Money

I

’As the world is, and will be, ’t is a sort of duty to be rich,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and her words — which sound almost ascetic in our ears — were held to be of doubtful morality in the godless eighteenth century which she adorned and typified. Even Lady Mary endeavored to qualify their greed by explaining that she valued money because it gave her the power to do good; but her hardheaded compatriots frankly doubted this excusatory clause. They knew perfectly well that a desire to do good is not, and never has been, a motive power in the acquisition of wealth. Lady Mary did render her country one inestimable service; but her fortune (which, after all, was of no great magnitude) had nothing whatever to do with it. Intelligent observation, dauntless courage, and the supreme confidence which nerved her to experiment upon her own child — these qualities enabled her to force inoculation upon a reluctant and scandalized public. These qualities have lifted mankind out of many a rut, and are all we shall have to depend on while the world rolls on its way. When Aristotle said that money was barren, he did not mean that it was barren of delights; but that it had no power to get us to any place worth reaching, no power to quicken the intellectual and spiritual potencies of the soul.

The love of gold, the craving for wealth, has not lain dormant for ages in the human heart, waiting for the twentieth century to call it into being. It is no keener now than it has always been, but it is ranker in its growth and expression, being a trifle over-nourished in our plethoric land, and not subjected to keen competing emotions. Great waves of religious thought, great struggles for principles and freedom, great births of national life, great discoveries, great passions, and great wrongs — these things have swayed the world, wrecking and saving the souls of men without regard for money. Great qualities, too, have left their impress upon the human race, and endowed it for all the years to come.

The genius which in the thirteenth century found expression in architecture and scholasticism, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found expression in art and letters, finds expression to-day in applied science and finance. Industrial capitalism, as we know it now, is the latest development of man’s restless energy. It has colored our times, given us new values in education, and intruded itself grossly into the quiet places of life. We should bear with it in patience, we might even ‘admire it from afar,’ if only we were sometimes suffered to forget. ‘Money talks,’ we are told; and, by way of encouraging its garrulity, we talk about money, and in terms of money, until it would sometimes appear as if the currency of the United States were the only thing in the country vital enough to interpret every endeavor, and illustrate every situation.

Here, for example, is an imposing picture in a Sunday paper, a picture full of dignified ecclesiastics and decorous spectators. The text reads, ‘Breaking ground for a three-million-dollar nave.’ It is a comprehensive statement, and one that conveys to the public the only circumstance which the public presumably cares to hear. But it brings a great cathedral down to the level of the million-dollar club-houses, or boat-houses, or fishing-camps which are described for us in unctuous and awe-stricken paragraphs. It is even dimly suggestive of the million-dollar babies whom reporters follow feverishly up and down Palm Beach, and who will soon have to be billion-dollar babies, if they want to hold their own. We are now on circumstances of easy familiarity with figures which used to belong to the abstractions of arithmetic, and not to the world of life. We have become proudly aware of the infinite possibilities of accumulation and of waste.

For that is the ebb and flow of the tide of American wealth. It is heaped up with resistless energy and concentration; it is scattered in broken and purposeless profusion. We are told that we possess one fourth of the wealth of the world, that we are richer than the British Empire and France combined; that our fortune is close to two hundred billions, and our income approximates thirty-five billions. Yet we rank fifteenth among the nations ‘in percentage of savings accounts to population.’ Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand save more per capita and per income than we do. The average savings per capita in Switzerland are $47.03. The average savings per capita in the United States are $4.84. What can this mean but weakness in the moral fibre of a nation? There is no power of the soul strong enough to induce thrift but pride. There is no quality stern enough to bar self-indulgence but the overmastering dictates of selfrespect. There is no joy that life can yield comparable to the joy of independence. A nation is free when it submits to coercion from no other nation. A man is free when he is the arbiter of his own fate. National and individual freedom have never come cheap. The sacrifice which insures the one insures the other; the resolution which preserves the one preserves the other. When Andrew Marvell declined the bribe offered him ‘out of pure affection’ by the Lord Treasurer, saying he had ‘a blade-bone of mutton’ in his cupboard which would suffice for dinner, he not only held his own honor inviolate, but he vindicated the liberty of letters, the liberty of Parliament, and the liberty of England. No wonder an old chronicler says that his integrity and spirit were ‘dreadful’ to the corrupt officials of his day.

