p. L. 171— II— '^ — II IDlSTRICWCOiynBiAl INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES BY . GERALD STANLEY LEE Editor of ** Mount Tom " and Author of *'The Lost Art of Reading," **The Voice of the Machines," etc. I / MOUNT TOM PRESS jiy Northhampton, Massachusetts s 'i ,"/^ \. .u^^ cl^HT^ P Two Of oies Received MAY 26 1908 Copyright, 1908 BY The Mount Tom Press Transferred from the Library of Cong-ress to D. C. Public Library for use therein under Sec. ^9, qop'yricg'btXa.w^'lQO^. By Transftr 0. C. Public Libraiy AUO 1 7 1934 i)ISTRlaT OF ^COLUMBIA i-KOPj£HTif ^BUBLIC LIBRARY INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES PART ONE (Which Says They are Coming) I Millionaires and Other People ...... 7 II Millionaires and Machines 23 III The Library Cure 26 IV Expectations 35 V Three Men to Expect 46 VI Millionaire's Turn First, Please 50 PART TWO (Which Considers Ways and Means) I An Arrangement for Being Allowed to Think 61 II Superintendents and Ideas 69 III Unions and Ideas 79 IV The Skilled Labor of the Poor 98 V The Skilled Labor of the Rich 106 a 35 PART THREE (Which is Concerned With Signs and Tokens) ^ I The Lack of Conveniences for Millionaires . . 113 II The Millionaire Who Does Not Want to Be Lonely 141 III The MiUionaire Who Wants to Be Happy . . 146 ^ IV The MilUonaire Who is as Good as Anybody . 152 V A Million Dollars as a Profession 163 VI A Million Dollars as an Ait ^orrj j g^ (1) Surplus una: Anstocr&;cy 170 P (2) The Millionaire and Kis Imagination . 174 r (3) Imagination and the Higher Selfishness 187 ^ (4) Imagination and Monopoly 195 V^ (5) The Back-fire of Socialism 202 J (6) More Imagination and More Monopoly 207 (7) Millionaires Who Invent People ... 216 VII How Some Money Looks 228 VIII How the People Show Through 238 IX The Still Revolution 252 X Mr. Carnegie as an Experiment Station for MiUionaires 256 XI On Being Too Big to Do Wrong 263 XII The Next Corner of the World 276 Epilogue 301 3 s TO JENNETTE LEE " I built a temple for my spirit's home; I filled it with myself — and it was fair. From its dream-pavement to its dream-reared dome No spirit but my own existed there. About the walls I wrought with doting care Huge fancies alien to the world of men, Vague daubs and vast of youth and light and air Sublimely isolated in my spirit's den, I lived and toiled and dreamed and hoped — And then — and then — / FIRE ** And Elijah said unto the people : Call ye on the name of your godSf and I will call on the name of the Lord; and the God that answereth hy jire, let him he God. ' And all the people answered and saidj It is well spoken.* " Millionaires and Other People It seems to be natural for all of us to be a little restless about our millionaires. They are all amateurs, or nearly all of them. The very idea of milhonaires — mobs of them at least — is new in the world. They do not know how to do it. There are probably very few of us who can keep, very long at a time, from trying to think things out for them a little. The last time I had of this sort I wrote out the following: Rules for Millionaires First. Be a monopolist. Second. Get your monopoly without being mean, that is, by invention, by some sheer overwhelming service to mankind, by saving every man on the planet several dollars a year. Inspired Third. Take it for granted that if you 1 lonaires j^^^ j^^^ ^ chance to make the rounds of the planet and talk to every man on it beforehand, and ask him if he would be willing, in case you saved him several dol- lars a year, to go halves with you on what you saved for him — take it for granted that he would say yes. Fourth. Pocket the money. See to it that you are able to keep in absolute un- questioned control throughout the world of the thing you have thought of for it. In other words see to it that you have an opportunity to be mean if you want to. Fifth. Almost anyone could be mean. There have been many great inventions among men before, but no invention any- one could make would be so great to us now, or so original, that not being mean with it would not seem more great and more original. The first man with an in- vention in the twentieth century who will be professional with it — act like a gentle- man or an artist, with it, who will dedicate 8 it to humanity and himself together, who Millionaires will keep absolute control of his invention ^q^^^ peopie in order to make it creative and emanci- pating at every point where it touches human life, who will scatter the oppor- tunity and freedom of the new invention into the daily lives of the men who are making it in the factory, and the daily lives of the men who are selling it in the streets — in other words, the first man who will civilize an entire new industry, who will present this barbaric world with one industry that has been civilized in spite of it, and that keeps on being civilized in spite of it, and with no one to say it nay, will be the greatest, and most impressive, and most memorable figure in mod- ern times. Incidentally, he will ac- complish one other purpose. He will make having a great fortune one of the ideals instead of one of the diseases of the world. He will make being a miUion- aire more religious than being in a mon- astery, or than any of the other rather Inspired religious-looking, but comparatively easy 1 lonaires ^.j^gg yj^^ being a St. Francis of Assisi. But the main point will be that he will have done something practical and spirit- ually business-like with our whole modern manufacturing world. He will have sug- gested, and carried out, and settled the one way in which the industries of the world can be civilized, viz, one new im- perious invention at a time, controling one new original world-wide industry, which says how it shall be run itself, which shall be free and splendid, protecting the lives that have been yielded up to it, and that belong to it, establishing factories that shall be literally, and every day, engaged in the act of pouring out from their doors upon the life of the world, new men and new things. When one looks up to the fac- tory windows one shall think of them to- gether there, the men and the things, making and being made together, each after their kind. But it is not merely because he will be lO the redeemer of industry that I am look- Millionaires ing forward to this man. I am looking other People forward to him because I believe in rich men and I cannot longer bear to see our rich men humiliated before the world. The man who does this first, who uses the wealth that has come to him from his cre- ative spirit, to liberate the same creative spirit in others will be looked back upon, I beHeve, as the Redeemer of Wealth. A rich young man some two thousand years ago in one of the smaller Roman provinces was told to sell all his goods and feed the poor, not because he had wealth but because he did not seem to have any creative spirit himself to put with wealth, and he did not know how to use wealth to liberate the creative spirit in others. He was told to sell all his goods and feed the poor, because it was obvious that any better, or less shiftless, or easy-going course, would have been beyond him. He had no great ideals to express with great riches, or great beliefs, or energies, or II Inspired vision of Opportunities. Like a great Millionaires .i . i 111 many other men, rich or poor, he had a poor helpless neuter soul. He did not know anything in particular he wanted to do, and went about asking people. A millionaire at his wits' end ought not to have any money, and he was told so. Even the general advice of Jesus (which is always quoted as against rich men) was against the rich men that he and the people about him knew. Because he gave up entirely, apparently, on a few crude, provincial-minded millionaires in a little side-country of the world, before a single church had been founded, it does not follow that he would give up entirely on millionaires now, after two thousand years of Christianity has had a chance at them. It would not be hard to prove that the very faults of the great world-gathered, world-wide millionaires we are producing to-day, have qualities of insight and consideration, and responsibility, that 12 would almost do to have made a whole re- Millionaires ligion out of, for one of those old- fash- q^^^^ peopie ioned, hemmed-in, narrow millionaires that were being produced by the simple industrial system (with hardly a machine in it) that obtained in the time of Christ in Palestine. It may possibly be true that million- aires have been less improved by Chris- tianity in two thousand years than any other class, but it must have done some- thing with the rich. Even the Christian- ity-in-solution in the world would have done something in two thousand years. It probably took a meaner man to be rich then than it does now. A man was rich on purpose in those days and for its own sake, and as things are to-day, what with the discovery of new countries, and continents, and the discoveries of chemistry and geology, and the boundless inventions of machinery, the millionaires we have now are million- aires that could not have been helped. 13 Inspired They are a new kind of man — many of Millionaires ^^^^ j^ j^ ^^^^^ ^^ j^ ^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ human nature had been produced — rolled up upon us by the sheer develop- ment, and fruitfulness, and heating up, and pouring over, and expansion of the earth. Great elemental forces silently working out the destiny of man, have seized these men, touched their eyes with vision. They are rich by revelations, by habits of great seeing and of great daring. They are idealists. They have really used their souls in getting their success, their mastery over matter, and it is by discovering other men's souls, and pick- ing out the men who had them, and gath- ering them around them, that the suc- cess has been kept. Many of them are rich by some mighty, silent, sudden serv- ice they have done to a whole planet at once. They have not had time to lose their souls. There is a sense in which they might be called The Innocents of Riches — some of them. 14 At all events, I cannot help believing Millionaires we have come to the point at last, where, q^j^^^ p^^ j^ with two thousand years of The New Testament struggling up through the human spirit it is time for men to begin to believe that a man may be good enough to be rich. Times have changed. It is com- ing to pass, even before our eyes. The very children can look up and see that times have changed. We are going to have more rich men in the world, not less. What with the introduction of machines and of sudden inventions, mil- lionaires cannot be helped. We might as well make the most of it. For every new value thrust upon the world, some new man is going to be obliged to be rich whether he knows how or not. There is no telling which of us shall be chosen next — if we keep thinking of things. And every man must be ready. The world must be full of visions. It must weld itself great faiths for the rich. I drink daily at this belief. I believe that the 15 Inspired ncxt Mcssiah that comes to the world is going to be a Messiah for Millionaires. I believe the time is almost at hand when he will come to us. He will come rather modestly, perhaps, and he will be a silent, busy man, but when he dies and every- body turns his way, and looks a minute, there will be a great village somewhere smoking up to the sky blessing him. And slowly when they look at him everybody will know, and slowly everybody will be- gin to believe, that being a rich man is one of the greatest and most honorable of all the professions, they will see that a man can be rich and be a gentleman with his money — a gentleman down to his last dollar — that he can even be a great artist with it. The greatest of them — those who have the deepest insight with money will be poets. Their money will go sing- ing from them out through the open doors of other men's Uves. Everyone will see then that holding on to a milhon dollars and doing things with it is more religious i6 than giving it all up with one wave of Mmionaires one's hand, and merely being self-sacrific- ^^^^ People ing with it. Being a millionaire will con- tinue to make a man have a rather worldly- look, perhaps, but if a man believes big things with a million dollars and expects them of himself and of other people, he will seem to us in the twentieth century a religious man, and he will seem a great deal more religious to us, than that nobly- blinded, glorious old hero we all think of first, over in Yasnaya Polynaya, who is sitting out the remainder of his days in a hair shirt and blouse, and who looks so religious to us now, and who is so literal and faithful, and so like the New Testa- ment (2,000 years ago) , but who does not believe big things of men the way the New Testament does, and who does not believe in men at all unless they are very poor, and who does not see any hope for any of us, either in our religion or our art, or our lives, but to level us down into Russian peasants, and begin over. But 17 Inspired it is hard to believe it is ever going to sat- Millionaires . /? i j? 'j.!. t • j. isfy people as a laith or a religion, to ac- cept Tolstoi's vision for the world, wipe away four thousand years with a sweep — temples, orchestras, libraries, Michel Angelo, Copernicus, Shakespeare, steam- ships, and wireless telegraph, and begin the world all over again, stupidly, and from the bottom up — with a sediment of Russian peasants. Tolstoi is going to continue to be respected as a genuine and noble character, and he is always going to be remembered, no doubt, as a morally picturesque man, a sort of Laocoon, but he is not going to seem to people fifty or sixty years from now, particularly religious, or in the spirit of the New Testament. The incredible thing about the New Testament, taken as a whole, is the way that Jesus had of ap- proaching men — the rich and the poor alike — and making them believe in them- selves and see visions for their own lives. The one thing of all others that Christ i8 did with people was to make them believe Millionaires in themselves and in one another more than ^j^^^ peopie they wanted to. He set twelve men at work in three years to make a new world. He made them believe they could. And so they did. And if this same Christ were to come into that new world to-day, who is there who can really doubt that he would have faith and daring enough to con- ceive great ideals for it, and for the men who are rich in it, as well as for those who are poor? It is impossible not to believe that he would see several things that rich men could do, that if he were to meet a small man with a great fortune to-day, in- stead of scaling the man's fortune down until it was as small as the man he would level the man up to the fortune, to the vis- ion or ideal that belongs with a fortune. He would not advocate (as we have taken it for granted he did in the New Testa- ment) throwing away the man and the for- tune both. If one is to make any inference at all from the general nature of his utter- 19 Inspired aiices, and his attitude toward human Millionaires ^^^^j,^^ ^g ^^ ^^^^^ J^^ WOuld do with a millionaire now, one would be inclined to say that the first thing he would do, prob- ably, would be to distinguish him from the other millionaires. He would be human. He would not believe that the world was going to be saved (like the socialists) by dropping off over the edge of the planet one entire class of men in one indistinguishable mass. If a world is going to be saved at all it is going to be saved by the men who see things first. If some of these men who see things first turn out to be millionaires, we will need them so much that we will have to keep them whether they are rich or poor. These men who see things first — the invention, the man who can be original with his mind, who can think of some- thing that all the world will want, and can found a new industry with it, and the millionaire — the man who can be original with his money, who will buy the new in- dustry and be a monopolist with it, i. e., Mimonaires will run it — not in a scared helpless way, ^^^^^ p^^p^^ as his competitors like, but as he likes him- self, who will run it as he likes in behalf of the laborer, in behalf of the inventor, and in behalf of the pubHc, and in his own behalf in such a way that everybody would see that it would be an international disaster for him to give it up — these two men: the inventor who sees things first, and the millionaire who sees things first have the making of a new industrial world between them. The new industrial world is coming to us one new free-born industry at a time. I would not be understood to mean by all this that I am placing my faith in in- spired millionaires as a class. But I do beheve that the next great thing that is going to happen in the world is one in- spired millionaire. I believe that one will be enough. He will make the rest un- happy. They will watch him really liv- ing with his money, and doing big, inter- 21 Inspired estuig thuigs with it, and they will feel Millionaires bored. And it will not be by being righteous, and noble-looking that the inspired mil- lionaire will appeal to other milHonaires, but by having a good time. He is going to do these things because he likes them, quietly and all in the day's work and with- out being a model, and without any fine moralizing flourishes, in a plain every- day business man's way, as a matter of course. This is what he will be like, I think, when he comes. One will be enough. 22 I II Millionaires and Machines T MIGHT not be amiss to state a particular situation and what, all things considered, an inspired millionaire would do in it. Not so very many years ago, when a certain well-known factory in was being run like many others nowadays, on the old-established principle of taking men's souls and minds away and giving them libraries, a man who was known as Long John about the factory, and who was one of the " A Machine " men, and who had more of a soul probably than any other man in the mill, was discharged by the Union and The Firm both for insubor- dination. The " A Machine " Union had two hundred and seventy men in it. Long John retaliated by saying (1) that in two years there wouldn't be any A 23 Inspired Machine. (2) that there wouldn't be any 1 lonaires ^ Machine Union. He had a machine, he said, that would take the place of two hun- dred and seventy men and forty-five more. The same machine, he intimated, would take the place of The Firm. " The Firm could go ." I regret to say that Long John said that the firm could go to the same place he said The Union was going. The result was, it all happened or nearly happened as stated. The new machine was invented. The A Machine men were turned out all through the country, and there was nothing else they knew how to do. The Firm itself was only saved by buying up the machine from Long John at revenge prices and finally by making him a junior member. The first thing that the inspired million- aire is going to believe in, with his money, is Long Johns. He is going to beheve that the only way to keep ahead in modern manufacturing, that is, in manufacturing 24 with machines, is to place inventive and MiUionaires interested men in charge of the machines. Machines Other things being equal he is going to believe that if his factory has the most creative men in it, the most of them at the most points, it will have the most chance of keeping at the head of the race. He is going to make his decisions and invest- ments, and promotions, and appoint his superintendents, on the principle that competition in manufacture is a race of machines. The less he allows his men to be like the machines they work with, the more they are going to do with the ma- chines he already has, and the more and better machines he is going to have with which to hold the market. »5 Ill The Library Cure I WAS talking on this general subject the other day with a friendly millionaire who happens to be the chief owner of a large mill which is not a thousand miles from Mount Tom and which we will call, for the sake of convenience, the Holbrook Mill. I had been trying to express a little my ideas about machines and about letting men think in factories and had just been telling him about the career of Long John — and I had told who Long John was. " But the trouble is," he said, " you cannot get Long Johns." He then went on to say that according to his experience, " machinery was machinery and that was all there was to it." " The men who work with machines do not think after a year or so," he said, " and would rather not." He rather patronized my hopefulness, I 26 thought. I listened a few minutes more, The Library while he heaped up difficulties, and then I stepped in with what must have looked to him, as a practical man, a sort of trip- ping literary promptness. I said that it seemed to me there would be no way out for our machine-civilization until the owners of machines had ideals for their employees, as well as for the machines, ^ and made it a point to improve the men and the machines together. He sniffed a little when I spoke of ideals for employees. " The Holbrook Silk Mill has them," he said. Then I remembered I had seen the Hol- brook Silk Mill once, out in the suburbs, its little Model Village all around it. I remembered a long day I had spent there tramping about with a reporter from New York. It was true, in a way, that the Firm was always appearing to have ideals — at all events it always appears to be trying experiments in the mill and the mill village. It gives dances and re- 27 Inspired vivals to the employees, and such things, and it has a beautiful little library in the center of the works, green grass growing all around, ivy at the windows and moss on the books. The point that Mr. immediately took up and emphasized was the moss on the books. I said I thought that books were the foolish end of the ideal to begin with. They were the foolish end with anybody, to say nothing of factory hands. And then, as I was trying to be especially rea- sonable with a practical man and talk facts and not theories, I brought up the E. S. Manufacturing Company, which has a huge plant in one of those wide flat towns one sees from the car windows in the mid- dle West. The mill has, no one knows how many acres of floors, seven big chim- neys, and a small library — books in same condition as above, but it goes one step further than the Holbrook Silk Mill. The Firm takes the ground that the most 28 natural way to rouse men's minds to The Library other men's works — books in libraries for ^^^ instance — is through their own works, the works they are daily engaged in them- selves. So the Firm publishes its own magazine, offers prizes twelve times a year, for the best idea of the month that any employee may have, for carrying on the business or any part of the business. " Sounds well," said Mr. . " But as regards actual ideas for the works and as regards the actual use of books in the library, do you know the results? " I was not sure. " I know," he said, " I have looked it up. 1. No ideas for the works. 