very unwillingly, I admit, to take their place on the treadmill. On one occasion I rebelled, and was so obstinate that my father gave me a sound thrashing, which 1 feel to this day when I think about it. This thrashing was the last straw, and after brooding over it for

some time I packed up a few clothes, ran away from home, and started on the long road that has led to my millions.' An unmerciful flogging administered by a shoemaker to whom he was apprenticed made Daniel F.iyei weather bolt incontinently from patching of damaged soles and uppers. He staited as a pedlar in Vancouver, and his new trade led to the possession of seven or eight million dollais, much ot which was subsequently eaten up by lawyers' fees. When John Magee--who died some time ago in San Francisco— vvas British vice-consul at San Jose he was unjustly Hogged by order of the command int. A hundred lashes tell upon tns unprotected stiouiders. For every sti oke the Guatemala authorities were compelled to pay him an indemnity of £100. The total amounted to 10,000. He invested it in a coifee plantation, piled the dollars Pelion-high, and speedily joined the ranks of the modern Croesuses. John D. Rockefeller married and started housekeeping on a slender £10 a month. The founder of the Rothschild's millions took to himself a wife at a time when he was struggling with poverty as a pawnbroker in a Frankfort slum. ' To-day,' says a recent biographical notice of him, • his descendants are said to be worth £4.00,000,000 sterling, or nearly half the entire value of the world's gold , while the original family income of £100 or so a year has blossomed into 200,000 times as much.' Russell Sage had chosen his bride when he was clerk in a small grocery store at a salary of 16s a week and his board. His fortune is now about £20,000 and his annual income about £1,000,000 sterling. Chauncey Depew and John D. Blair — two other American millionaires — also married poor and toiled and moiled and struggled into wealth. As an illustration of the uncertainties of million-getting and million-keeping: Jay Gould's millions were in serious danger in 1873 and were merely saved by hisjinesse. During a Stock Exchange ' boom ' in Wall street (New York) less than two years ago, John D. Rockefeller is said to have lost at the rate of a million dollars a minute for six consecutive minutes through a fall in ' Standard oils.' Nat Jones— who swiftly built up a millionaire's fortune on a few borrowed dollars — lost everything in a few moments by a rash deal on the Stock Kxchange and died in poverty. A little over 20 years ago James R. Keene lost £1,200,000 by his famous 'corner,' and in or about 1887 H. E. Harper 'plunged ' on 17,000,000 bushels of wheat ; the market fell; in order to avert ruin he borrowed from sundry banks under fictitious names, lost over £1, 000,000 on his purchase, and was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment into the bargain. Thomas lirassey narrowly escaped becoming a bankrupt during the construction of a railway in Austria — and his £3,000,000 fortune escaped dispersion merely through the completion of the line just in the nick of tune. Sir Samuel Morton Ft to, who was at one time very clo->t ly connet ted with Thomas Bra^sey in business aitairs, failed in iSOh. His liabilities stood at the enormous amount of £4,000,000. Baron Albeit Grant's failure created an even greater sensation in England. He was a multi-millionaire, is said to have cleared £2,000,000 in a single transaction, entertained sumptuously — at one time • dining ' 1000 persons in London at a cost of £100 each, made the Londoners a present of Leicester Square, and wound up a swift career ot high living by becoming a commonplace and unromantic bankiupt. The Hooley millions were a more recent instance, and ' ganged the same gait.' Some of our readers may remember the sudden collapse 01 Ismail Pasha. He was at one time the ruler of Egypt, lived in unexampled splendor, and ended in financial disaster with personal debts which reached the magnificent proportions of £90,000,000. He was. a very prince of bankrupts. There is a story of a London usurer and millionaire who gambled his shekels away and died in the steerage of a mailing vessel bound for Australia. Some years ago a former West-end (London) club proprietor and millionaire likewise gambled his wealth away, and (according to an authority belore u^) 'died absolutely alone in a miserable lodging in Lambeth, the candle stuck in .1 bottle, that furnished his sick bed with light, setting his poor garments on hre, when he tainted with weakness.' Another, who was heir to a fortune of about £1,000,000, became a drunkard as eatlyas his sixteenth yetr, w is rejected by schools and universities, m.irne 1 a bar maid, and, ' alter two or three years of drink and nmeiy, killed h.r during a dispute as to the facts of which no one could depose. He was convicted of manslaughter and died in prison not long afterwards.' And who has not he ird ot the follies with which Juggins, ' the Jubilee Plunger,' disposed of his suddenly inherited wealth? The second generation trequently busies itstli in dispersing the wealth created by the fir-,t. We do not, of course, go the length of asserting- that this 1-, the ordinary iate ot monster fortunes. Frank Gould, for instance, is credited with a good deal of his father's strong common-sense, quiet tastes, and love of work. And some Catholic millionaires like John A. Creighton. of Omaha (U.S.A.), the Drexels, of Philadelphia, and the late Joseph Binigm, ol Providence, R.1., have realised that they are but God's stewards and that the poor are entitled to a share in their great wealth.