II

There are Americans who appear to love their country for much the same reason that Stevenson’s ‘child’ loves the ‘friendly cow.’

When the supply of cream runs short, the patriot’s love runs shorter. He holds virulent mass-meetings to complain of the cow, of the quality of the cream, and of its distribution. If he be an immigrant, he probably riots in the streets, not clamoring for the flesh-pots of Egypt, — that immemorial cry for ease and bondage, — inasmuch as the years of his thraldom had been softened by no such indulgence; but simply because the image of the cow is never absent from his mind, or from the minds of those to whom he looks for guidance. The captain of industry and the agitator, the spendthrift who flings his money about our city streets, and the president of the Woman’s Trade Union League of New York, who said, ‘When we get an eight-hour workingday, we are going in for a six, and when we get a six, we are going in for a four,’ all seem to be actuated by the same motive — to grasp as much and to give as little as they can. It is not a principle which makes for citizenship, and it will afford no great help in the hour of the nation’s trial. Material progress and party politics are very engrossing things; but perhaps Mr. Francis Parkman was right when he said that if our progress was to be at the mercy of our politics, and our politics at the mercy of our mobs, we should have no lasting foundation for prosperity and wellbeing.

The tendency to gloat over the sight and sound of money may be less pervasive than it seems. It may be only a temporary predisposition, leaving us at heart clean, wise, and temperate. But there is a florid exuberance in the handling of this recurrent theme which nauseates us a little, like very rich food eaten in a close room. Why should we be told that ‘the world gapes in wonder’ as it contemplates ‘an Aladdin romance of steel and gold’? The world has other things to gape over in these sorrowful and glorious days. ‘Once a bare-foot boy, now riding in a hundredthousand-dollar private car.’ There is a headline to catch the public eye, and make the public tongue hang watering from its mouth. That car, ‘early Pullman and late German Lloyd,’ is to the American reader what the two thousand black slaves with jars of jewels upon their heads were to Dick Swiveller — a vision of tasteful opulence. More intimate journalists tell us that a ‘Financial Potentate’ eats baked potatoes for his luncheon, and gives his friends note-books with a moral axiom on each page. We cannot really care what this unknown gentleman eats. We cannot, under any conceivable circumstance, covet a moral note-book. Yet such items of information would not be painstakingly acquired unless they afforded some mysterious gratification to their readers.

As for the ‘athletic millionaires,’ who sport in the open like — and often with — ordinary men, they keep their chroniclers nimble. Fashions in plutocracy change with the changing times. The reporter who used to be turned loose in a nabob’s private office, and who rapturously described its ‘ebony centre-table on which is laid a costly cover of maroon-colored silk plush,’ and its paneled walls, ‘the work of a lady amateur of great ability’ (I quote from a newspaper of 1800), now has to scurry round golf-links, and shiver on the outskirts of a polo field. From him we learn that young New Yorkers, the least and lowest of whom lives in a $900,000 house, play tennis and golf like champions, or ‘cut a wide swathe in polo circles with their fearless riding.’ From him we learn that ‘automobile racing can show its number of millionaires,’ as if it were at all likely to show its number of clerks and ploughmen. Extravagance may be the arch-enemy of efficiency, but it is, and has always been, the friend of aimless excess.

When I was young, and millionaires were a rarity in my unassuming town, a local divine fluttered our habitual serenity by preaching an impassioned sermon upon a local Crœsus. He was but a moderate sort of Crœsus, a man of kindly nature and simple vanities, whom his townspeople had been in the habit of regarding with mirthful and tolerant eyes. Therefore it was a bit startling to hear — from the pulpit — that this amiable gentleman was ‘a crown of glory upon the city’s brow,’ and that his name was honored ‘from the Golden Gate to New Jersey’s silver sands.’ Therefore it was more than startling to be called upon to admire the meekness with which he trod the common earth, and the unhesitating affability with which he bowed to all his acquaintances, ‘acknowledging every salute of civility or respect,’ because, ‘like another Frederick II of Prussia,’ he felt his fellow citizens to be human beings like himself. This admission into the ranks of humanity, however gratifying to our self-esteem, was tempered with so many exhortations to breathe our millionaire’s name with becoming reverence, and was accompanied by such a curious medley of Bible texts, and lists of distinguished people whom the millionaire had entertained, that we hardly knew where we stood in the order of creation.