2. Moss on the books. I thought I would not bring forward any more practical illustrations after this. So I merely talked on in a muffled, hope- ful way on the general principle. Finally I said that the failure of a magazine did not prove much. It did not prove that 29 Inspired men's iiiinds were not interested in the 1 lonaires ^^^^jj^ ^^ other men through the work they are interested in themselves. It merely- proved that they were not interested in the work they were doing themselves. Why should they be? If our modern machinery keeps a man standing before a lever all his days, if he is not allowed to do anything with his mind but put his hand from left to right with it for fifteen or twenty years, why should his mind be interested in anything whatever — least of all, why should it be interested in his work? Why should it be interested in itself? If a man cannot use his mind, the most intelliger^t thing he can do with it is to drop it. He becomes a motor for running a hand from left to right. If improved machinery required him to run his hand from right to left, he would be thrown out of employment. To have tried the Library Cure on men, in condi- tions like these we are confronting now, and to have found that it failed, does not 30 prove that ideals for employees are not The Library practicable. It merely proves that the man with a mere modern left-to-right or right-to-left factory mind can no more be interested in a library than a Cog Wheel. Even the Firm Magazine does not interest him. Being interested — such a man is not long in learning — is out of date. The sooner he gets over any latent idea of being interested, if he has to work with a machine, the better. The more he and his machine are alike the more happily they get on together. This is what the Man with the Machine, judged by his actions at least, thinks that he thinks — namely, that he does not need to think. And this is what his em- ployer thinks apparently. " Machines are machines," he says, crossing his legs before his three-thousand-dollar fireplace, " and that is all there is to it." In the meantime the moss on the books, the saloon, the more stupid strike (from this man who does not think) , the bribery 31 Inspired qucstioii, the tenement question, the cock 1 lonaires ggj^^^ |.j^g political boss, the walking dele- gate, and the other things, ad infinitum. All that society can do with the Library Cure is to open the wound. The thing that a man does his knowing with and his real reading with, is his life. The only thorough way to act on his reading is to act on his life. And the only thorough way to act on his life, is to act on the center and core of it, on eight hours a day of it — the habit of mind in which he does his daily work. A man knows as much generally as his habit of mind in his daily work will let him know. When factory work is so arranged that the only habit of mind a man can have in a factory is the habit of not having any mind, the question a machine civilization is obliged to face, is. What can be done for a man that is in the habit of not having any mind? What can be done for mil- lions of such men with whom we are obliged to live, and vote, and worship, which 3a shall be consistent and thorough? A The Library great factory which takes a man's soul away from him, and then presents him with a library is not thorough. Neither is it consistent. It should take away the library. All that a library can do for such a man is to remind him of the rest of him which has been taken away. But can a great factory help taking a man's soul away? Factories must do their work with machinery. Machinery is not going to be uninvented, or moved off the world, and machinery makes men like itself. Machinery involves minute subdivisions of : l^-bor. ; Siibdivision of labor means subdivision of the laborer. Can it be said with truth of our present civilization, that Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who (like the rest of us) has been taking men's souls away, and giving them paper books instead, is doing as well as any man can be expected to do, who does anything at all in an age of machines? Thus we are brought face to face with 33 Inspired the fuU breadth of the entire question of Millionaires j • -t j.' 'xi. i • i n modern civinzation with which we all must reckon sooner or later. It is a ma- chine-civilization. Can men who live in a machine-civilization, a civilization in which men are obliged to earn their money with machines, in which they cannot even spend it without machines — have souls? 34 IV Expectations IN TRYING to answer the question, " Can men who work with machines have souls ? " it is only fair to say that this is not a work on political economy or industrial science, and that it has been written on the assumption that the ques- tion of human labor is one that belongs to the arts and the humanities and not merely to the sciences. Perhaps nothing — not even a clod of earth — belongs merely to the sciences. Our present grave industrial problem, the problem of how men who work with ma- chines can have souls, and of how we can get the men who own the machines to let them, while it has its scientific aspects, is more, after all, a problem of human char- acter, a study of human motives, and of the powers of men, of psychology, intu- 35 Inspired ition, conscience, of worship, and of °°*"^^ what in the long run men really want in this world, and are going to get, and of what really makes men happy. Indus- trial science does not claim to be expert in divining hunian nature, and is preoccu- pied with the laws and principles them- selves more than with what the men — just around the next corner of the world, are going to choose to do with them. Such a book as I have in mind, a world- divining book, might be written by a man who has more the equipment of the novel- ist than the scientist — a novelist who does not write novels but who is wise and true about people, or perhaps it will be written when it comes by some big play- wright in the human spirit like Shake- speare who reaches under desire, and who sees and controls the motive energies of men. It is in the spirit and the hope that a book like this is going to be written sometime, that this one has been written toward it. 36 The scientific men of to-day, as I under- Expectations stand them, are not averse to letting in a work of human appeal, a work of art or of action in their own field, or even a work of the imagination, and if the imagi- nation in it, is true or in the right direction, they will be the first to welcome it. It is not literary for the literary men to crowd out the scientific man from his influence on the arts, and it is not scientific to crowd out literature and the method and appeal of literature from science. It is what literature really is or should be seeking to be to-day — a kind of glorified applied science. Chemistry is not the physician. Biology is not the mother of society, and political economy is not the dynamo of business, and what this country needs next in the way of books on this subject is not more maps, charts, or systems, more net- work — vast trolleys of theories over our heads, but some central powerhouse of thought, of faith, and of turn- ing on the wills of men. Perhaps 37 Inspired it is bccausc wc havc considered the emotions that go with this subject and the ideas that go with it, apart, that we have been so helpless in dealing with it. Perhaps it is because our emotions have not been fertilized or allowed to have their pollen on them, that they have been planted merely in libraries and have never come up. Only some man with the double equipment for it, who works in the spirit of a Henry George, and writes from the point of view of a human being and a scientist at once, some man whose heart reasons and whose rea- son burns, can write the book at last that shall search the hearts of the people and turn the wheels of events. In the meantime the people, until their hearts have been searched and lighted and the power turned on, are on trial before the older and the weary nations, and before the kings and cynics of the earth. In the meantime we are living in a country where every class of men, where every industry, 38 is fighting against itself, where every vil- Expectations lage and nearly every factory is in a state of civil war, a country governed by the people and for the people, where the peo- ple are grinding up their souls in iron and in cogs and wheels (in machines called machines), where people are lying and stealing in machines (called trusts), and killing to get enough to eat, and where all men are asking " Can men who live with machines have souls ? " Perhaps it is just as well that every book on this subject should not be purely scientific. Perhaps there is nothing sup- erficial or unworthy in strong feeling, or in hope or fear or despair, or in breaking through to the truth, or even in a little singing, in discussing the fate of a great and proud people among the nations of the earth. And so, gentle reader, I have come to the conclusion, timidly, and after butting a rather foolish and experimental pair of brains against several high walls of 39 Inspired books on the subject, that in all Millionaires /» •, •• i i .1 .1 of its practical and even the theo- retical and intellectual phases, the labor of a world is essentially a human or spiritual subject, that the knowledge of human nature, of the laws of the human spirit is the knowledge that has the most masterful bearing on it, that the great human insights, the eternal passions, the great faiths of the human soul, are the energies that are finally going to count in the great practical and industrial problem that is growing to-day out of the presence of the machine in modern life. And so I have claimed the question for my question and for every man's, and it is only by its being every man's question — a human question — that it can be settled. " Can men who work with ma- chines have souls? " The socialists seem to have an idea that somebody is going to think of something, some industrial contrivance or machine for morality, which will be set 40 up, and which will make it possible for Expectations men in a machine-age to have souls, if they want them. But I have come to be- lieve that it is not by any economic scheme, or social device, some way of inventing evil off the earth, but by great personal be- liefs, that the battle for the existence of the soul in an age of machines will have to be fought. If it is true that these great, splendid, blind machines are crowding me, and crowding my brother, and even crowding a God, from off the earth, there can be but one reason for it, and that is that my brother has been so busy in mak- ing bigger and bigger machines every year that he has forgotten to make big- ger men to go with them, and bigger be- liefs to make bigger men out of. What he is going to do next, is to build him great creeds to go with his great machines, and great men that shall be built out of his great creeds. The world as originally planned, was planned to have men in it, and any mod- 41 Inspired em contrivance that is being rigged up Millionaires ■, n r» t^* i • .1 by proiessors oi pontical economy m the first breathless minutes of the twentieth century, to make a world all of a sudden which is going to work as well whether there are men in it or not, or whether the men in it are trying to be men or not, will have to be complex. An industrial sys- tem which is based on nobody's expecting anything of anybody, or upon expect- ing as little as possible, has to be elaborate because it is not true. Lying is always elaborate and everything that goes with it. There is no denying the value of the economic expert. If we have chosen an economic system in which we are going to lie, the more specialists and libraries it is going to take to help us do it. In the meantime everybody really knows that in the last resort, if we are going to have a real economics — an economics that can save a real world — it will not be an economics that only a special- ist can understand. The truths that 4a strike down to the bottom of the matter Expectations are all human and elemental. The actual situation, instead of being elaborate, is standing out at this moment, when one thinks of it, with a terrible, naive sim- plicity across the whole broad front of modern life. The whole industrial problem of our modern mechanical age is an essentially religious problem, the problem of getting a few millionaires, or industrial leaders in this world to believe in the men. Modern industry is getting more com- plex, requires more and more an expert to mention the matter, because it is an in- dustry which is trying to get on more and more, without employers and without em- ployees who trust each other, and who can afford to. The center of an industrial ^ situation is its organic belief or its organic disbelief in human nature. The first man, whether he is a man of thought, or a man of action, who shall do something or say something that shall 43 Inspired make people quite generally see that be- Millionaires t • • i • v j j. lievmg m human nature can be made to pay — will settle the situation. It is an act of insight, the fixing of the real or live belief of men of action, that is going to bring order out of chaos in our modern life. What shall we have for our work- ing belief, for instance with regard to capital? Shall we believe that nothing good can be expected of a man with a million dollars and kill our millionaires off? Or shall we believe that we are going to produce and are already pro- ducing men who will be good enough and who will know enough to have a million dollars? The moment men's creeds or gospels of action are determined, all the other aspects fall into line. What shall we believe with regard to labor? Shall we believe that the way out in the labor problem is for every man to have a be- lief in labor — a belief that doing five- dollar work pays whether one gets the five dollars or not? Or shall we believe 44 that the way out in the labor problem is Expectations not a belief in labor, but a belief in wages, — in not doing five-dollar work until one has the five dollars? It would be hard to mention a single point in our present industrial life, which is not being settled or cannot be settled by what men believe or fail to believe about themselves or about one another. 45 V Three Men to Expect THE best way to prophesy the course of the next few hun- dred years would be to pick out the three hardest men to believe in, in this modern world — the three particular kinds of men this modern world has stopped expecting — and believe in them and expect them. I have no special theory or program, or device that I propose to hang out — flutter like a handkerchief in the face of the most appalling cataclysm of elemental forces that this world has ever seen, now gathering upon us; but I have three great beliefs which I believe are being silently and irrevocably written to- day, in sleep and in waking, upon the hearts of the strong through all the earth. These three great faiths are three men. I have made these three men my creed. I 46 believe in the inspired millionaire, I be- Three Men lieve in the inspired laborer, and I believe ° ^^^ in the poet or world-singer, who shall con- ceive, and reveal, and inspire these men out of the men we know about us, who shall forge out the great faiths for them, the faiths that alone can glow through and melt down and build up a world. The man who has the situation most immediately in his hands — if he is going to do any believing — is the inspired millionaire. He has the advantage of position. More people notice him. The moment one exists, people will believe in him, and inspired and believing labor will gather about him. Instead of trying to run an industrial world on the cash-reg- ister, fare-recorder principle, in which men will not need to believe in themselves or in one another, he is going to start a fashion of making and invoking men — men in whom nobody can help believing. A few sample millionaires made out of a few great sample beliefs in human nature, 47 Inspired judiciously placed about in this modern Millionaires ■, ■, -, -, i •• • n world, would make it over m a few min- utes — that is, for all practical purposes. They would make everybody believe that it was going to be made over, and make everybody see that it was belief that was going to do it, and the start would be made. This modern world in its great crisis, with its new machines, is at the parting of the ways. There are two courses we can take ; the course of arranging a world so that men will not be necessary, because they cannot be expected, and the course of arranging it so that they will have to be expected. Some of us believe that the more inconvenient it is made for a worl3 not to have men in it, the better. We be- lieve that the way out for us modern men, struggling with these huge machines, is not to creep back from our souls into the machines, but to come out and face the machines and lift ourselves to the machines, loom up with our souls beside 48 them and be men with them. So we face Three Men the issue. It is the final challenge of ^^^^^^t Matter, hve, terrible, steel-fingered, boiler-souled, to the manhood of the earth. 49 VI Millionairess Turn Firsts Please WHEN the inspired millionaire comes to the conclusion that it pays to have men who can think, with his machines, and begins scouring the world for Long Johns and looking about under the machines for them, the first thing that happens is — as has already been intimated — that he cannot find them. He finds himself growing a little con- temptuous and tyrannical towards all these men who work with machines and would rather not think. He falls into a naive, disgusted surprise. Now, that (all in a moment) he has decided that all these men with his machines can think — wKy do they not begin to do it? Gradually, as he thinks more and more himself, his mood changes. He finds himself won- dering at the men a httle, — that they are so not worse than they are. Then he begins Millionaire's to wonder about himself and about his p"J°^ "^ * class. Slowly there falls a kind of fumbling, wavering humbleness upon him. As he walks back and forth through his factory — this vision of faces clacking in and out among machines — why is it that they do not want to think? Why is it that he cannot get Long Johns ? Will there be more Long Johns or fewer in twenty years, with whom his sons can carry on the business? Belonging to the millionaire class, and being a millionaire because he has time or power to think out the future and past in business more than others, the next experience he has, probably, is the sense that he has been personally abused, that the employers who have gone before him have left nothing but these herds of machines to run machines with. They have killed oif the Long Johns. They have struck at the roots of the business. All he seems to see before him is a great 51 Inspired human gap, for thirty years, a whole gen- MiUionaires ^j^^^-^j^ ^f ^^^ ^J^^^^ J^^g ^^^^^ SWept OUt of reach. Long Johns are not to be had. They were to be had once; and instead, there is this huge, hungry, unreasoning drove of mongrels, half -machines, half- men, staring one forever in the face. Then the inspired millionaire falls to thinking what it is, that all this time has been happening to the world. It comes to something like this. The rich man, who has always, from the first, possessed the ground and the holes under the ground (the two things from which leisure and thought can be dug) , and who has guarded for thousands of years the ground and the hole under the ground, so that no poor man could get at them ex- cept on terms the rich man dictated, — has now added, in the nineteenth century, a third means of subjection — the Machine. There was a time once when the poor man at least had his hands. Whatever happened to him, he felt that 5* he had at least his hands. But now he Mimonaire's T TT« 1 J Turn First, has not even his hands. His hands are pjease nothing without a machine and the machine costs money. If he wants to make the work of his hands worth any- thing he must ask the rich man to let him have a machine for it. Then, what happens next? The rich man having gained, as in the case of the ground and the guarded hole under the ground, a purely military advantage, at once proceeds to use it all for himself. The poor man takes the rich man's machine and stands by it, makes the machine into six hundred men. The rich man pays him (what he has always paid him) the wages of one man and pockets the wages of the other five hundred and ninety-nine. It looks like a plain case of military occupation, the man with the gun threatening the man with the fist. We have grown rather used to it. Some of us are so used to it that we think it is the nature of things. And yet if one were 53 Inspired to account honestly for a certain low tone, Millionaires ^ certain modern meanness which seems to have come into the business and indus- try of the world in these later years, it would not be too much to say that it is because the ideals and methods of busi- ness have slowly fallen into the hands of a man with a gun, who is capable of threatening a man with a fist. Under conditions that formerly ob- tained, a certain type of man was often encountered as a leader of industry. He made being a manufacturer almost an art, and he gave to commerce in many com- munities the dignity of the professions. When this type of man found gradually, as things were going, that leading in busi- ness, meant leading with a gun, he dropped his gun and went out of business. So things have grown worse and worse. A man with a gun always grows worse, and now there is a whole crowd of men with a gun keeping each other in counte- nance, egging each other on, and hiring 54 philosophers to make the gun look wise Millionaire's and like a law of nature, and artists to p^J^^^ "^ * make it look beautiful, and lawyers to make it look legal, and churches to make it look right — until it looks for all the world like God's Gun to most of us. And so things have gone with the world. We begin to spell out the new century, a great wonder and pain upon us — some of us. What is it we see as we look forth? Soci- ety moved to its foundations, our whole modern life, slowly, mightily, across the world, and with a great sigh of a hundred years lifts up from this nineteenth cen- tury at last, rousing itself. With our own eyes we are seeing it. It is making itself ready for the longest reckoning, the greatest battle in history. The field is already white with the tents. They are going out to meet each other unless some- thing can be done about it — on the one side Capital, God with a Gun, going out to meet Man — Man with a Fist — a terrible light in his eyes. This is what the 55 Inspired inspired millionaire sees, as he looks ahead. Millionaires j^ ^^^^^ j^.