It is a mistake to suppose that the great captains of industry, the
great organizers and directors of manufacture and commerce and
monetary exchange, are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too
often they suffer the vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the
idleness and ostentation of their wives and children, who "devote
themselves," it may be, "to expense regardless of pleasure"; but we
ought not to misunderstand even that, or condemn it unjustly. The
masters of industry are often too busy with their own sober and
momentous calling to have time or spare thought enough to govern
their own households. A king may be too faithful a statesman to be
a watchful father. These men are not fascinated by the glitter of
gold: the appetite for power has got hold upon them. They are in
love with the exercise of their faculties upon a great scale; they
are organizing and overseeing a great part of the life of the world.
No wonder they are captivated. Business is more interesting than
pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot said, and when once the mind has caught
its zest, there's no disengaging it. The world has reason to be
grateful for the fact.
It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties of the
man whom the world was afterward to know, not as a prince among
merchants--for the world forgets merchant princes--but as a prince
among benefactors; for beneficence breeds gratitude, gratitude
admiration, admiration fame, and the world remembers its
benefactors. Business, and business alone, interested him, or
seemed to him worthwhile. The first time he was asked to subscribe
money for a benevolent object he declined. Why should he subscribe?
What affair would be set forward, what increase of efficiency would
the money buy, what return would it bring in? Was good money to be
simply given away, like water poured on a barren soil, to be sucked
up and yield nothing? It was not until men who understood
benevolence on its sensible, systematic, practical, and really
helpful side explained it to him as an investment that his mind took
hold of it and turned to it for satisfaction. He began to see that
education was a thing of infinite usury; that money devoted to it
would yield a singular increase to which there was no calculable
end, an increase in perpetuity--increase of knowledge, and therefore
of intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after generation
with new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world's fitness
for affairs--an invisible but intensely real spiritual usury beyond
reckoning, because compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age.
Henceforward beneficence was as interesting to him as business--was,
indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new
forces in a commerce which no man could bind or limit.
He had come to himself--to the full realization of his powers, the
true and clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its
satisfaction. His faculties were consciously stretched to their
right measure, were at last exercised at their best. He felt the
keen zest, not of success merely, but also of honor, and was raised
to a sort of majesty among his fellow-men, who attended him in death
like a dead sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he not broken the
bonds of mere money-getting; would never have known himself had he
not learned how to spend it; and ambition itself could not have
shown him a straighter road to fame.
This is the positive side of a man's discovery of the way in which
his faculties are to be made to fit into the world's affairs, and
released for effort in a way that will bring real satisfaction.
There is a negative side also. Men come to themselves by
discovering their limitations no less than by discovering their
deeper endowments and the mastery that will make them happy. It is
the discovery of what they can not do, and ought not to attempt,
that transforms reformers into statesmen; and great should be the
joy of the world over every reformer who comes to himself. The
spectacle is not rare; the method is not hidden. The practicability
of every reform is determined absolutely and always by "the
circumstances of the case," and only those who put themselves into
the midst of affairs, either by action or by observation, can know
what those circumstances are or perceive what they signify. No
statesman dreams of doing whatever he pleases; he knows that it does
not follow that because a point of morals or of policy is obvious to
him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to his own friends;
and it is the strength of a democratic polity that there are so many
minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and that nothing can
be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal more than the
thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose, have not
been prepared. Social reform is a matter of cooperation, and if it
be of a novel kind, requires an infinite deal of converting to bring
the efficient majority to believe in it and support it. Without
their agreement and support it is impossible.