Copies of this sermon, which was printed ‘in deference to many importunities,’ are now extremely rare. Reading its yellow pages, we become aware that the rites and ceremonies with which one generation worships its golden calf differ in detail from the rites and ceremonies with which another generation performs this pious duty. The calf itself has never changed since it was first erected in the wilderness — the original model hardly admitting of improvement. Ruskin used to point out gleefully a careless couple who, in Claude’s picture of the adoration of the golden calf, are rowing in a pleasure boat on a stream which flows mysteriously through the desert. Indifferent to gold, uninterested in idolatry, this pair glide smoothly by; and perhaps the river of time bears them through centuries of greed and materialism to some hidden haven of repose.

III

Saint Thomas Aquinas defines the sin of avarice as a ‘desire to acquire or retain in undue measure, beyond the order of reason.’ Possibly no one has ever believed that he committed this sin, that there was anything unreasonable in his desires, or undue in their measure of accomplishment. ‘Reason’ is a word of infinite flexibility. The statisticians who revel in mathematical intricacies tell us that Mr. John D. Rockefeller’s income is one hundred dollars a minute, and that his yearly income exceeds the life-time earnings of two thousand average American citizens, and is equivalent to the income of fifty average American citizens sustained throughout the entire Christian era. It sounds more bewildering than seductive, and the breathless rush of a hundred dollars a minute is a little like the seven dinners a day which Alice in Wonderland stands ready to forego as a welcome punishment for misbehavior. But who shall say that a hundred dollars a minute is beyond the ‘order of reason’? Certainly Saint Thomas did not refer to incomes of this range, inasmuch as his mind (though not without a quality of vastness) could never have embraced their possibility.

On the other hand, Mr. Rockefeller is responsible for the suggestion that Saint Paul, were he living to-day, would be a captain of industry. Here again a denial is as valueless as an assertion. It is much the habit of modern propagandists — no matter what their propaganda may be — to say that the gap between themselves and the Apostles is merely a gap of centuries, and that the unlikeness, which seems to us so vivid, is an unlikeness of time and circumstance, not of the inherent qualities of the soul. The multiplication of assets, the destruction of trade-rivalry, formed — apparently — no part of the original apostolic programme. If the tent-maker of Tarsus coveted wealth, he certainly went the wrong way about getting it. If there was that in his spirit which corresponded to the modern ininstinct for accumulation, he did great injustice to his talents, wasting his incomparable energy on labors which — from his own showing — left him too often homeless, and naked, and hungry. Even the tent-making by which he earned his bread appears to have been valuable to him for the same reason that the blade-bone of mutton was valuable to Andrew Marvell — not so much because it filled his stomach, as because it insured his independence.

‘L’amour d’argent a passé en dogme de morale publique,’wrote George Sand, whose words have now and then a strange prophetic ring. The ’peril of prosperity,’ to borrow President Hibben’s alliterative phrase, was not in her day the menace it is in ours, nor has it ever been in her land the menace it has been in ours, because of the many other perils, not to speak of other interests and other ideals, filling the minds of men. But if George Sand perceived a growing candor in the deference paid to wealth, to wealth as an abstraction rather than to its possessor, a dropping of the old hypocrisies which made a pretence of doubt and disapproval, a development of honored and authorized avarice, she was a close observer as well as a caustic commentator.

The artlessness of our American attitude might disarm criticism were anything less than public sanity at stake. We appeal simply and robustly to the love of gain, and we seldom appeal in vain. It is not only that education has substituted the principle of getting on for less serviceable values, but we are bidden to purchase marketable knowledge, no less than marketable foodstuffs, as an easy avenue to fortune. If we will eat and drink the health-giving comestibles urged upon us, our improved digestions will enable us to earn larger incomes. If we will take a highly commended course of horse-shoeing or oratorio-writing, prosperity will be our immediate reward. If we will buy some excellent books of reference, they will teach us to grow rich.