^ ^j^.^j^ jj^ g^^^ .^ ^^^^ hard as he thinks — even with the gun in his hands and his fingers playing with the trigger — not to think against him- self. In action it may be easy to side with a gun, but in thinking, a gun does not help. One gets a little ashamed of think- ing with a gun. The result is, that when an inspired millionaire gets started he is more ashamed of himself than anyone else could possibly be. He becomes ashamed of his whole class, and of the years be- fore he was born. In former days, when the rich man had the mountains and the valleys and the holes under the ground with which to fight the poor man, he was taking away where his food was, and where his body was buried. And now he has added machines and taken away his hands, and he has not merely taken away his hands — made them empty, useless things, mere flourishes on his trunk — but he has taken away his soul. Formerly, when a rich S6 man fought with a poor one, he let him Millionaire's fight out doors, let him have a whole sky p^eTse^"'*' to fight under, and the breath of heaven. The way he fights with him now is to shut him up with a cog, ten hours a day, until he is a cog himself. The damage the rich man has done with the machine in taking away the poor man's hands, — the new, strange babyishness and helplessness of his hands, is nothing to the damage that is done in taking away his brains ten hours a day, in making them sick and helpless, and vague, and mean, and full of evil, and weakness, and wrath. When a man's brain has been shut in with a lever or a cog ten hours a day, when his brain has become a mere click on his shoulders — and a particular kind of click at that — to go with the click of the particular machine that is turning out his life be- side him, the problem of how to get on with such a man, the problem of whether more money can be made out of him by crushing him more, and throwing him 57 Inspired Eway, OF by letting him be slowly put together, so that he will work better, is the question to be faced. The inspired mil- lionaire finds himself weighing these facts. He sees what the men who have gone before him have done. He looks over the remnants of men they have left him for carrying on the business, and what is there he can do? They had Long Johns. He cannot get them. What is the best he can do, with the men he has? So it becomes the daily problem of the inspired millionaire, " What are the con- ditions of work and habits of mind that need to be arranged for, in my factory, to make men who work with machines, keep thinking of things? " 58 // WA TE R And Elijah said : Fill four barrels with water and pour it on the burnt sacrifice and on the wood.^ And he said. Do it the second time.^ And they did it the second time. And he said. Do it the third time,^ And they did it the third time.^^ An Arrangement for Being Allowed to Think, THERE are many details and diffi- culties that need to be considered, and it takes a great deal of patience and repetition and self-restraint, to arrange and conduct a factory in such a way that men are allowed to think in it. Out of the many methods that might be employed for this purpose, it may be well in this second section of this book to pick out one method and deal with it con- cretely. The method proposed may not be the best one in itself, perhaps, but it is brought forward as the one which best il- lustrates the general principle that would be likely to run through any or all meth- ods an inspired millionaire might employ. It is not claimed for this method that 6i Inspired it solvcs the problem in all of its details, but I do believe that it is a good sample method, and that operated by an employer who believes in it, and applied strictly to employees who believe in it and deserve it, it contains the principle that goes to the root of the matter. If a factory is to have live men scattered through the machines in it, — that is, if it is to be a live factory through and through — it must arrange for an exchange system of employment as well as a specialist one. The idea is not that this exchange sys- tem of employment should be applied to the rank and file of the factory, but that the few men in every factory who are cre- ative, who have it born in them to master a whole factory by degrees, who are capa- , ble of overflowing their work, like Vree- land, the brakeman (who overflowed into a whole railroad), should have ample provision made for them, both for the sake of the factory and for themselves. The main feature of this plan is that every 62 man shall be given a chance, if he wants An it, at the rest of the factory, shall be al- fo^B^fn^^'* lowed within certain limits to choose ap- Allowed to Think prenticeships all his life, to spend part of his working-time and a regular part of it, in doing other men's work. The reason for this is not merely that men who keep growing and who always have something young and new before them, will pay in the long run and do bet- ter work from day to day as they go back to their own machines. Many of them will secure unexpected results on the machines they are merely wondering about and cannot run and do not under- stand. Almost all inventions in behalf of women have come from men who have been obliged, for some sudden reason or for a little while, to do women's work. Photography has developed more in ten years by the blunders of amateurs than it has in forty by the labors of profes- sionals. Modern industry is a race of in- 63 Inspired vciitions against inventions. The soul of 1 lonaires jj^ygjj^-iQj^ [^ ^q^ regularity, or even ac- curacy, or any of the other things that are grown in a man by being too intimate with a machine. The power in a mind that makes for invention is its skill in turning irregularity and blundering into inspiration. The inventive mind works by cross-fertilizing. It minds its own business, but it minds it with a large and sometimes rather useless-looking margin. A machine is quite as likely to be im- proved by a man who does not quite know how to work it, as it is by one who does. A man who comes over from some other machine and wonders — who visits a machine with his mind a day or so — may accomplish more with it than a man who works with it all his life. It is as good a principle in industry and in mechanics as it is in law, medicine, and the arts, and in biology, that specialization is a source of weakness as well as strength. It is as true of factory hands as it is of 64 silk worms. Jerseys, chrysanthemums, An 11 • 1 • ti T_ T J* • 1 Arrangement and horses, that the breeding oi special f^^ Being qualities breaks down vital force. The AUowedto . . Think men who do the inventive and revolution- ary things in machinery are the men who put something with something else, and factories that do large things in the long run are only going to be able to do them by having a high average of large men in them, men who can do more than one thing, and who, for that reason, can make combinations, and invent devices, of which the mere specialist would never think. Experience in dealing with different grades of factory hands in strikes goes to show that a man who thinks can be de- pended upon to think, generally, as much as the kind of machine he works with will let him think. After a long struggle, factory owners were convinced that light and air in factories, for men's bodies, paid. The next thing they are going to allow for, is light and air for their minds. They are going to see that almost any kind of 65 Inspired wastc Can be better afforded in a factory Millionaires .t ,• , . , ,^, than wasting men s mmds. inrowmg away a machine now and then is nothing — com- pared to throwing away a man who could think of a machine. It is a mere matter of experiment and competition when all factories will find this out, and will treat their men accordingly. They will realize that to put a man for five, ten, or fifteen years into solitary confinement with a machine, is really to throw away the ma- chine and the man both. Long John was discharged because he wanted to keep on being a man. Many men's faults are virtues that a factory management is not shrewd enough to use. The real trouble with Long John was, that, as the superintendent said: "He could not keep in his place." He was always wanting to do other men's work. When he learned to do a thing, and could do it perfectly, he wanted to do something else perfectly. As long as he found him- self, body and soul, acting on the machine, 66 he kept at it. The moment his work be- An , . , T ,, , . , Arrangement came mechamcal, and the machme began f^^ Being to act on him, he wanted to ffive it up. It Allowed to ^ ^ Think IS not unreasonable that mechanics who really have something on their minds should be allowed to move within certain limits at least, when their minds move, and that a man like Long John, instead of being discharged for being interested in machinery, should be given as many ma- chines as he Hkes. In everything except manufactures this general principle has been proved again and again. It is acknowledged to be a mere matter of business common sense and foresight, that if a Cab Company is going to make money out of its horses it must allow them to keep on being horses. The most available method in a machine shop of allowing men to keep on being men would seem to be to give them the freedom of the shop at times and let them go about thinking in it. Within certain limits a part of every man's labor should 67 Inspired be deliberately sacrificed to apprentice- Millionaires 1. J • ii?j.lT_ Ha. I* ^^ ship and experiment lor the benefit of all concerned. The men in the shops who are going to think of the most improve- ments are going to be the men who come in practical contact with the most things that need to be improved. They will get into the habit of shifting ideas from one department to another, or from one machine to another, a habit of putting things together. The money that is often spent in giving prizes to employees for ideas would be a great deal better spent, in the long run, in giving them room to have the ideas. The most natural way of making room in a man's mind, of letting him visit in other men's ideas and letting them visit in his, is to let him try to do the work of the other men. 68 II. Superintendents and Ideas IT IS obvious that several practical difficulties would have to be overcome in establishing a system of partial rotary employment in a factory. The first thing to do with such a plan would seem to be to find a superintendent who believes in it. The second thing to do, if one failed to find a superintendent who be- heved in it, would be not to try it. It is not claimed for the idea that it could be carried out by a man who does not beUeve in it. On the other hand, there is some ground for the opinion that when the in- spired millionaire has overcome the first difficulty — has found a man who beheves in it, the solution of most of the other dif- ficulties will be found well under way. Perhaps it might be well to state what kind of man such a manager would be 69 Inspired likely to be, if he is to be successful in Millionaires carrying out his belief. He wiU begin, I believe, by having it explicitly understood among all concerned that, in taking the position of manager or superintendent of the factory, he is taking it as the personal representative and champion of every man who works in it, and of every man who owns it, and of the great public outside that is buying its goods. He will proceed on the principle that every act of every day of his life is to be governed by the interests of these three groups of men, that in proportion as he can braid these interests together, make them inextricably mutual and keep them so, he is establishing a permanent and prosperous career for both the business and himself. The first objection such a superintend- ent would encounter in attempting to in- troduce a partial rotary system of em- ployment in his factory would probably come from the union men. The labor 70 unions would oppose it on the ground Superintend- dirt's f).Ti(i that it would lead to the discovery of more j^^^^ men, and of more men's actual qualities at more points, than would be otherwise possible, and would inevitably result in the giving of more freedom and wages to some men than to others. The labor unions have not outgrown the idea of treating all men aUke. The firm would oppose it on the ground that if a factory is alive all through, and many of the men are able to do a great many things, it is harder to keep the secrets in the business from the public, and the secrets in the profits from the men, and more difficult to keep the men and the public both from insubordination. It is obvious that the only man who can manage an unbusiness- like situation — that is, a situation of mutual distrust like this — is a superin- tendent who has, as his first business equipment, the supremacy and the probity of his own personal character. As long as it is neither possible nor desirable to run 71 Inspired a great business without secrets, the only man that can act as superintendent of a live firm with secrets, and of a factory that is alive all through and likes to know secrets, is the man who can keep secrets with fairness, and who can win and hold personal confidence on all sides. He will not be looked upon by the employees (like most superintendents) as the hired man of the Firm. He will be too much of a man to belong to anybody and not to be- long to the whole business from the bot- tom to the top, and he will be looked upon by employees, and by the Firm, both, as their personal representative in dealing with the other. I am ready to admit that if an inspired millionaire desired to acquire a superin- tendent with a first-class mind or a busi- ness-imagination like this, he would find it hard to attract him with an ordinary salary. But I am inclined to believe that, as things are going now, we are likely to see in the near future an entirely new rank 7a or grade of mind in the positions of super- Superintend- intendents. All of these innumerable j^^^^^ anonymous owners of factories — these stockholders and drawers of dividends and interest, their huge pulpy, helpless, unmanned capital mounting up over their heads — are slowly and painfully being brought to the point where they will en- tirely change their idea of the price that it pays to pay for manning capital and making it alive all through. The proba- bilities seem to be that if our millionaire's are able to secure such a man as I have described, to conduct their money for them, they will not only be glad to do it on the specific condition that he shall con- duct it freely and according to his own ddeas, but they will realize how much it is worth to have a man who can. The indi- cations are that when our modern money is being generally invested once more, on far-sighted or human principles, it is not going to be the man who furnishes the money for the business nor the man who 73 Inspired docs the wopk, but the man who holds the 1 lonaires j^^gjjjggg together — who makes it alive all over — who shall receive the largest in- dustrial rewards. The large-minded, in- gathering, centripetal superintendent, the man who, by his human nature, his per- sonal qualities and insights, brings all the sources of power in a business to a head, is going to be allowed, as a matter of course, by all concerned, the highest pre- mium that business affords. When the crash comes and the successful superin- tendent under the present regime — the man who conducts business on the prin- ciple of suspended hostility — goes for- ever out of power, and the new type of man steps forward to his place, the man who believes that being human is practical and good business, no one will find fault with him for getting rich. He will be watched with relief, and everybody will fall in and help. Everybody will see that if a superintendent can be found, who really has a soul, he ought to be paid a sal- 74 ary which shall approximate to the actual Superintend- 1 I 1 It • j_i • T ents and market value a soul has, m this modern j^^^^ business world. A man who has the spirit- ual power of putting hirkiself in the place of everybody and holding everybody in place, who is doing, or as good as doing, everybody's work, can be as rich as he likes. Nobody in a factory will quarrel with the fact that he ought to have more profit in proportion than the millionaire or the pro- ducer, or laborer, or than everybody. He uses his profit to give everybody a chance. To let such a man get rich is put- ting money in one's pocket. Under these conditions it does not seem to me that (especially when a few sample superintendents have become known throughout the country) the imprac- ticability of getting such superintendents will be so very great. I cannot help be- lieving that the first moment we have live superintendents over these great fac- tories of ours — these little cities of machines — the factories will be al- 75 Inspired lowed to be alivc too. While it is true Millionaires ^^^^ there are very few such superintend- ents occupying positions now, and that, under present conditions, even those are working under enormous difficulties, and under protest, I believe that these men have been made, and are biding their time in our modern business world. The indi- cations are that the first moment our mod- ern capital, which at present, in a kind of brutal, stunned, morally-underwitted mood, seems to be lunging along, is sud- denly jarred into its senses, and wakes up, and sees how helpless it really is without men like this — the men will be there. I place my faith in these men. If I am wrong and it is really true that such men are not to be had for our factories, that, they are not being made, it would pay our great millionaires to give up starting fac- tories for awhile, altogether, and try churches. Factories are not alive all through be- cause they are not organic. The best they 76 have attained as yet, most of them, is a Superintend- sort of organized suspended hostility. 1^^^^ The real reason that factories are not or- ganic and cannot become organic is that nobody believes in anybody. It is getting to be a literal business truth that what the typical modern factory most needs to go with its plant to-day is a creed — or pos- sibly a church on the premises, where all the people in the factory could go — mas- ter and workmen — and kneel together until they amount to something — that is, amount to enough, have religion and in- sight enough, to work their souls together. Business is being done on so large a scale and so far ahead that it is getting to be no longer practical not to have a soul in it. If a man is going to be a superintendent or a worker, if he is going into business in the twentieth century, let him get down on his knees. • The next great event in the business world is going to be a religious | event, the making of men who shall have it in them to tie to great faiths, to the great 77 Inspired permanent facts of human nature and of Millionaires .it • •. *i ±. i. t • the human spirit — silent, serene, behevmg men, who carry great burdens with glad- ness and boyishness and who do their liv- ing and working in some great daily faith in one another. It is obvious that the next best substi- tute in a factory, for a church on the grounds — some place for smelting the men together — is to have a superintend- ent who is a sort of church all by himself. 