In one of his essays, Mr. Godkin says of wealth . ' From the very earliest limes its deceitfulness, us inability to produce

happiness, its fertility in trmptation, its want of connection with virtue and purity, have buen among the commonnplaces of religion and morality. He r -iod dt.cl.iims against it, and exposes its bad effects on the character of its possessor-,, and Christ makes it exceedingly hard lor trie rich man to get to heaven. The folly of winning wealth or caring for it has a prominent place in mediaeval theology. Since the Reformation tli. m has not been so much declamation against it, but the rich man's position has always been held, even among- Protestants, to be exceedingly perilous.' The stewardship of wealth is still strongly insisted upon, and the philanthropic movements of our day afford some — though a relatively very inadequate — substitute for endowments of institutes of charity and religion which afforded such a splendid outlet to the wealth and piety of the middle ages. But nowadays the wealthy ' old nobility ' seek comfort first and above all ; the ' new rich ' hanker more after ostentation. In the days of slavery the display of wealth and power was a comparatively easy matter — uncomplaining service could be bought in "indefinite quantity at a cheap rate, and it created the luxurious splendor of Hadrian's villa and Diocletian's palace at Spalatro, and the villas of Lucullus and Maecenas. The cheap service of the seventeenth century also enabled persons of such moderate fortune as Madame' de Sevigne" and Madame de Montespan to travel — the one to her country chateau, the other to Vichy— with a retinue that resembled the baggage train of an infantry battalion. Other great families— such as the Colignys, the Rohans, the Montmorencis — careered over the surface of the earth with even greater retinues. The same thing prevailed in England. In both countries the nobles had power over the great numbers of people. They were, to a great extent, a law unto themselves, and their exaggerated sense of their position was pithily expressed in the saying of a high-born French woman : ' God Almighty thought twice before damning one of them.' Nowadays the power of compelling such service or of ruining a refractory subject is happily about as dead as Julius Csesar. The 'old families' have the mode of using their wealth — their kind of house, their number of servants and horses, the extent to which they shall entertain, etc. — settled for them by well-established usage or tradition. Their expenditure, says Godkin, is, in a certain sense, 'the product of popular manners. If a rich man in England, for instance, expends money like a rich Turkish pasha, or Indian prince, he is frowned on or laughed at. But if he keeps a great racing stable, or turns large tracts of land into a grouse moor or a deer forest, in which to amuse himself by killing wild animals, it is thought natural and simple.'

In European countries— as Matthew Arnold points out — ' the newly enriched drop easily into the ranks of the aristocracy by a mere process of imitation. They try to dress and behave in the same way, and though a little fun" may be made out of them at first, they and their sons soon disappear in the crowd.' No such traditions of wealth-expenditure p evail among the newly enriched of America. ' Ihe result is,' <?a.ys Godkin, ' that we constantly see wealthy Americans travelling in Europe without the slightest idea of what they will or ought to do next, except get rid of their money as last as possible .'"by the payment of monstrous prices and monstrous lees, or the committal of other acts which to Europeans simply vulgar eccentricities.' Reckless i xpenditure is not, however, a folly that is wholly monopolised by the American nouvemt ricJie. Baron Grant, spent £40,000 on a single staircase in the home which was known as his ' Kensingion P,.lace.' Another wealthy Englishman expended £14,900 on the furniture and decorations of his Lilhard-rooin. 'I he hte Lidy Bra^ey possessed a feather cloak valued at £100,000. In 1832 Lady Mackin paid for a silver do^-coliar .studded with diamonds; and as far back as ISO 6 a wealthy English nobleman parted with close on lor another collar— of gold and precious stones — to circU the neck of a tavoiite do^ ! Mr. Thomas Lawson — a wealthy Bostonian — paid £6000 for the 'rights' of a pink carnation. Mr. Stephen Marquand (New York; s-pent £200,000 on a single bedroom— the wardrobe alone costing £29,000, the dressing-table £12,500, and the bed the tidy fortune of £38,000. William C. Whitney, a well-known New York millionaire, paid some £10,000 for the painting of the ceiling in his mansion. Howard Gould paid £20,000 for a fan as a casual present to a lady. His father, Jay Gould, expended a ' king's ransom ' on the purchase of a Spanish crown for his daughter, the Countess Castellane. William Waldorf Astor <-pent £50,000 of his on the ' fountain of love ' in the grounds of Cliveden. * Silver King ' Mackay's mausoleum is ebtimated to have cost £80,000.

Such phenomenal folly is not new, even for Christian days. A Spanish Governor of Brazil formed} shod his horses with gold. Many French noblemen, shortly before the great Revolution, shod their horses with silver, and some of them had tyres of their carriage-wheels made in the same metal. During part of that period ot folly Lord Stair was British ambassador to the Court of France. He dropped into the prevailing

fashion, and the six splendid horses which rumbled him through the streets of Paris wore shoes of solid silver. The extravagance of the ' Humane Elizabeth ' Petrovna, Empress of Russia (daughter of Peter the Great) ran into costly d reuses, of which she had some 15,000 unused, at her death in 1761. Queen Elizabeth of England shared to some extent in the same form of extravagance : as many as 3000 costly and little-used dresses lined her wardrobe when her soul and body dissolved partnership in 1603 Louis XIV. was a connoisseur in buttons. The diamond buitons which bespangled the front of a single vest of his cost some £4.0,000, and the dressy old monarch is said to have spent on buttons alone as much as £120,000 a year. American and English millionaires have undoubtedly done much in the erection of colleges, schools, museums, and institutes of chatity. But much of their great wealth is spent in those trivolous and useless and oftentimes vulgar displays which recall the follies of the days of Louis XIV. and the farther-off extravagances of the later Roman Empire, and which, flaunted in the face of the poor, raises their gorge as in the days that preceded the Great Revolution, and contribute more to the spread of anarchical socialism than all the preaching of all its long-haired, wildeyed prophets. The rich sorely need to have the Gospel preached to them, and to be taught the lesson that an energetic Irish Chief Secretary once vainly tried to instil into the unwilling minds of rack-renting Irish landlords — that property has its duties as well as its rights.