‘There are one thousand more millionaires in the United States than there were ten years ago,’ say the purveyors of these volumes. ‘At the present rate of increase, the new millionaires in the next few years will be at least twelve hundred. Will you be one of them?' There is a question to ask a young American at the outset of his career! There is an incentive to study! And by way of elucidating a somewhat doubtful situation, the advertisers go on to say: ‘Typical men of brains are those who have dug large commercial enterprises out of a copper mine, or transformed buying and selling into an art. You must take a leaf from the experience of such men if you would hold positions of responsibility and power.’

Just how the reference books — chill avenues to universal erudition — are going to give us control of a copper mine or of a department store is not made clear; but their vendors know that there is no use in offering anything less than wealth, or, as it is sometimes spelled, ‘success,’ as a return for the price of the volumes. And if a tasteful border design of fat moneybags scattering a cascade of dollars fails to quicken the sales, there is no tempting the heart of man. Our covetousness is as simple and as easily played upon as was the covetousness of the adventurers who went digging for buried treasures on the unimpeachable authority of a soothsayer.

The endless stories about messenger boys and elevator men who have been given a Wall Street ‘tip,’ and who have become capitalists in a day, are astonishingly like the stories which went their round when the South Sea Bubble hung iridescent over London. Mankind has never wearied of such tales since Aladdin (one of the fools whom Fortune favors) won his easy way to wealth.

The domination of Wall Street over the public mind and over the public morals was convincingly illustrated last December. The President of the United States sent a ‘Peace Note’ to the warring powers of Europe. He was impelled to take this step by the menace of Germany, who was threatening unrestricted murder on the seas. The note was a guarded one, equal in lucidity and in expression to any of its predecessors. It was fairly well received by the Allies, and candidly answered. France, indeed, betrayed some irritation at being asked what she was fighting for; but she may have thought that the presence of an invading army on her soil sufficiently answered this question. One does not, as a rule, ask a man whose windpipe is clutched by an adversary what it is that he is trying to do. On the whole, however, the Peace Note, although frankly self-concerned, — and every intelligent American knew we had good reason for concern, — cleared the atmosphere in Europe, and revealed to us the close-knit bonds, by help of which the allied nations hope to preserve the imperiled civilization of the world.

But what happened in the United States? The message which aimed at tranquilizing Europe became a high explosive at home, bursting in all its fury upon Wall Street, and scarring its victims for life. Whose fault or whose folly it was which precipitated this ignoble combat will never now be known; but the echo of the strife rang loudly and bitterly in our ears long after the note itself had ceased to interest a rapidly moving world. We had grown to look upon international correspondence as a trifle academic, and that it should involve a treacherous raid on our American securities was no less humiliating than disastrous.

IV

'’T is man’s perdition to be safe,’and ’t is his deepest and deadliest perdition to profit by the perils of others. The accession of wealth brought us by the great war has been too sudden and too vast for any principle of moderation. A writer in the Bankers’ Magazine for December, 1916, reviewed simply and without arrogance the impressive rôle which the United States has for two years played in the industrial and financial history of the world.

‘Our opportunism has lifted us to supreme heights of commercial and fiscal triumph. Our aggregates of exports have surpassed our wildest dreams. The economic achievements of our bankers and financiers in their handling of large international credits are none the less real and remarkable. New York has become the world’s money centre. Everywhere prosperity abounds, bewildering in its magnitude.’

As a result of this unprecedented situation, controlled with unprecedented skill, the number of supertaxable incomes in the United States was doubled in twelve months, and the number of citizens who modestly, and perhaps reluctantly, confessed to incomes exceeding a million of dollars came close to trebling in the same period. Yet these returns, however staggering, inadequately represent the swollen tide of wealth. Ours has been the Midas touch. We have coined gold as easily as did the long-eared king, and we may find ourselves in time as uncomfortable as he was. There are those who say that the profits yielded by munitions have been excessive, and that our bargaining with nations, whose needs were for the time desperate, savored a little of Jacob’s bargaining with his fainting brother. It was certainly a shock to our feelings when a Sheffield company offered last winter to supply the United States with fourteen-inch and sixteeninch guns at a trifle more than half the price demanded by American ammunition-makers. Great Britain, it is true, frowned upon this transaction; but we have been asking ourselves ever since if the patriotism of our manufacturers has kept pace with their cupidity.