78 Ill Unions and Ideas, WHEN the inspired millionaire has secured for his factory as super- intendent, or Soul of the Business, a man who beUeves that souls are a necessary- part of the running gear of a factory, the whole matter of carrying out some ex- change system, or partial-rotary system of employment for the men who want it, becomes one of determining and adjusting details. The two main horns of the dilemma, in allowing souls in factories, would seem to be met at the outset by the character of the superintendent. The men in the labor unions who would object at first to a system of apprentice- ship a part of each day or week, would ob- ject on the ground that if the entire fac- tory is going to be thrown open to every- body in it — exposed to a procession of 79 Inspired mcii thinking of things, no one man in the Millionaires -, •, ii^Ti j. iji?i whole estabnshment would leel secure m his place. He feels that some one might come along at almost any minute who will know more (by accident almost) about his work, or about his machine, than he does. So he takes his stand in favor of shutting every man carefully in with his own little click of skill. He does not think himself, but he knows that no one else will be let in to think, and feels safe. The conditions may have forced it upon him, but to a de- gree it must be admitted that this man, standing there clicking his little click day after day, all by himself, is at bottom some- thing of a coward. If everything is being left open in the factory, if the machines are being ventilated every day or so with men pouring through them, he fears that it will be found out that he has a better place than belongs to him. He makes up his mind he will keep it whether it belongs to him or not. A state of affairs in which he will have to defend himself from other 80 men's thinking of things about his machine, Unions and by going out and thinking of things for theirs, fills him with forebodings, and mor- alizing, and a love of making rules for those who are ahead. So he persuades the labor union to hold labor down. " Do not allow this thinking of things," he says, " to go on." " Keep your place and let every- body else keep his. Do not let the ma- chines in our factory, or the men beside the machines, or the factory as a whole, improve or grow any more than can be helped." Under the mechanical system that gen- erally obtains in our factories there is no denying that this position of the employee is natural. Given another system, how- ever, which is based on daily human in- sights into human possibilities, which has a superintendent who makes it the soul of the business to discover the best qualities of all his men, and put those best qualities where they will work best, it is obvious that the whole situation of the individual em- gi Inspired ploycc is changed. He would discover in 1 lonaires ^.^^^ ^^ ^le took his Superintendent in, that his interests and the interests of the super- intendent, and the factory are identical, that the most creative, and interesting, the most self -expressive and natural thing that he can do, or think of to do, in that factory will be the thing that, sooner or j later, will come into his hands. He will feel sure of this because it is the policy of j the factory, and will earn the most money for him, and for everybody else. The other objection that men in the ! unions would make to allowing men ] around thinking in factories, would be, that it would result in the promotion of some men at the expense of others. This, : also, like the objection that has just been i described, is met by the character, that is, | by the business equipment, of the super- intendent. When an employee thinks of i something of enormous value to the firm | and is suddenly elevated above the rest, in proportion to the value of what he has 82 i thought of, several things promptly hap- Unions and pen, if the factory is not a live factory. Three parties in the factory, if anyone suddenly thinks, are sure to feel injured, and to set to work to defend themselves. The common hands do not want a man out of their own grade promoted over their heads, because he will receive a benefit from what he has thought of, which they will not share, and which may be employed against them. The members of the firm promptly line up in the same posi- tion. There is danger that the man will employ his invention against the firm. He may use it either to extort privileges for himself, or to leave the factory, and sell to rivals. So it comes to pass in the typical ordinary factory which does not believe in being alive, that if a man suddenly acts in it as if he were alive, a minute, he finds his hand is against every man, and every man against his. A penalty on being alive is crowded into every cog and wheel of ma- 83 Inspired chincry and into every crevice of manhood Millionaires -r ■ .1 i about the place. Given another system and a superin- tendent who beheves something, and the situation is changed. The character of the superintendent, instead of driving every man back upon his own interests against all the others, acts as a tremendous centripetal force, holds all of the interests of all the men together. The man who is promoted for thinking of something knows that the superintendent will see to it that his reward will be great, that he will not be treated as a mere hand, but will have his fair share, no matter what his position is, of the actual money his invention has earned for the firm. He knows also, through the superintendent, that his fac- tory will make it a point to make better terms with him than any other would. In other words, the more a man thinks in such a factory, the more everything he thinks identifies him with it. The sanie principle holds good of the 84 other factors in the situation. The men Unions and 1 1 J 11 Ideas over whose heads a man has been pro- moted for thinking, instead of opposing his promotion, will be sure to desire it. They will know that the superintendent is looking out for their interest. The only reason that men object to a man's being promoted over their heads, is that superin- tendents do not make them feel that the man's success is going to be theirs, as well as his, that their interests and his are iden- tified, and that everybody — more or less — has really been promoted with him. It is because the men who have belonged to the laboring class in modern industry, and who have thought of things, and risen out of it, have not acted or been influenced to act as saviors with their inventions, or as redeemers of their class ; it is because they have seemed to turn against their class as they rose, have shared with the men above them, and never with the men below — that the prejudice of the present-day la- boring man against allowing a laboring 8s Inspired man to improve, has grown so insur- Millionaires . i i mountable. Given a superintendent who beheves that men who work with machines can have souls, who sees that the manufactur- ing business is really the business of put- ting men's souls together and making them work, and not a mere business of putting together fragments of iron and glass and wood — the situation is changed. The factory becomes organic and alive all through. The first moment a man really thinks of something the factory feels the glow and thrill of it all over. In such a factory the employees and owners and the public become as members of one body moving and growing in conscious health, and in strength and joy together. The very things that to-day look difficult and impossible become a matter of course. It is not denied that a live factory, like a spirited horse, would be much harder to have under one sometimes, than a dead one. But the kind of superintendent who 86 does not enjoy a live problem squirming Unions and under him day after day, who does not prefer a seething, rising and falling mass of living and thinking, going on under him, is the kind whose days are numbered. The inspired millionaire, instead of giving up the idea of having a live factory be- cause a humdrum superintendent would be thrown by it, is going to give up the hum- drum superintendent. He is going to suspect that a man who is made of machin- ery on one side, and stock-exchange on the other, with all the human nature be- tween squeezed out, is the last man who can make a success of running a great business with machines. He is going to suspect that the power of conducting a great enterprise that is filled with the hum of machines, instead of being a machine-like power — a power of precision — must be at bottom a human, artistic, or divining power in a man, the power of put- ting oneself in the place of other men and of making them know it. 87 Inspired The assertion that a superintendent like Millionaires , i • • • . • i i . i . ■■ this IS impracticable, that such men cannot be found for such positions is only true temporarily. The reason that the more heroic type of man in modern times, the kind of man who used to be a soldier or an artist in the days gone by, has not been at- tracted by the factories and the million- aires we have been so largely hav- ing of late, is that the conditions both among the machines and among the mil- lionaires have been becoming impossible. A man such as I have described can only take a position by changing conditions both for himself and for everybody else. The practical difficulty in many cases is not in the condition of the men, nor of the man, who might be superintendent, but in the millionaire. The million- aire finds, as a matter of experience, that the kind of man he would really like for the position of manager is a man who can- not quite be managed. Then he tries to manage him. The real trouble is with the millionaire. He has had it proved to him, 88 over and over again, that the men that Unions and can be managed cannot manage anyone else. And when it comes to making an actual choice between a second-rate super- intendent who can be controlled by money, and the man of the highest order of gifts who is controlled by his own gifts, the millionaire chooses the second-rate super- intendent. So, as a rule, we have had sec- ond-rate factories with money on top of the superintendent, and machines on top of the men from the bottom to the top. The only way out of this difficulty is a change of heart on the part of the millionaire, the conviction that if the money in a great busi- ness wants to make more money, it must be more modest, must make heavy conces- sions at the start to brains and insight. The man who sees things, cannot be had \ except by men who will let him do them. It does not interest him to be a mere helpless adviser — a dictionary or glossary of busi- ness, a man to be run into, or looked up, who sells little flashes of insight on things 89 Inspired that he cannot do, to people who cannot Millionaires j ,■■ r^n •■ •, . . do them. Ihe whole arrangement is superficial and blind, and from hand to mouth. He knows that great jbusiness enterprises, except for a short time, cannot be conducted in this way, by brains inter- rupted by money. He has the spirit and the attitude of the artist and the only kind of money that in the long run controls him is the money that buys the whole of him, buys the man and his ideas together, on the condition that he shall carry them out. Only a few men can do it, but the men who make money for others best, are those who can be told to treat it as their own. In proportion as the money in a business and the brains are inextricably identified, the more it is going to succeed. If the money and the brains are not already together in the same man, two courses are possible to try to gain this identity. One course is for the money to make a hired man of the brains and get a hired man's result. And the other is for the money to give up to the 90 brains and be ruled by them. The first Unions and 1, • I L /? Ideas course results in our present system oi second-rate factories and the general slave system of modern industry from the bot- tom to the top. The second course is com- ing in soon, because all it has to do is to wait for the first to be played out. It is merely a matter of things becoming bad enough before they are better. With money bullying at the top, and foremen bullying all the way down through, the general idea that men who work with machines cannot have souls, and had better not have brains if they can help it, is abun- dantly justified. The moment that our great millionaires, as a class, have come to the point where they deal with other men's spiritual powers as respectfully as they do with their dollars, the whole manufactur- ing world will begin to be placed on a new footing. The time is not far off when it will be generally taken for granted by all concerned that the controlling factor, the strategic position in industry, instead of 91 Inspired belonging to the man who has the money, Millionaires ^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^le work, bclongs to the superintendent, the man who has the ideas, the great faiths of the business — who is the soul of the business, who holds the owners, and the men, and the plant in his hands, and is putting them together. Modern industry is daily living, in this beginning of the twentieth century, in fear and slavery, and drudgery all the way through, because it is sick industry. And it can never be anything else but sick until it acknowledges that the soul must be as supreme in business, as it is in everything else. Even as it is, it is only the soul struggling up through in it which keeps it alive. It is not possible to have a great industry in a great nation a long time, without humble millionaires — until the men with brute force, the men who are top- heavy and dull with money, are seen giv- ing place gladly, for their own defense as well as the defense of all of us, to the men who have spiritual powers in business, 92 who see things and do things by using Unions and their souls daily, and by getting the use of the souls of others. There is no reason why a factory, if enough soul is poured in with the money at the top, should not be as spiritual as a church, and as educa- tional as a school, in the town where it stands. It would be a kind of ceaseless church — -or a church at least ten hours a day. And every time a man thought of his work, it would rest and light his soul. His work would become to him a part of the vision of the making of a world, a daily, hourly unfolding, a kind of pan- orama of his larger self, reaching out be- fore him. The look of the youth would lurk in his eyes (as it does in all who really live) down to the farthest slope of old age. There is as much room for imagination — the habit of visiting in things with one's mind — -and of being young and fresh before them, in a machine shop as there is in poetry. When machine shops are con- 93 Inspired ductcd as they are going to be, the men 1 lonaires ^j^^ work in them (at least in an age of machines like this) are going to be more creative men, more expressive, progres- sive, and original in their work than any other men we have. The idea that there is something in a machine simply as a machine which makes it inherently unspir- itual is based upon the experience of the world, but it is after all a rather amateur and juvenile world with machines as yet. Its ideas are in their first stages and are based for the most part upon the world's experience with second-rate men, working in second-rate factories, men who have been bullied, and could be bullied, by the machines they worked with into being machines themselves. No one would think of denying that men who let machines get the better of them either in their minds or their bodies in any walk of life, grow unspiritual and mechanical. But it does not take a machine to make a machine of a man. Anything will do it 94 if the man will let it. Even the farmer Unions and who is out under the great free dome of heaven and working in wonder every day of his life grows like a clod if he buries his soul alive in the soil. But farming has been tried many thousands of years and the other kind of farmer is known by everybody, — the farmer who is master over the soil, who instead of becoming an expression of the soil himself, makes the soil express him. The next thing that is going to happen is, that everyone is going to know the other kind of mechanic. It is cheerfully admitted that the kind of mechanic we largely have now, who allows himself to be a watcher of a machine, a turner-of-something for forty years, can hardly be classed as vegetable life. He is not even organic matter, except in a very small part of himself. But it is not the mechanical machine which makes the man unspiritual. It is the mechanical man beside the machine. A master at a piano (which is a machine) makes it a spiritual 95 Inspired thing, and a master at a printing press, I lonaires j.|^^ William Moms, makes it a free and artistic and self -expressive thing. It is only a second-rate order of labor- union and administration that is not going to recognize this, that will not so arrange a man's work with a machine eight hours a day as to develop the man and the machine together. It is true that it will be difficult to arrange, in the beginning, and that only the millionaire who believes in it, and wants it a great deal, will be able to arrange it, and he will only be able to do it through a superintendent who believes in it as he does. There can be no doubt that the moment there appears a richly- endowed millionaire who sees this sort of thing there will appear a richly-endowed superintendent to go with him. The moment that the man of intellectual genius — of spiritual insight — even of dramatic insight (the power of knowing men's souls in crowds at a glance) is rec- ognized as the suitable superintendent for 96 a factory, the whole drift of the life with Unions and machines will change. The very things that now tend to keep the machines on top of the men in factories will begin to put men on top of machines. When the new type of superintendent comes, we shall begin to feel new things about the ma- chines and the men beside the machines — the very sound of machines through the windows on the street, shall bring at last wide, rested thoughts to us. As we go by, we shall think of the machines every- where, spelling freedom and joy around the earth. 97 IV The Skilled Labor of the Poor IT is not denied that, under a partial- rotary system — the allowance of part time for doing other men's work — there would be a falling off in quantity and quality of work at first, but it is believed that whatever a factory may lose tempo- rarily by having the employees who desire it, apprentices part of the time, it will gain many times over by bringing fresh and creative minds every day of the year, and a great many of them, to bear upon old difficulties, minds that suggest methods and think of things, out of their very ignorance, which never have been thought of before. It is not denied that a superintendent who carries out this policy will have to begin slowly and perhaps with all against him at first. But he can at least begin 98 by making sure of the fresh young men, The Skilled and of those who have kept fresh, and who p^^^' ° * ^ have kept growing among the older ones. Gradually when the whole soul of the business is seen by all to be turning on it — upon the daily discovery, developing, and sorting out of men, the whole factory will respond to it. Instead of the super- intendent's problem being what it is now, how to defend the stronger men from the weak, and the men who can work, and want to work, from those who do not, the problem will be inverted — will be one of getting the strong to divide with the weak, as they grow stronger, until all the weak are drawn in with them, and all work to- gether. If the employers are voluntarily and habitually generous, if they make common cause with their best men, the best men will make common cause with the men below and the whole factory will be keyed to a new spirit. It is by no means claimed that a partial- rotary system of employment will make 99 Inspired all machinists inventors. But it will nat- Millionaires n i'*ij.n i j? urally and incidentally make a lew men inventors, and by giving every man a chance, and a good many kinds of chance, it will discover which those few are, and more of them. It will be generally rec- ognized by all, that a soul in a machine shop is as valuable as anywhere else. The chief attribute of the workman's soul is his imagination, the mind's power of visit- ing around in things, and of putting them together. To say that a man with an imagination in a machine shop is worth his weight in gold, is to put it mildly. It is the very essence of a machine shop, of all places in the world, that the skilled labor of the hands is reduced to its lowest terms and the skilled labor of the mind or soul is all that is left, and wins the highest possible premium. A man in a machine shop who has an imagination does his thinking in armies. Every machine he thinks of is a crowd. Great buildings full of din and might build lOO themselves with a thought, and cities and The Skilled fortunes flock to him. To be spiritual in p^^^^ ° a factory, to be spiritual with raw material like machines, to have a thought that is like miles of men in a minute, to put two bits of steel together with an echo around the world — it is incredible that anyone could ever have had the idea that a man who works in a machine shop cannot have a soul and cannot work in the spirit of the artist. The inspired millionaire is through with it. He is going to believe that the more spirit a factory-hand has in proportion to the amount of matter in him, the more matter he can get hold of both for himself and for everybody else. He is going to beheve that the more spiritual a factory is, the more it emphasizes spirit and pays for it, the bigger material success it will make, and the longer it will make it. He is going to believe that the more a machine shop treats its men like machines, the more machines it has, with nothing but ma- lOI Inspired chincs tending them, at just so many more 1 lonaires p^-j^^g ^^^g ^^ expose itself . A half-aKve machine shop cannot succeed any more than a half -alive anything else. The supreme irreverence, and master-stupid- ity and infidelity of the present age is the idea that it can — the idea that ma- chines, the things we do our living with — are not meant to be filled with life. It is almost a demonstrable fact that most of the industrial evils, and nearly all of the social and religious ones in this age of machines, can be traced to the idea that in some mysterious and hopeless manner God has left a bare spot in creation and that the men who work with machines do not need to have souls, and that if they do need them, they cannot have them. Incidentally, the whole question of modern civilization is at stake in establish- ing a belief in this principle, in getting millionaire manufacturers who will see that they are compelled to employ the best men, with the best minds that this I02 country can produce, millionaires who will The Skilled want everyone to know that they are es- p^^^. tablishing new conditions among the ma- chines, who will advertise that the very men that factories, under conditions that now exist, cannot hire, are the men that they are trying to get, that the most im- portant part of their machinery to them is the live part of it — the men in it. It is the soul of the business that if machinery is good machinery it will have to be alive all through. The first millionaire who will really be- lieve that a factory can only be a material success by being a spiritual one, who will put up his fortune on it, who will makie a sublime wager for modern life, and who will attract men from all parts of the world and all walks of life to help him carry it out, will turn the whole modern world around. When one millionaire has done it, the rest will follow, will come to see by experiment, by comparison, that if men in a factory are under the machines 103 Inspired in it, it is merely a matter of time when Millionaires ,-, ■, . i .1 -11 1 the machines and the men will go down together. When a manufacturing busi- ness fails, the chances are nine out of ten that it is because some other manufactur- ing company has managed to be spiritual at a vital point, that is, — to have an em- ployee who thought of something. Men were not meant to be under machines. Everyone is going to see, when it has been given one good, decisive trial, that neither the men nor the machines can really be made to work in that way — except for a little while. There will be nothing a mill- ionaire will dread more than these slaves and cowards and drudges he has made, and that he has scattered among his machines. He knows that it is a mere matter of time, when some factory in which men are allowed to think will get a machine that will ruin his. It already looks as if the time were not far off when machines will be thought of so fast in machine shops that think, that 104 all others will cease to exist. One can The Skilled 1 , J 1 -■ • • • 1 1 Labor of the almost see the day — it is merely around p^^^. the corner of the world, I think — when all of these under-the-doUar millionaires and these under-machine men, and men- machines will be wiped from the face of the earth. It would be hard to find an empty or silent mill anywhere, even to- day, which in one way or another, does not bear witness to this coming of the truth. It is silent and empty because someone, somewhere else, has thought of something. 105 I V The Skilled Labor of the Rich T is W. B. Yeats who has said, in speak- ing of poets as a class, " We see the perfect more than others, but we must find the passions among the people." It is this finding the passion among the people which makes me hopeful about million- aires. If the passion for making money is the passion that we actually have in America, the next vision for us is going to be some way of making what we actu- ally have beautiful. The beauty that builds the destiny of a nation always lies next neighbor to its greatest gift. If it is true that wealth is our greatest gift in America, — our vision, — it is merely a matter of time when America is going to show that wealth is full of revelation, and creativeness, and beauty, that it is holding in its hand the liberties of a world. 1 06 It is already obvious that the American The Skilled people have a great latent, obstinate faith j^.^j^ in rich men and in what they can do and be. They are already picking out all over the country, semi-inspired millionaires. They have their eyes upon them every- where. They have no inherent pessim- ism or distrust in money as money. It was only a year or so ago that it was sug- gested by the whole State of Massachu- setts in a rather big voice at the polls, that finding fault with a millionaire for his money is gone by. We joined together almost without knowing it, out of all parties, and suddenly and quietly on election day made W. L. Douglas Gov- ernor of Massachusetts because he is rich and because we are all glad of it. The same men on the same day, who were electing a Republican President by an enormous majority, elected a demo- cratic governor by another enormous majority for no other reason that anyone can find out, than that W. 107 Inspired L. Douglas Seemed to be a man who Millionaires u i j j i could make money and men and shoes together. If this could be done and there was a man in the State who had proved that it could be done, all that seemed to be needed was pointing. And after care- fully seeing to it that the President was elected, the people suddenly dropped everything else at the bare thought that there could be such a man in the State, and in a few hours made him Governor of Massachusetts. There was not a man anywhere, out of all the men of all parties who voted for Mr. Douglas, who seemed to object to him for being a millionaire. Without his money nobody would have noticed him. And probably without Mr. Douglas nobody would have noticed the money. It seemed .to be the combination. A fortune and a human being lying alongside each other, all interpenetrated with each other, seemed interesting to the people and to the point. The people seemed to like Mr. Douglas's money. io8 The more money he had, the more his The Skilled , 111 • 1 • J.1 Labor of the money meant; and the more thmgs they ^^^^ kept hearing about him the more money they wanted him to have. Every dollar of it was the autobiography of a kind of man that rich men and labor unions had been saying for decades could not exist. What the situation amounted to, as it has seemed to me, was simply this. A man that everybody had said could not exist had suddenly existed. And some- thing had to be done about it. So he was made Governor of Massachusetts. The real secret of the people, one is in- clined to think, in what the papers had characterized as an altogether unheralded and noiseless revolution, was the sudden hopefulness that came to them when they heard that Mr. Douglas might be good enough to be rich. I have no personal knowledge of Mr. Douglas and no very definite conviction as to whether this is true or not. He may be the merest glim- mer toward the inspired millionaire, but 109 Inspired the Overwhelming way in which the people Millionaires -it j»ii t jj.j j believed m the glimmer, and stood up and let their faith be counted, was to me an event of profound and national impor- tance. It was like an interpretation, a reading of the next one hundred years. I had been plodding down my own little road of behef alone, I thought, or almost alone. Suddenly I felt a great multitude — silently and out of sight — tramping beside me. I had been told at every cross- road that our working men were mean- spirited, that they were dull and small men, seeing only their own side, and bitter against the rich. Then sud- denly — I heard them — it was like a mighty shout, the voice of a great com- pany as one man, out there in the dark. It was proclaimed upon the house- tops, the next morning, what was really in their hearts. no Ill CLOUDS THE SIZE OF A MAN'S HAND And Elijah went up to the top of Carmel, and he cast himself down upon the earth and put his face between his hands. And he said to his servant, go up now, and look toward the sea. And he went up and looked and said there is nothing. And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said. Behold there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea like a man's hand.'' The Lack of Conveniences for Million- . aires A GOOD many thoughtful people have been trying to find of late some slight position, or opening for mil- lionaires in this country. There doesn't seem to be anything. One can hardly go anywhere in the United States the last few years without seeing millionaires standing in rows — trying to get some- thing to do. Sometimes one sees hun- dreds of them waiting patiently — these plain humdrum millionaires we run to in America, waiting in all the cities of the world — Paris, Rome, Lucerne — even in New York. But nothing comes of it. As far as one can see with the naked eye, the one single position in the country that is vacant just now is that of in- spired millionaire. 113 Inspired Thosc of US who hold to the conviction that the position of inspired millionaire in this country is somehow going to he filled, are not saying that there is going to be anything precipitate about it. We do not count on the inspired millionaire's coming like a miracle out of the sky, or as a great, sudden apocalyptic character looming up in Wall Street, or in the life of this modern world. A great many millionaires will be wasted probably ex- perimenting. We will have, as always, millionaires who do not intend to be in- spired if they can help it, or who want to be inspired in some little private, amusing . way of their own; but there is reason to believe we are going to have the inspired millionaire, because it cannot be helped. The other kinds of millionaires will be tried and they will not work. The millionaires are being driven to it. This is the first cloud the size of a man's hand. When our typical American man of 114 wealth in the course of his natural devel- The Lack of opment comes, sooner or later, to the point for^Mmionalres where he feels that he can afford to face the problem of living instead of getting a living, the idea of millionaire he most naturally attempts is the imported or Eu- ropean idea, the gentleman of leisure, the en j oyer of the world, who seeks to benefit and refine it by the way he spends his money, by the ennobling effect of his pleasures. It may be a remarkable fact, but it looks like a rather true one, that an inspired millionaire, in this European sense, viz, a man who sets out with a great capacity for giving and receiving joy in the world, cannot find anything to do in it — that is, taking things as they are and without touching or changing them he cannot find anything to do in it. The world is not arranged for inspired millionaires. If a millionaire wants to be inspired in it, even if he wants to be amused in it, he finds he will have to arrange it himself. What is 115 Inspired there, for instance, a really inspired mil- Millionaires -,* . j. !• ^ n n, t lionaire can do to amuse himself after dm- ner? Of course, if he could spend a night in the whole world at once, ring up any continent he has a mind to, for the evening, attend opera in Berlin, London, San Francisco, or Hong Kong, he might find something inspired being said or sung somewhere and could drop in for a while ; but the arrangements already made in the world for an inspired millionaire at any given time or place in it, any place that can be reached after dinner, are pitiable enough. There is hardly any part of the land or any day of the year in which it is not easier to get a few dollars' worth of work than it is to get a million dollars' worth of play. He tries everything he can think of, that people do after dinner, and that they seem to think is play — the picture gallery, the concert, the lecture, and the club, and the ball, and the theater. But he soon finds that the things that have creative joy in them — that is, millions of ii6 dollars' worth of joy — are not to be had. The Lack of - . J "KT Conveniences He finds they are not being made. JNo ^r Millionaires one can get joy enough to put into them. So, generally, in sheer desperation he thinks at last he will stay at home and read. He thinks he will read down to the heart of the world in its latest books. He will see what kind of a world it really is under the noise, and what it is really thinking, and feeling, and expecting. After a few evenings spent in this way he cannot but come to two conclusions. There are two facts that face him at every turn: First. The immeasurable and unprece- dented number of men devoting their en- tire time to literature and the arts. Second. The immeasurable and un- precedented number of probabilities, judging from their work, that there is not a single great, lasting, irreplaceable artist among them all. He rather won- ders at this at first. "Why is it," he thinks, " that with all our improvements, our civilization, with all our education, — Plato and Homer hold on so? " 117 Inspired If all the Eitists of the world in the onaires pj.gggjj|. y^g^p Q-f Q^p Lord, 1908, Were put together in a single place all by themselves, they would make a city a deal larger than Athens was, with her processional of im- mortals down the years ; and if all the men and women who are devoting their entire time to writing were gathered together — quarantined on an island in the sea, Mada- gascar, for instance — these same writers, writing — all of them writing, all of the time, and writing, and still writing, the scratching of their pens rising higher and higher, and sounding far and faint to us, like some forgotten thing across the surges of the sea — these same writers would con- stitute a nation all by themselves as large as the nation in Palestine ever was, a nation which, with very few persons in it who could read, and fewer still who could write, produced several immortal journal- ists — men of their own times, called prophets — and two or three very consid- erable poets, one of whom wrote the hymn- ii8 book of three thousand years and another The Lack of _r»i J ±.1 J2 ±. ii_j.* Conveniences of whom made the first rough but mi- f^r Millionaires mortal sketch of a God for the human heart, and told the news as though it hap- pened yesterday of a Man fifteen hundred years away. Very few literary men or women with notebooks and typewriters could have been found about David's court. The masterpieces of Isaiah, de- livered largely to men who could not read, were taken apparently from notes of ex- temporaneous addresses here and there, and the number of artists that could be found in the whole length and breadth of Palestine in that day of masterpieces could have met together in a hall bedroom without crowding each other. The civil- ization in which we are living to-day is a civilization that has conventions of artists in auditoriums, and mass meetings of men who do nothing but write. It is a civilization which has scores of schools of painting and scores of universities of music, with fullest courses and the like. 119 Inspired It is a civilization which has hundreds of 1 lonaires ^j^Q^g^nds of people engaged in master- ing the footnotes of Shakespeare and studying the participles of Homer ; which has its library on Dante, its miles of ex- plaining the masterpieces of the Hebrews, and its acres of analysis of the master- pieces of Greece, which has scores of Chairs that tell men in college how to be geniuses, and summer schools that tell how other men have been geniuses; which has clubs to be men of genius in, and clubs for women to be women of genius in; which has two or three magazines on how to be an author; which has two or three hun- dred magazines showing what it is sup- posed an author ought to be, and three or four thousand journals showing what an author ought not to be, — is a civiliza- tion that (with one exception perhaps) has not a single colossal living artist of its own. Gradually, as the inspired millionaire X20 sits down night after night and looks over The Lack of these writers and tries to get interested in foTmui^nalres them, he gets interested in what is the matter with them. He puts the question — " Why is it that the more hterary men we have the less our chances seem to be of ever having a literature? " He soon finds himself facing the fact that this modern literature with all its literary look, its artistic ingeniousness, its gilt, all its poor, sad little trappings of joy about it, is not really a literature at all, has not a single great structural necessary joy in it, lifting itself up, from world's end to world's end. Perhaps the modern liter- ary world is not great because it is not real and is not quite honest. Instead of being a real literary world, it is a vast monoto- nous prairie of self-support. All these hordes of writers, these long processions or caravans of authors, if they were to put all their creative joy in their work to- gether, and pile it up in one place for an inspired millionaire after dinner, would 121 Inspired Hot amusc him for five minutes. The whole Millionaires j. i x» j tj. j_ • spectacle of modern uterature is a weari- ness to him — these rows of dreary hired- men with pens, timid and expedient, and rigidly self -suppressed, with their roofed- in, practical minds — these rows of timid publishers tiptoeing along before the pub- lic eye, their millions of dollars behind them, all in a kind of anxious literary hush. He sees through it all as he sits in his library. He will have nothing to do with it. Even an uninspired million- aire would not. It was only the other day that one of them, when he wanted to do something intellectual-look- ing (buy something he thought would be really literary), bought a hundred-and- thirty-thousand-doUar set of Dickens. Forty thousand living authors looked on in silence. The next thing that happens after the inspired millionaire has given up encour- aging forty thousand living authors after dinner, is generally one more struggle 122 to be amused with some of the other things The Lack of . ^ ,.p J Conveniences that people try at first, m modern lite, ana ^^^ Millionaires that look amusing until they are found out. He soon comes down to hardpan in all of them and faces a truth. In a country where millions of peo- ple, nearly all of the people, are hired by the week not to have any joy, that is, to keep their ideals and their work apart, where even the leading men — the men one knows — are drawing salaries for not- living, inspired amusements are not to be looked for. A man's joy in his work is the expressing of his individual self in it. If he is doing his work under conditions which do not recognize individual selves in men, and best selves in them, his work can have no joy in it. A man who is daily separated in his work from his ut- most inspired self soon comes to believe that he was never meant to have one. He not only believes this, but he believes that it is the very nature of work not to have inspiration in it. He tries to put his in- 123 Inspired spiration into playing after his work is Millionaires ^^^^ rj.^^^ ^^^^^ ^j^^ f ^^^ ^j^ich is hard- est to face of all, especially if a nation has to face it. People who spend nearly all of their time in doing their work with- out inspiration, have very little inspiration left to do their playing with. Not having inspiration themselves, they do not know it when they see it in others. The actors and the plays that have creative fire or joy in them do not become known among such a people. They cannot seem to burn their way through to those who might want them. Always this same great Damp Wall of Public, — this same dear anxious, plodding, art-proof. Public. It is a world in which the very playhouses work. If the millionaire goes about hopefully from one country to another feeling that great actors may yet be found, actors who are interested in supporting great plays, he finds nothing but small actors — crowds of them — supporting themselves. 