It was a shock to our pride, no less than to our feelings, when the Hon. John Skelton Williams, Comptroller of the Currency, told us in January, 1917, that our contributions to the war-sufferers of Europe had in the two previous years amounted to one twentieth of one per cent of our earnings. We did not give away our easily acquired money, we spent it — spent it as lavishly as every avenue of self-indulgence permitted. The spirit of waste, which ran riot in all our big cities, surpassed itself in New York, where it was reckoned that three hundred and fifty thousand non-residents assembled last winter to teach the residents a needless lesson in prodigality. It was what the proprietors of hotels and cafés strikingly describe as a ‘lush’ season, meaning a time when the spending of money was the foremost consideration of their guests. A profound contempt for cost swayed the crowds which gathered day after day, and night after night, wherever wealth could be squandered. The great jewelers smilingly confessed that never before had they done such a thriving business. Nothing they could produce was too extravagant to find a speedy purchaser. The spectacle of well-dressed hordes eating and drinking all they could possibly hold, and far more than nature ever meant them to hold, became wearisomely familiar. Interesting stories went the round about Western men who wore so fortunate as to pay thirty dollars apiece for theatre tickets, and about Western women who, by dint of energy and determination, succeeded in finding twenty-five-dollar bibs for their little children to wear.

Side by side with these exhilarating anecdotes, jostling the ‘record prices’ paid for old lace or Japanese prints, were the brief statistics which told us of Polish women dying of starvation (their little children starved long ago), of typhus fever ravaging the hungerstricken towns of Belgium, of Armenians devouring carrion as did the Jews in the siege of Jerusalem. It is but a little world to show such sharply contrasted pictures. We Americans have had a place in the sun so big and so warm that the rest of mankind seemed to shiver in the darkness; but the sound of their tears has affronted our pleasures, and vexed our repose. We are ready now for a readjustment, ready to rise from sleep and turn from play, ready for any sacrifice imposed in the name of duty. Mohammed prayed that he might be found among the poor on the Judgment Day — a prayer echoed by Saint Bernard, who took some pains to insure its fulfillment.

If money does not make for charity, neither does it make for liberation. When Germany dared us last winter to send out our ships, voicing her threats in the most fantastically insolent message which one nation ever dispatched to another since the Dauphin sent the tennis-balls to Henry V (and he mistook his man), what help did all our millions give us? When we dug our mail out of an American steamer, and asked England — England overwhelmed with debt and bleeding at every pore — to carry it over the sea for us, what solace did our wealth afford our humbled pride?

‘Money talks!’ Yes, but how wise and resolute are its words? Perhaps when Mr. Cleveland said that, if it took every dollar in the Treasury, and every soldier in the United States Array, to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that postal card should be delivered, he was glad to think that the nation’s wealth could be used to sustain the nation’s rights, and fulfill the nation’s obligations. But it takes more than a treasury full of gold to send a postal card across the sea. An American rhapsodist, singing the pæan of money, says in its mighty name, —

‘I am the minister of war and the messenger of peace. No army can march without my command. Until I speak, no ship of trade can sail from any port.’

‘Until I speak!’ Again the emphasis upon that powerful voice, and again the certainty in our souls that when men lay hands upon the ‘hilt of action,’ there is scant need of words. Money stops talking and obeys.

A college principal at Oxford has asked plainly if England could ever have hoped to do anything better with her national resources than spend them to save the nation. The money which before the war was a menace, has since become a safeguard. ‘Better,’ he says, ‘that the country grow poor for a cause we can honor than grow rich for an end that is unknown. Who can regard without deep misgiving the process of accumulating wealth, unaccompanied by a corresponding growth of knowledge as to the uses to which wealth must be applied. This is what we see in normal times, and the spectacle is profoundly disturbing.’

That the war, which brought to England and to France agony of soul and body, brought them also something akin to peace of mind, is one of life’s comforting mysteries. We can understand the generous sympathy which springs from a common danger, the generous insight born of an unassailable ideal. But that tranquility should walk hand in hand with violence, that the mental attitude of men and women forever face to face with grief should be a composed attitude, has a psychological rather than a spiritual significance.