124 A getting-a-living public prefers getting- The Lack of T . , Ti T j_ • Conveniences a-hving actors. It does not miss any- ^r Millionaires thing in them. The more an actor acts to make money out of people of this kind, and the more money he makes out of them, the more they are impressed, and the more they flock to hear him. The in- spired millionaire soon learns that if he wants to hear a great actor, he must make one, and that after he has made him, he must make a public for him. The same is true not only of the art of acting, but of every other art which, by its nature, is intended to give joy and to be the expres- sion of joy that belongs to life. Hard- working people have hard-working arts. If an inspired milhonaire could go to all of the theaters in America at once — go to them in one night — is there anyone who really supposes, for a single moment, he could get his money's worth? . . . Herds of tired faces . . . thousands of herds of tired and callous faces ... the flare of the footlights . . . one 125 Inspired sct of tired faccs grimacing at joy out of empty hearts to another set of tired faces. . . . Nothing more pathetic, more full of terror, and sadness, and prophecy, could possibly be conceived than The Spectacle of Audiences — the panorama for a single night of the American people at its joys. Joy is not in us. We have parted from its spirit. And when hard- worked people, engaged in supporting themselves all day, gather together and watch some more hard- worked people sup- porting themselves all night, we call it an amusement. With rare exceptions the only form of public entertainment that can be said to be open to the average man nowadays — the man who is trying to master the prob- lem of self-support — is to go and watch some other man trying to master it; and when this average man has mastered it, be- comes an average millionaire, for instance — perchance an inspired millionaire — his last condition is no better than his first. I£6 He may have a theory that he does not The Lack of need to keep on getting a hving any fo^MlmonaTres longer, but in a getting-a-living world he is practically compelled to keep on getting a living, whether he wants to or not. He cannot find anythii:ig else to do. He cannot find amusements that are worth spending his money on. So he spends it on more work, and as spending money on more work (reinvesting it) merely means having more money to spend on amuse- ments he cannot get, the longer a million- aire finds himself holding on to life the smaller his chance seems to be of doing any living in it. Even the kingdom of this world is shut against him. It looks sometimes as if the saying of Scripture: " It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom " must have meant that it was no object to the camel — going through the needle's eye — even if he could. There is no denying that having great means to spend in the next world — 127 Inspired with the bcst people to spend it with — Millionaires ^^^^^ ^^ j^^^de to mean something, but the more a man has money in this one, the more he works on the project of Uving with his money instead of getting a liv- ing with it, the more he is discouraged. Whichever way he turns in human soci- ety, where, at first thought, at least, one would think beauty, and joy, and rest might be, he finds that they are not ; or if they are, he finds he cannot get at them, or that they cannot get at him. The get- ting-a-living crowds are in the way. They are getting a living. They are against every man who is not get- ting a living. They want their get- ting-a-living things. The world has been made convenient for their getting them. There is nothing anywhere in modern life but this same ceaseless spectacle — the spectacle of the Arts being tamely led around by a host of pleasant married women, white-aproned nurses, and babies in go-carts. It is a spectacle of The True 12S and The Beautiful, and The Good being The Lack of _ _ , , J Conveniences ground between our two great modern ^^ Millionaires millstones, The Home and The Office. To one who loves his kind, and watches them, who loves to see men doing their thinking and living in long spans like those that have gone before us, there seems to be something a little fussy and effeminate about our modern life. One can only watch the babies governing their mothers, in it, and the mothers governing the fathers, and the fathers tramping down to the office. And even the office — even business, which might seem to be heroic, and artistic, and self -expressive in a day like this, if anything is — is gov- erned by a set of anonymous, vague mil- lionaires, who are literally ordering the whole planet around from morning till night — for a few dollars. There is get- ting to be hardly a man on it with whom to associate — least of all artists. Not that an inspired millionaire would not like to associate with them. He would — and 129 Inspired with aliHost anybody — but they all have I lonaires ^g^|(»|^gg jj^ their hands when he tries to. All their time is hired by somebody else. The result is, that the more he thinks about it, and the more he tries to be amused after dinner, the more serious he gets. He drifts to the edge of The Preci- pice and looks down. The Precipice is this: Inspired things can only be done by inspired men, by men who take time to live inspired lives. An inspired millionaire, a man with a great capacity for giving and receiving joy in him, cannot help becoming a philanthro- pist. He finds that he cannot even be self- ish in a world like this without having better-made men and women around him to be selfish with. He cannot find the men and women. The only thing an in- spired millionaire can do is to make them. He becomes a philanthropist or man- maker in self-defense. He comes sooner or later to but one object in the world, namely, going about, picking out the men 130 in it, in all the arts, in all mechanics, The Lack of machine shops, libraries, and laboratories, foTmiikmalres and everywhere, who have visions, and in- ventions, and ideals which they are mak- ing sacrifices to put into their labor — and giving them a chance to do it. This is his program. The first thing that happens to his program is that he slowly learns that man-making is not only the most expensive amusement, but the most lonesome one that the world affords. We all wish him God-speed. And then we get in his way. When one considers how many things there are in the course of his life a millionaire is obliged to give up, this is hard. The first thing he does as a young man is to give up amusement in order to make money. The next thing he does is to try to make an amusement out of making the money. Then he has to give it up. Then he tries to make an amusement out of spending the money. He has to give this up also. Then, when, as the years go on, the truth leaks out, and 131 Inspired he Icams once for all that making money 1 lonaires ^^^ spending money are both failures as amusements, because of the men with whom one has to do them, and he takes up at last with the amusement of making men, he finds that the public is against him. We approve pleasantly and placidly enough of making men, but everything we do makes men impossible. We are not even making men of ourselves, — most of us. We have not time. The making of men is a peculiar occupation in which a man could be expected to spend his time, and is left to women and ministers. An in- spired millionaire soon finds that he can- not get any men to make. Boys want to be like their fathers, and their fathers are making money. The government is in the business of producing conditions in which the money can be made. The schools and colleges, with a greater or less degree of candor, are in the business of producing the men who can make it. The 13a Church is in the business of doing as well The Lack of ,.,,. ,, 1111 1 Conveniences as it can, trickling the gospel helplessly ^r Millionaires into the stream that sweeps around it and away with it. It hopes gently that men will do as little wrong as possible in get- ting their money, and as much good as possible in spending it. In the meantime it takes the money if they make it, and comforts them if they do not. They need a great deal of comforting if they do not. The man who has a million dollars in his pockets and a philanthropic work on his hands soon finds that, so far as his philanthropy is concerned, he is one of the most lonesome and helpless objects in the the world. The world does not want his philanthropy. It wants his million dol- lars. It does not even want to hear what he has to say about his philanthropy. It wants to hear how he got his million dol- lars. If there is a particular set of poor people in whom he is interested, the best way for him to raise money for them would be to tell other poor people how to 133 Inspired get pich. For cvery hundred dol- est the world in his charity, by talking about it, he could raise thou- sands talking about himself. If he were to open an office and give private consul- tations, heart-to-heart talks, on how he supported himself, he could support a dozen charities with his daily fees. Peo- ple are not interested in his telling them how to help others. They want to be told how to help themselves. He finds that he is held in esteem and is considered a useful member of society because he has helped himself the most. He finds that he is looked upon as a kind of hero for having done it. If there were any ar- rangement by which a millionaire could be told at sight, if he were compelled by law to wear a coat, for instance, with a dollar sign on it — amount specified — there is scarcely a city in the world where he would not be followed by crowds in the street. Even as it is, he is often re- 134 minded that he is a sight, in spite of him- The Lack of T n m-i 1 1 • r» 1 Conveniences self. The word passes around if he en- f^r Millionaires ters a restaurant, and when he hides in his hotel people stand in line to see his name on the register. The world envies him for one thing, and that is the thing it never forgets. Whichever way he turns, in his attempt to carry out some larger design for the world, he finds that his million dollars are in the way. He cannot do the work alone and he cannot find the men to help him. He spends nearly all his time in dis- covering that the men who appear to help him are helping themselves. They are not the same men with him that they are with others. They are po- larized by his money. He cannot get at men, somehow, as they are. He finds himself defeated at every point, either by his own million dollars, or by some one's else million dollars, or by some- one's else desire to have his million dollars. The whole getting-a-living machine of 135 Inspired modem life is across his path. If, in the Millionaires interests of his work, he suggests that other people give money, it is hinted that he has money of his own to give. If he tries giving his own money to others, that they may stop making money, perhaps, and make something they know how to make better, he is told that he is spoiling them, that he is a pauperizer, that he is breaking down the foundation of society. Society swears by the shibboleth of self- support. Self-support, society tells its inspired millionaires, is what society is for. Every man's hand is against him. His words may not be, but his hand is, and everything he does with his life is. Ex- cept in his evenings and holidays, every- thing he does with his life is based on the belief that getting-a-living is living. When the millionaire stops to think about it, he remembers that when he was getting his million dollars he believed that getting-a-living was living himself. He finds that the men he knows around him, 136 who have actually tried being millionaires, The Lack of , ,. . .,1 . ^ .1 ml- Conveniences believe it still, most Ot them. inOSe ^r Millionaires who would like to try being millionaires believe it — at least they would like to see if they do. The result is, that the majority of people nowadays — (1) mil- lionaires who are still getting a living, (2) persons who are getting a living in order to be millionaires — may be said to consti- tute, so far as helping the world is con- cerned, the dependent and pauper classes of society. That is to say, they are de- pendent upon getting a living and society can expect very little from them except their getting a living. Any real living that may be done in the world will have to be done by other people, and, as men who are really living their lives themselves, are the only men who can help the rest of the world to live, all persons who are merely getting a living must be counted out, in any large and practical scheme of world- lifting. The one logical thing that is left for a 137 Inspired man to do who has a miUion dollars in his Millionaires ij.*i !•.• .j« i . pocket IS to spend it m getting people not to want it, in getting them to love their work instead of their wages. The most practical way the rich man can do this is to ally himself in all places and in all walks of life with the men who are artists. The great moral adventure of making a world which has a virile, every-day, all- day belief in labor and the inspiration of labor narrows itself down to two kinds of men, rich men who refuse to use their money merely to make more money, and poor men who, as anyone can see at a glance, do not even need to be rich — re- formed millionaires and artists. In gen- eral all persons in all employments who love making a perfect thing out of the thing they do, more than making money out of it, may be called artists, whether they are millionaires or not. In society, as at present constituted, under the false ma- chine-conditions that now obtain, the mil- lionaire finds the majority of men putting 138 their work into a time and place by itself. The Lack of mi • 1 Y» 1 • •! • Conveniences Their sole reason for doing their ^r MiUionaires work is that they may have time to play. But he also finds hundreds of other men in these same machine- shops who have the point of view of the artist. They seem to have been so created that neither work nor play can be got out of them in the ordinary way. They mix up the words. Unless they can do their work perfectly enough to make play out of it, they do not do it. Their work and their play, alike, both fail to interest them unless they are in the act of putting them together. All persons the inspired millionaire can find in all walks of life who have the strength, daring, and joy in them to play in their work, to make their work self -ex- pressive work, whatever it costs, and for lesser wages if necessary, all persons who insist upon putting their whole selves into their work, who lay the emphasis of their joy not upon their evenings and their days 139 Inspired off , but upoii the Very brunt and center of Millionaires ±.1 • t • n i j.i • • j their hvmg, — all such persons the inspired millionaire will seek out and gather to- gether. He will let his money take sides with their souls and he will set them in a large place and give them their tools and let them work their will upon the world. Then a new world will begin to be made. 140 II The Millionaire Who Does Not Want to he Lonely A MILLIONAIRE is a helpless man, wondering how he can possi- bly think before he dies, of enough beauti- ful, or permanent values into which he can put his money. An artist is a help- less man who is looking for enough money into which he can put his values, and ma- teriahze his ideas. To be a miUionaire is to have so much matter on one's hands that one cannot possibly in one short life have enough spirit to go around. To be an artist is to possess so much of the ideal and beautiful that one cannot get hold of matter enough to express it. It seems to make little difference, so far as the hardship is concerned, if one is to be a poor man, whether one is poor backwards or forwards. The miUionaire 141 Inspired who is poop bccausc he has not time to 1 lonaires gp^j^j j^^g money and the artist who is poor because he has not time to make it, are the men who rule the world between them, and they are both paupers. Perhaps it is the main trouble with our civilization that they are both paupers, that matter and the spirit just at present are locked away by themselves, that the two most powerful kinds of men a civ- ilization can have — its rich men and its artists, the men who can buy and the men who can make — are lonely : they cannot seem to get together. The fact that they belong together, that men feel that they do, that they are bound to come together some time, is shown by the history of every family fortune that has been produced. It is the operation of a natural elemental law that wealth must ally itself with beauty or creative- ness of spirit, with men who dare, or melt away and be redistributed where it can. If the men who are obliged to have 142 great incomes in order to support life The Millionaire wish to keep their great incomes, they can ^^^^ ^°^^^ ^^ only do it by allying themselves with men Lonely who have great enthusiasms, and do great things whether they have great incomes or not. Men who are clever enough to love their work more than their wages are the Only equals, the only fit men or partners, for millionaires. Inven- tors and artists are the only men who without any money can do and are doing every day millionaire sorts of things. It has seemed to me that the day is not far oiF when there shall be a turn in the tide of wealth in America. The American man of wealth is going to stop working grimly away on the world all alone and looking askance at the artist — who is all alone, too. He is going to break away from Philistinism, from a mere bank or safe-deposit view of life, and from his big comfortable clubs, and asso- ciate with artists and with men of genius, men of ideas, inventions, and visions. 143 Inspired Inspired millionaires, the most envied men Millionaires • ii u j • • i t* • i • m the world, and mspired artists and m- ventors, the humble inspired laborers, the most despised and patronized men in the world, are going to be inevitably thrown together. They have the making of the planet between them. As they have the necessary gifts of matter and spirit that go to the making of a planet (one that can be taken seriously) , and as the making of a great, happy, peaceful, furnished planet is the only thing big enough for such men to be interested in, they can probably do it. It has been attempted in the last two chapters to point out the extreme diffi- culty of being an inspired millionaire of the European or imported kind, in this country — the gentleman of leisure and en j oyer of the world, who seeks to benefit and refine it by the way he spends his money and by the ennobling effect of his pleasures. It is intended in the chapters that fol- 144 low to point out the opportunities of the The Millionaire , . 1 A . 'IT • Who Does Not more typical American millionaire, we are ^^^^^ ^^ ^^ now beginning to produce — the man Lonely who is inspired in making his money in- stead of in spending it. 145 Ill The Millionaire Who Wants to he Happy MILLIONAIRES, as seen from Mount Tom on an Easter morning, looking across the country, as a whole, seem to be dotted rather thickly; but they do not look as important — from up here on Mount Tom, with a big fresh sky over them — as they do down in North- ampton by one's fire-place, with The Springfield Republican in one's hands. And even there — even in a Springfield Republican sort of world — millionaires look more important for what they might be than for what they are. With all these miles of meadow down below, all so still and snowy, and beautiful and unconcerned looking, I have been wondering why I should bring my new unfinished million- aires up here. I have caught myself re- membering a line of Bliss Carman's some- 146 where, about being a "fidget and a re- The Millionaire former." One would have to be rather ^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^ far gone to be a reformer up on Mount Tom to-day — with this still stretch of snow below one — this great floor of sun- shine on the world. I call people to wit- ness that I have not been trying to make a kind of fine moral flurry and improve people, in this book, and get millionaires to do right. I merely want our million- aires to be happy. And, so far as one can see, looking over the country at large, they do not seem to be paying the slight- est attention to it. The people have a right to have their millionaires happy. It is the millionaires who are running the world, and it is because they are not enjoy- ing their work that they are not running it better. It would be a matter of public concern and of personal pleasure to all of us to-day to see one happy millionaire — one real millionaire who is really enjoying himself, who is daily getting the taste out of the world, who is noticing the human H7 Inspired TSLce and playing with it, the way artists Millionaires ^^^ ^^^ instance. I sometimes think that if — ahnost any afternoon, at three o'clock — one could look off from Mount Tom across the coun- try and see our millionaires, thousands of them, all out playing golf with our artists, the real ones and best ones, the best sculptors, painters, composers, singers, and writers — happy millionaires would begin to be seen cropping up almost every- where all the way between New York and Los Angeles. There would be more happy artists, too. They would catch each others' spirit. All that millionaires need, to be happy, is to grow more like the artists. And what our best artists in this country need, is to grow more like millionaires. The problem seems to be, how to get them together before they are dead. When the millionaire dies, one finds that in the second generation his money is ahnost always spent by, and with, and for, 148 artists, and after the artists are dead they The Millionaire are ahnost always millionaires. They ^^ Happy keep on, some of them, like Wagner and Durer, making fortunes — one fortune after the other, out of their graves. While it is true that by the mere move- ment and stir of events in the world, money and the arts, as by a kind of huge cosmic sex-attraction, are being inevitably brought together, it is also true that they do not come together any sooner than they can help. When wealth and beauty are seen together to-day in America there is apt to be something a little dogged and helpless and dragged- in about it. It has the air of a last resort, as a rule, when the millionaires and the artists are seen working quietly and hope- fully together. The main difficulty that stands between the millionaires and the artists working together, without both waiting to be dead first, instead of being an economic diffi- culty, is almost purely a personal one, a 149 Inspired difficulty of temperament. Rich men Millionaires j a.* ±. ij.i i >i and artists — each taken as a class, the men who can buy and the men who can make — will not understand each other. To the rest of us they are both men of proved power and value, men who control between them the two practical secrets of the world — the secret of being poor and powerful and the secret of being rich and powerful. But they do not respect each other. Because, perchance, the million- aire is a man who sees that money is an inspired thing and that inspired things can be done with money, and tries to get some, the artist feels superior; and be- cause the artist sees that inspired things can be done without money, and is doing them, the millionaire looks upon him as a kind of happy, mysterious, intolerable person. It is one of the concerns of this part of this book to point out a few tokens of how the millionaire and the artist in this coun- try are coming together. 150 They are going to come together be- The Millionaire cause the conceptions that artists have of ^^ Happy millionaires and business men in America are going to change in the next fifty years. People have stopped putting all business men together into one indistin- guishable mass. The business man has appeared in America who is insisting that a business man is as good as anybody. He is proving that he has the same spirit, the same principles, and the same motive in his work that the artist has. It is still true that the men who have the habit of dropping into the National Arts Club in New York can snuggle up the word " art " if they want to, and with a certain serenity and self -congratulation, and they can still feel, not without some plausibility, that they are a little nobler for being associated with the arts or with the professions, and a little more high- minded and disinterested than business men. But their time is limited. 151 IV The Millionaire Who Is As Good As Anybody WE HAVE a tradition or perhaps a kind of left-over consciousness, most of us who are associated with the pro- fessions, that we would rather not be grocers if it can be helped — even great grocers. The professions have the his- toric right of way and the old-world pres- tige on their side and they seem to have a higher standing in the community. The more distinguished preachers in New York, probably — the majority of them — do not want to change places with the more distinguished grocers like Park and Tilford. One of the most hopeful things that can be pointed out in the business world just now is that if Park and Tilford knew which the preachers were, out of the more 152 distinguished preachers in New York The Millionaire 1 n 1, • . 1 • Ai Who is as Good who felt superior to being grocers they as Anybody would not go to hear them preach. None of the best grocers would go. Some of the worst ones might and would not know the difference. But the best grocers, if they go to church, want something they can use to lift on their lives the next day. This is the next cloud the size of a man's hand. Our whole American country is full of business men who fail to get inspiration out of preachers who think that being a preacher is a superior or more high- minded enterprise than being a grocer. Our American communities all have men in them who take a professional pride in business. They are idealists. They are seeing every day how much larger motives and how much more generous understandings and how much nobler abilities can be used, every hour of the day and the night, in conducting a modern business. They have discovered that being a judge or a bishop or a physician 153 Inspired 01 an editop or an author or a professor in Millionaires ■ i • a • j. • j_ i j this American country means just what a man puts into it and no more. So does being a grocer. The grocer of the better sort is insisting in America to-day that he is as good as anybody. He is deahng all day with the real things and with the facts, and he sees that in our existing moral, economic, and social conditions the busi- ness life has become the storm-center, the religion-center of the world, the place where the real religion of the people is being day by day wrought out and welded into the lives of men. There is not a business one can think of, which is not full of little temples where one can curse or pray. Every business one knows has its host of light in it, fighting against its host of darkness — one set of men con- ducting the business as if they and the public were engaged in a sort of mutual enthusiasm and daily service, and perma- nent success, another set of men whose success is ruining the business to which 154 they belong, and the public besides — and The Millionaire themselves. The American business man ° ^^^\ °° as Anyboay who has observed these things is the most inspiring character this country has pro- duced, because he is every day seeing big inspiring things to do. Our best business men are grasping at the honors and the motives, and at the public standing of the professions. They are full of victorious self-respect, and are proving the dignity and raising the standing of the business in which they are engaged. A man who is really being professional in the conduct of his business, who is doing all the while hard and unprofessional- looking things in a professional way, can- not much longer be ranked by society in a lower row than the man who is merely being a judge. A great many people could be a judge professionally. Being a judge is easier. Every business man knows this, and he sees that everybody else is going to know it soon, that society is going to see how difficult and how honor- 155 Inspired able the thing he is doing is. The man Millionaires ^^^ .^ ppQf essional in business is going to get more prestige and standing out of it than the man who is merely professional in a profession. The honors of the world go to the men who foresee the next neces- sary, unexpected, and difficult thing to do, and then do it. Under our present condi- tions it takes more brains to be a good, morally-beautiful grocer than it does to be a good, morally-beautiful clergyman; and it is abeady beginning to look, in some quarters, as if the clergymen would have to hurry a little in the next generation if they are going to keep up to grocers and icemen, and coal dealers in the pews who are practicing what clergymen preach, and who illustrate their sermons for them during the week. It is generally the illus- trations that people prefer in sermons. The man who devotes himself to being a grocer professionally, for instance, who makes his business profitable enough to be permanent and at the same time creates 156 values and lowers prices in his city so that The Millionaire the whole world wishes it could come there and live, is going to be not only the lead- ing citizen in his own town, but a national figure. The first man who uses his power to dominate the markets of a great city and to make it the cheapest city to live in in the United States will be news around the world. His business character will be the leading advertisement put out by the Board of Trade. Factories will flock to the city, and great schools and great rail- roads and great churches. Any grocer in any city who will get control of its mar- kets and who will raise values and reduce prices so that people can live there a fourth cheaper than they can in the cities that compete with it, will be so big a man that railroads will be rebuilt for him and geography reconstructed for him. He will put out his hand and stir the center of population of the United States. When a few cities have moved over to where he is, and a few of the other cities 157 as Anybody Inspired farther off, already feel that they are 1 lonaires g^g^p|.jj^g^ ^j^^j ^jjj have to go, the other cities will grow business-like enough to have a morally beautiful grocer or professional business man of their own, in self defense. Then, when all the cities have learned the lesson and America has achieved at last the rnost high-minded, most scientific, most efficient grocery business that can be found — that is, the business in which values have been brought up the high- est and prices have been brought down the lowest — all the nations, and all the men, and all the money of the nations will begin pouring into America as if it were some vast trough at the bottom of the world. This may sound religious or poetic ; but it is business. Thousands of men who have partly be- lieved it and who have partly tried it, have been believing and trying it harder every year, and they have found that the more they succeed the more professional they 158 become, and that the more professional The Millionaire .1 -I ,1 11 1 1 •! Who is as Good they become the more capable and bril- as Anybody liant men they are able to draw into busi- ness with them. The immense propor- tion of university men who are going into business every year instead of into the professions — men of the highest possible intellectual calibre and spirit — are being attracted because the different forms of business in this country are becoming more professional in the powers they call for and the spirit they exercise than the older professions. The great business houses, or nearly all of them, are profes- sional in their origin, to-day. They begin in laboratories and in the researches of experts and specialists and are based upon secrets of chemistry and geology and botany, and the key to modern business success is getting more and more into the hands of inventors, and scientists, and of the masters of materials. When one stops to think of the actual opportunity for the spirit of the arts and 159 Inspired scienccs, in the development of the soil, Millionaires ±.i ' ,i • j_i ji the mines, the very air up over the earth — when one stops to think of the supremacy of the inventor to-day, of the glory and power of the successful organizer — the elevation of business ideals and the crowding of our picked men into trade and commerce seems almost a matter of course. The big, permanent things can- not be done by men with small spirits or with small morals ; and when one considers how big the things are that are waiting to be done in this way, by the bigger type of business man, it makes being a lawyer now-a-days, or a clergyman, or an author, seem a comparatively plain and humble affair. This is what the professional business man is seeing all about him in America. It is what makes the American business man lead the world, — this kind of in- spired sense he has of himself, and of his own career, and of what can be done with material and homely things. We are all 1 60 beginning to guess that there is nothing The Millionaire • ^^ho is SIS firood. intrinsically second-rate about getting as anybody rich. The only reason that getting rich has not ranked a man highly is that the wrong men have taken hold of it. The millionaire in America who obvi- ously belongs to the creative or artistic class, who conducts his business with a cer- tain richness of temperament, who con- ceals his money decently and safely in his personal character, so that artists and pro- fessional men feel that he is one of them- selves, will be taken seriously into the fold soon, by our professional men. Our best, our most select, and gentlemanlike, and remote ones will be convinced (even our minor poets will see it) that a business man can be an artist. He will convince them by the way he conducts his business, by being what may be called in a certain robust sense, a poet with a million dollars — a somewhat realer poet than we are used to — a man to whom a million dollars is an art form. i6i Inspired When a few millionaires like this have Millionaires ^^^^ judiciously Scattered around the country the breach between wealth and the arts, between making a fortune and making a book or a picture, will cease, and the National Arts Club will gradually set- tle down at last into being human and sociable and friendly-like with the Board of Trade. 162 V A Million Dollars As A Profession THERE are three principles that a business man who is as good as any- body, who is an artist, or who ranks him- self with the professions, applies to his business : I. Not making all the money he can. II. Making money enough. III. Mixed motives. He sees to it that he is serving others and serving himself at the same time. He fails to see anything irreligious, or second- rate, or immoral about mixed motives, if they are mixed properly. He believes that mixed motives are the best ones to have, that they are the most sound, manly, and candid ones, and the most reUgious, and that it takes the most religion to mix them, and that they are the only kind that work. Service without self-preservation 163 Inspired docs not look holy to him and self -preser- Millionaires ,. <,•, , . -i iti*. vation Without service does not look inter- esting. As long as it is really true that the art of making money is the mere plain rudimentary instinct of making as much as one can, it cannot be called an art. It does not interest, and never has, and can never hope to interest an artist. It does not amount to enough. There is nothing that is really original, or that is really capable, about making as much money as one can. Anyone could have thought of it. Nearly everybody has — who has conducted a business at all — since the be- ginning of the world. But the moment a man undertakes to conduct his business in such a way as to make it a service to the public, and to his employees, and a perma- nent profit to himself, he becomes an art- ist. It is the power in a man which insists upon putting essential things together, and upon keeping them together, which makes an artist. Almost anyone ought to be able to get rich, by the simple rudi- 164 mentary device of leaving one or two of a Million ,, , T- n • Ml* I • Dollars as a them out. If one is willmg to give up profession enough for it, if one is willing to be a great neuter personality like Mr. Rocke- feller, make a mere business-is-business device of one's self, a kind of hydraulic valve or pump of riches, it would be com- paratively easy to be rich, and would not take an artist. And an artist would not try. It would not interest him — a mere monotonous taking of all he could get, whether there was any object in it or not. He would not be willing to give up the self-indulgences of the real man of busi- ness — the other strands of business that a man enjoys — the candor and the glory, and the self-respect that always go with a great, joyous, or real success, and that make getting rich a little slower and more complicated. The element of personal profit, a real artist in business looks upon with dignity and frankness, and as a mat- ter of course, and he is no more willing to give it up than the element of workmanship 165 Inspired and public service. If he is serving others MiUionaires ^^ jnsists on making money, if only as a bond of permanence in what he is doing. It is all that keeps him from being degraded to the rank of a mere charity worker. Any- body can conduct a charity and be kind and superficial, correcting with money the abuses it has wrought; but it takes an artist of the highest human and business resources to establish a great industrial house on such profound principles of mutual service, and voluntary generosity, and self-support, that it will renew itself from within, and last for generations, and be what a great business house ought to be — something to be pointed to as one of the moral dignities of the nation, a monu- ment to the probity and beauty of the people. To be charitable, to help others in business in such a way as to make them not worth helping any more, is a small thing for a millionaire to do. A man with a few cents could do it. The special op- portunity of a millionaire is that, if he has 166 brains and capital enough and they are a Million _ _ 1 1 • • •j.' Dollars as a mixed together enough, he is m a position profession to do business on a permanent basis, to adopt principles, and methods, and faiths which make him ready to forego the large, foolish, swift profits so much looked for now — and conduct a business with quiet- ness and dignity and without getting out of breath. (It is the difference between breathing with the upper chest and a deep abdominal breathing in business that men are slowly beginning to realize.) Almost any man who goes below his diaphragm in anything he does is ready to bear witness that the idea that has lately taken possession of many of us that " busi- ness is business," and that humanity is a special department by itself, is contra- dicted by the plain matter-of-fact daily experience of the men who always rule at last. The experience of these men in every age of the world has been that neither business nor humanity can be of any per- manent account unless it is put with the 167 Inspired othcr. Not Until the business ability that Millionaires i j -,• * . .■,■,. has made our ordinary American million- aire, and the human or artistic ability that has made the artist, are being put together daily in the same life — the life of our typical modern man of affairs — can we expect anything but puddling and tempo- rizing, either with the social, industrial sit- uation, or the artistic, philanthropic one. The business man who is heaping up social conditions which require him to turn phi- lanthropist, and the philanthropist who is heaping up financial conditions which re- quire him to turn business man, are both ridiculous. The very essence of sound- ness and permanence in a man's business is that the man is doing good in it as he goes along, and the essence of a sound philanthropy is that with time and capital it pays. In saying that the business man who ranks his business with the arts and the professions does it by employing three principles (not making too much money; i68 making enough; mixed motives), it a Million ought not to be overlooked that the value pr'^ofession of these principles depends entirely upon the way in which they are carried out. Perhaps the best way to carry out these principles is to put with them three en- thusiasms : First, an enthusiasm for doing the thing one does perfectly (which requires not making too much money) . Second, an enthusiasm for doing the thing one does independently and in one's own way (which requires making money enough) . Third, a general enthusiasm for the world and for the other people who are allowed in it. 169 VI A Million Dollars as an Art Form 1 Surplus and Aristocracy THE fundamental thing in a man with a million dollars, if he wants to be an artist, is imagination. A man has a vision of something to do, which if done in the way he sees it, will be good. Then he does it. There is always something fine and willful and aristocratic and full of leisure and pleasure and surplus about a man, be he rich or poor, who creates a new value in the world. The creative imagination is some man's joy, his surplus of selfishness. The common people of Boston did not want music taught to them in the public schools, but Lowell Mason did not want to live in a wilderness or at best on a little oasis of music with a few other lonely 170 shivering musicians in New England, Surplus and and he was possessed with the idea that ^^^^^^^^y every one should sing. There was almost no one who thought he was right and there was no one who would give him a chance to prove it, and the best he could do at first was to get the people of Boston to give him permission to pay his own salary while he proved to them that they wanted music. When the people had had it proved to them in Boston that they wanted music, it was found that they wanted it in every city in the United States. It would be hard to measure the value to this coun- try of the willfulness of Mr. Lowell Mason. There is a great chorus of shop girls and factory hands singing The Crea- tion to-day in more than one city in America, and the joy, or the memory or hope of joy, the bare idea that there is a great, free, overflowing world of it, is being kept within the hearing of the people. And what Lowell Mason did with the 171 Inspired common people in Boston, Major Hig- Millionaires • 'ii i • c« t 11 1 • ginson with his Symphony has been doing A Million with the so-called cultivated classes. They Dollars as an . i • t Art Form are not quite cultivated enough to want to pay for all of it themselves, as yet, but they are going to be, and orchestras are being wanted and springing up all over the country because a willful man in Bos- ton wanted people to have an orchestra that they did not want — a man who did not care to go to Europe of an evening after dinner when he wanted music. Nearly all the best things for people have had to be forced upon them by some man's overflowing selfishness, and what a democ- racy is for, is to create a free and favor- able atmosphere for producing excep- tional personalities, men who will do these things, rich and poor, men who are willful with visions of their own for others, and who give people a chance to want what they are glad they wanted after- wards. One could go on forever multi- plying instances of the fact that the great 17a or new ideas begin in the aristo- Surplus and .... ,1 , Aristocracy cratie spirit, m the peremptory serv- ice of some man who has a vision of his own, some one hke Pulhnan with his sleeper, who centers himself upon his vision until it is everyone's. From the Krupp gun up to Millet and Whistler and Wagner's operas the principle holds good. We look for something assertive about all real values from the little things to the great, from the unpractical phonograph, the visionary railroad, from the self-asser- tion of coal, of steel, of Copernicus, Co- lumbus, Luther, up to the self-assertion of the New Testament, that divine, willful be- lieving in everybody, that standing up for people in spite of themselves which started our modern world. There seems to be nothing good that is not aristocratic and noble and free and voluntary. What civilization is for is to produce in every temperament and walk of life men with a surplus. The man who has a vision of his own that is so good that he is in danger of overdoing it, and even of doing wrong 173 Inspired with it, is the man the world can least 1 lonaires ^ff^^^ ^^ throw away. We can better A Million afford to let him do wrong with it awhile Dollars as an , i i • i i i Art Form and practice on us and do right slowly and clumsily; and the only safe course for society would seem to be not to annihilate him or emasculate him, or smother him out, or flatten him into a socialist, or make impossible in him what one might call his selfishness, but to take his selfishness — that great, natural, driving force of things — and turn it on the main drive-wheel of the world and on the good of all of us. The Millionaire and His Imagination I have been wondering of late why it is that the schemes that are put forward in behalf of the very poor and for the betterment of the condition of the rich seem to come to so little. Neither the very poor nor the very rich seem to Uke their schemes, and yet the schemes look true, most of them, and worthy. Every- 174 one has a vague feeling that they ought The _ .I'll Millionaire to be admired, and everyone thinks how ^^^ His good and how charitable they are. But imagination they are not attractive or catching. No- body cares about them except the people who think of them, and committees. I have come to the conclusion that most of our schemes for getting milHonaires to do as they should, are failing to-day, not because the schemes are right or wrong, but because they are neuter. They fail to reckon with the creative joy of a man in what he has thought of himself. What the very poor and the very rich seem to be needing most in this country just now is not to have money given to them, or