‘There is more repose in social intercourse than there was before the war,’ writes an observant Englishman; and this acute comment is a key to the nation’s serenity, to the measured breathing which resists tumult and trepidation. How long ago was it that the Caillaux trial shamed France, revealing depth after depth of sensuality, treachery, and greed! How long ago was it that the National Gallery had to be guarded like an arsenal, because frenzied women, obsessed by the will to destroy, slashed the pictures which were their heritage, and the heritage of coming generations! These excesses seem to belong to some remote period of corruption and madness, before the cleansing breath of a great purpose blew away the pestilence, and healed infected souls. Now, instead of

we hear the quiet words of Sir Edward Carson, spoken in the House of Commons, February 21: ‘In the face of sacrifice and trials, of ships sunk without notice, of the drowning of wounded soldiers, and of frozen corpses brought in from torpedoed merchant vessels, I have yet to hear of one seaman who has refused to sail.’

So are many minor problems solved by the great problem of an assaulted civilization; so do we come to recognize the values by which essential things are weighed and measured; and so does money — no longer ‘ barren ’ — slip into its lawful place, the servant, not the master of mankind. ‘We are richer or poorer by what we do or by what we leave undone,’ says President Hibben tersely. The National Association of Manufacturers in the United States, which issued a bulletin deprecating submarine warfare, but pointing out that the destruction of the Allies’ trade would open to us the markets of the world, took no count of the fact that Great Britain owes her commerce as much to the courage as to the astuteness of her sons. Her seamen who think little of danger and much of duty, and who have never been in the habit of calling heroism heroic, are the upholders of her fortunes no less than of her honor. Were they driven from the waterways of the world, their great opponent would make us pay in blood the price of our inheritance.

Mr. Shane Leslie, shrinking sensitively from that oppressive word, ‘efficiency,’ and seeking what solace he can find in the survival of unpractical ideals, ventures to say that every University man ‘carries away among the husks of knowledge the certainty that there are less things saleable in heaven and earth than the advocates of sound commercial education would suppose.’ This truth, more simply phrased by the Breton peasant woman who said, ‘Le bon Dieu ne vend pas ses biens,’ has other teachers besides religion and the Classics. History, whether we read it or live in it, makes nothing clearer. Mr. Henry Ford is credited with saying that he would not give a nickel for all the history in the world; but though he can, and does, forbear to read it, he has to live in it with the rest of us, and learn its lessons firsthand. No one desired the welfare — or what he conceived to be the welfare — of mankind more sincerely than he did; and he was prepared to buy it at a handsome figure. Yet Heaven refused to sell, and earth, inasmuch as the souls of men are not her possessions, had nothing worth the purchase. The price of war can be computed in figures, the price of peace calls for another accountant. The tanker Gold Shell, which first crossed the ‘forbidden’ zone, did more to support the civilization of the world than a score of peace ships. Its plain sailors who put something (I don’t know what they called it) above personal safety; and their plain captain who expressed in the regrettable language of the sea his scorn of German marauders, were prepared to pay a higher rate than any millionaire could offer for their own and their country’s freedom. We know what these men risked, because we know what agonizing deaths the American sailors on the tanker Healdton suffered at Germany’s hands. The Gold Shell seamen knew it too, and met frightfulness with fearlessness. The world is never so bad but that men’s souls can rise above its badness, and restore our fainting faith.

Bishop Lawrence has denied in very simple and gallant words that Americans are wedded to ease, or enthralled by money. Their strength and their wealth are at the service of the nation, and they stand prepared to spend for noble ends the accumulated riches of the country. God will not sell us safety. In so far as we are prepared to lay down our lives for justice and humanity, in so far is our welfare secured. The reduction of unnecessary consumption is perhaps a matter of taste. The discipline of action and endurance is a stern necessity. The time for proving that we coined money in no base spirit, and that we hold it at no base value, is at hand. For our own sake, no less than for the world’s sake, this truth must stand the test. The angel who looked too long at Heaven’s golden pavement was Hung into Hell.