money taken away from them, but the chance to help themselves. If they could break away from Edwin D. Mead and the rest of us, and all the other dear, faith- ful people who worry about them, and plan for them, and would think of some- thing they would be glad to do themselves, things would begin to budge. If society 175 Inspired evcp wishes to Start up the millionaire in the right direction, it will need to reach A Million through to the joy, the vitality, and energy Dollars as an . Art Form m the man, to strike down through to his sense of power, and to stop pottering with his sense of propriety. One must not speak of anyone's con- science disrespectfully, but it does seem to be true that when the place we get hold of in a man is his conscience, it does not seem to be a very practical hold. His con- science, is there of course, always, but what of it? It is at best only a very small part of a man, and if our hold on a man is to be firm and enduring, and endure moods and all kinds of events and the weather of the world, it seems to be necessary to get hold of the whole man, and the only way to get hold of the whole man is to get hold of the power in him which most sums him up, which concentrates the whole of him in itself, and this means that we must strike down through to the creative in- stinct in the man, the stronghold of vital- 176 ity and desire. It is not going to be by The appealing to his sense of what he ought to ^^^ jj^g want or by puUing peevishly on the sleeve imagination of hfs conscience or by changing his clothes, but by appealing to what he does want, by rousing the nobler passion in the man, the lion of delight in him, the visions and the dreams, the sense of noble oppor- tunity, of personal destiny, of identity with great movements and deeds, that men like millionaires are going to be made to do things. In other words, if a million- aire is to accomplish great things with his money, he must be allowed, like any other man, to act with it like a genius or an artist. The main thing in the artist that makes him an artist is his creative function, and the main thing that seems to make a mil- lionaire a great millionaire, a genius or an artist with money, is his passion for thinking of things himself, and putting them together, his imagination or virility of thought. The artist is never so hard 177 Inspired put to it in this world that he has to look | Millionaires i • -j. j. j j tt j. j * around in it to do good. He creates and j AMiUion likes it. After he has created (like | Dollars as an , . ? Art Form God) , he says it is good, afterwards. The j good is thrown in and is too obvious to be \ mentioned, with a great artist, and the i probability seems to be that the great mil- I lionaire, when he comes, like Leonardo da Vinci or Phidias, will do good in the same | way, not by poking dismally around the i world and being on committees, and try- ; ing to be self-sacrificing and trying j vaguely to make people happy, but by j being happy with some deep happiness | himself, and overflowing the world with it. | The real artist does not see anything to I be ashamed of in this. He believes that : the creative instinct, the instinct of pro- ducing and reproducing values, was in- \ tended in this world as a personal joy and j that it would not be a capable, sound, or well-knit world if it were not. He be- | lieves that the best use to make of a crea- | tive joy is to have it, and that the best \ 178 ' way to be of service to others is to have The enough. He believes that a painter who anVms"^^ paints a picture merely to make other peo- imagination pie happy hurts their feelings, and he be- lieves that when a million dollars really appears which can be called an art- form, it will not be an altruistic-looking million dollars. It will merely be a million dol- lars having a good time, i. e., it will be a million dollars full of creative imagina- tion. When we see a man in this world having virtues for the fun of it, we call it the artistic temperament. The thing that makes an artist an artist is that he is in the daily act of using and enjoying his best and fullest self, and that except as a last resort he will have nothing to do with the pure or rank forms of unselfishness. He believes that true or great love consists not in unselfishness, but in identifying one's selfishness with other people's. And he is frank about it and acts as if it were so, no matter how 179 Inspired it looks. Why should not a millionaire Millionaires r n jj.t. i.' 1.0 be allowed to be an artist? A Million There is no reason why a true artist or Dollars as an Art Form true millionaire should be expected to feel a little inferior for selecting his own inter- ests and the interests he was born next to and caring for them. He believes that as a plain matter of fact a man who pursues his own interests and other people's to- gether and who considers that they belong together, is doing a more noble and diffi- cult as well as a more religious thing than the flat altruist or the merely unselfish man has ever dreamed of. A good, hearty, selfish man who is having a good, hearty, daily sense of identity and oneness with the world and is mixing himself and his money with it, seems more spiritual to an artist, in spite of appearances, than an altruist. Altruism, from his point of view, is a kind of tired, tepid, proper goodness. Altruists may have a better look at first, but what altruism is really made of is a sense of otherness, 180 a sense that other people are other people, The and that they are different from us, and anVmr"^^ that we must do them good. The one imagination thing in a million dollars that can make it an art form is a man in it who is filling it with his own selfish personal desire to be happy. As it would be underwitted to try to be happy alone, he tries to have all his happiness, his growth, and his fortune so conducted that they will be full of the growth and happiness of others. A really great fortune, made by an artist, is a fortune that expresses a man's oneness with the world, his daily creative joy in something he and the world have had a great time doing together. There are many pleasant things that can be said of altruism, but altruism is never finished until this last fine touch of selfishness has been placed upon it. Probably if the facts were known, we do not any of us believe in pure unselfish- ness. What we really believe in is selfish- ^^ ness properly mixed, but we keep it as a Inspired little secpct of our own and we are not Millionaires r . i • 'j. j. j.i i i breathing it to other people because we A Million are afraid they would make too much use Dollars as an . , Art Form 01 it. The artist, whether he is a million- aire or not, is more frank than the rest of us, and takes his stand boldly. Being purely selfish or unselfish is lazy, he thinks. When people complain that they must draw the line somewhere, he answers that the drawing of the line is what a man's art or what his religion is for. It is what makes them interesting ; and secretly all the live folks in the world, whether they are in the sports or in the prayer- meetings, agree with him. Drawing the line and seeing it drawn straight is what the world likes. It has a good, healthy liking for selfishness. It does not want millionaires who are mere altru- ists. The world is like a woman, and what sensible woman wants a man about who is loving her for her own sake? She would rather be one of a man's failings, a happiness, a self-indulgence that he can- not help. It is the one thing in a husband The ,■■. Ill 11. •. Millionaire that makes her happy, and what society ^^^ jjj^ really demands of a man with a million imagination dollars is that he should keep from being distant and benevolent and charitable with it and from improving people in- stead of enjoying them. The last thing the world can afford to do is to do any- thing that will keep its millionaires from being selfish like its artists. We want the artist to be selfish enough to be a good one, and we want the millionaire to be selfish enough to make the best possible use of being a millionaire. This may be a dan- gerous-looking truth, but the best way to know a truth is by the fine manly intelli- gent dangers that go with it, and by the way it takes for granted that the people are not fools. Money is already learning the artist's instinct and is learning to live, gradually, and to enjoy living. The time is already at hand when the most characteristic trait of money will be this living, overflowing, 183 Inspired neighborly creativeness. It will be found Millionaires j • • i i • • i i • engaged m seeing and doing the big A Million things that humanity has put in an order Dollars as an i • mi Art Form f or — ^^d it Will see them so truly and so nobly that it will do them and look out for itself besides. The man who is redeem- ing the business in which he is engaged, up to the boundary line of loss, holding it to the voluntary small, slow profit that belongs to a great, dignified business — the man who is making men and money and things together, will be a not uncom- mon sight. He will keep from falling into the three great fallacies of modern ambition — quick money, large money, or no money, and he will look upon wealth as the great artist looks upon art, as the supreme sociable institution. His mil- lion dollars will not be his altruism, his sense of being different and of doing peo- ple good, and it will not be his lazy un- selfishness and it will not be his sympathy or suff ering-with, but it will be creative, and mutual, a great hearty joy- with across a world. 184 He is not unaware (for thousands of The years the artist has not been allowed to be) anVms"^^ that the course he has taken has the look imagination of selfishness. It will probably always be a question to some people. In the meantime he can only wait for cant to go by, and hope in his own quiet way to make his selfishness as eiFective as possible. The question that always interests the artist and the millionaire the most, is whether or not he is going to be a great artist or a great millionaire. All one has to do with one's selfishness, if one wants to be a great artist or a great millionaire, is to apply one's imagination to it. The moment a man applies his imagination to a selfish interest and begins to see it in its possible relations, a selfish interest be- gins to cross-fertilize and to be all wrought in with other people's. Not long ago a man who owned a fac- tory and had made his money to an un- usual degree in this spirit divided his en- tire fortune at his death among his 185 Inspired employees. He did not spoil it by being 1 lonaires j^^p^jy conscientious and altruistic about A Million it. He had enjoyed thinking about it all Dollars as an i.i t i Art Form his last days — the idea that he was going to share the rest of his money with the men who had helped him make it. The more he made this use of his money a per- sonal self-indulgence, the more economi- cal and business-like it was, and the more the men liked it and the more everybody got out of it. The best and most profit- able way the world can do with its million- aires would seem to be not to try to stop their selfishness and scold them for it, but to call out their better and nobler kinds. The better and nobler kind of selfish- ness is the selfishness with imagination in it. One can be selfish for one, like a baby with a bottle of milk, or one can be selfish for two, like a new lover, or one can be selfish for seven or eight, like a mother, or one can be selfish for a city like Jean Valjean, or one can be selfish and identify oneself, strike up a mutual inter- i86 est, with the daily lives of eighty million imagination people, like Alexander Graham Bell. Higher Selfishness 3 Imagination and the Higher Selfishness The Honorable Wayne MacVeagh was quoted sometime ago as saying that before twenty years there would be but two great parties in this country and that by what- ever names they micrht be called, one of these parties would be the party of capital and the other would be the party of labor. If this statement is true, it means that this country has nothing in it but second- rate, inefficient millionaires, and second- rate, inefficient laborers. If a party that is strictly and merely a party of capital exists, all the second-rate and inefficient millionaires will belong to it. If a party that is strictly and merely a party of labor exists, all the second-rate and inefficient laborers will belong to it. There would soon have to be a third 187 Inspired party in this country, a party for million- Millionaires •ill 1 1 1 T ' m ' aires that are not second-rate and inemci- A Million ent, and for laborers who can work. Dollars as an t.--.,,. Art Form Millionaires who propose to belong to a party all by themselves are inefficient be- cause millionaires who have no one to work with but other millionaires, could not get things done. Laborers who have no one but other laborers to work with could not get things to do. It is only the millionaires who do not want to do their work as millionaires and bone down to getting on with people, and to accomplishing things, who would want to belong to a party by themselves. And it is only laborers who are not trying to do their work better, and who are not trying to amount to something, and to be worth more than they get, who would think of belonging to a mere party of labor. This brings us to the question at the bottom of the matter. What is the basis of the efficiency of labor in a great indus- trial nation like the United States? i8S The basis of the efficiency of labor, imagination whether it is the labor of the rich or the ^^}^^ labor of the poor, is imagination. Selfishness In our complex American business con- ditions, where so many different kinds of things have to be put together, men who are without imagination cannot be effi- cient. To be without imagination is un- business-like. Men who have no imagi- nation about other men's minds quarrel with them instead of working with them. They keep stopping the mills to fight. Men who have no imagination about other men's work are inefficient because they cannot lay out work that the men could do. Men who have no imagination about their own work and who stop imagining or see- ing how their work is being done, and how it might be done, only half do it. They die at forty. Men who stop imagin- ing or trying to keep alive in their work and who die at forty, and yet who keep on looking as if they were living, make a great business nation impossible. The 189 Inspired millionaires and laborers who are efficient Millionaires • ii • , ,i -t ^ , m this country are the men who keep put- A Million ting thcmsclves into each other's places Dollars as an Art Form and makmg the most of each other. This is an act of the imagination. In the Bible, imagination is called the Holy Ghost. In literature and the fine arts it is called genius or perhaps the artistic temperament. In business it is called common sense, the sense of putting com- mon things together so that they are shown to be extraordinary and full of power and surprise. Imagination ap- plied to iron means steel, applied to manu- facturing steel it means putting a strong draught on the creative powers of the men who are helping to make the steel, and bringing out the utmost glow and help in each of them. Applied imagination — imagination applied to being a laborer and to being a millionaire are the two magnetic forces that run the dynamo of the business world. All of the best men are full of it. The laboring man who is 190 a little inspired and is creating values and imagination the millionaire who is a little inspired and ^^ y^^^ is creating values are moved by the same Selfishness spirit. The really inspired laborer is not begrudging the really inspired millionaire his automobile. He looks at it as it whirls by, thinks how the man earned it and how he will earn one, too. The two men at bottom feel that they are alike. They are the last men to hate each other and not to work together. The real enemy of the laborer is not the man in the automobile who works as hard as he can, but the laborer next to him who works as little as possible. The trouble with the laborers in our country is not that the millionaire is against them, but that they are against each other, and that the men who cannot do things are in a vast conspiracy of keep- ing them from being done by the men who can. The real tragedy of labor — the oppression of the poor — is the mob of weak men intimidating the strong. The natural division of parties in the business 191 Inspired world has come to be not between rich Millionaires j i , • i j. i and poor or even between right and wrong A Million or selfish and unselfish, but between men Dollars as an . Art Form who are creating values and men who are not. When they do not work together it is because the millionaire is a case of arrested development. He began by being an inspired laborer and has forgot- ten. He was once a man who was being inspired with something worth a million dollars and when his million dollars was paid in, he stopped. The millionaire who keeps as much ahead as a millionaire as he used to keep as an inspired laborer finds that his men feel identified with him or trust him. The more he makes being a millionaire look original and interesting and better than other millionaires have made it look, the more they work. It is the hard labor of the rich that can get the hard labor of the poor. A manufac- turer can have all the success he wants who has made a success of his factory by being a working millionaire, by having X92 inspirations himself and by going about imagination in it lifting off the lid from other people's. Higher It is his putting down the lid on other Selfishness people's and sitting on it, that makes the millionaire unpopular. The moment he gets up and helps, they like him. They like him when he does not help and merely gets up. Our manufacturing towns are trying hard every day to believe a man can be good enqugh to be rich and they are even willing to stand by and let a man have money to throw away, if he is not using it to throw men away. In the last analysis, in a machine civilization the skilled labor of the rich consists in finding ways in factories of not throwing men away. The man who is clicking off the middle of this sentence to you, Gentle Reader, on the linotype machine, does not know it is^ about him probably. If it were his own autobiography he would not notice. Where is the author — which of us is 193 Inspired there who is trying to be an author to-day, Millionaires _i iji .j. i? j • who could hope to stop a prooi -reader m A Million his mad career of correctness down the Dollars as an i i i • i Art Form V^g^^ who could hopc to get lu a word with him just of our own as we went by, or whisper to him as a brother, so that we two might stop a second perhaps, and be glad together? We are filed away in machines and partitioned off in specialties. We live hours every day, most of us, in the hold of the world, or under water in work, and we are not free and strong and human, and up in the light with it. And what I am hoping for in this book is not that we should all elbow our way together into the Pilot House all the time, or walk superior up above and to and fro on the Bridge of Things, but that we should all have turns of looking from the pilot's window at the course of the ship, and turns of walking up and down the deck in the broad day, and in the solemn night. Then we would go down again and with the seas and with the stars around us we would do our work. 194 A man who does a part of a thing can imagination not do it as well or as long, unless he has Monopoly at times the vision of the others and of the whole. A millionaire becomes no better than a mere factory-hand without this, and a factory-hand becomes no better than a mere millionaire. What seems to be wanted in the men who conduct our in- dustries is not altruism, but a more com- prehending, comprehensive, inclusive self- ishness — the selfishness that includes others and is full of shrewd mutualness and of a passion for putting one's own interests and the interests of others together. 4 Imagination and Monopoly It has-been said that the quality that makes a million dollars an art-form is imagination. The imagination, when it is seen working in full force in a millionaire, works through into three phases: Invention. It makes him see some- thing people ought to want. 195 Inspired Mutualncss. It Hiakes him see men Millionaires ■•! aIii • • t ^ creatively, so that he can get men to help A Million hijn make it. It makes him see men cre- Dollarsasan • -, ■, t Art Form atively, SO that he can get men to want it and buy it. Monopoly. It makes him see, like any other artist, that if the thing he has thought of is to be made perfectly, and if it is to be of the most perfect service to the people for whom he has tliought of it, it must be kept in his own hands or where he can see that his original design is car- ried out. Mr. Edison has announced that his new invention, which will make it possible for any workman to have a new concrete house complete, costing only a thousand dollars, is a sheer gift to the world and is not to be patented. Anybody can make use of it. Mr. Edison's idea has been that he will be benevolent and not make money out of his invention himself. If Mr. Edison were persuaded not to be benevolent, or rather benevolent-look- 196 ing, in this matter, and would consent to imagination keep his invention of a house for nothing, Monopoly in his own hands, he would have the chance to make the most original gift to the world, the world has ever had — a great, new and free-born industry. As it is the world is going to have, apparently, from perhaps its greatest inventive genius, one more industry as brutal and as helpless and as monotonous as the rest. As some of us see it, it is a thoughtless thing to do to stand up kindly in a country and dis- tribute several million dollars a year with one's eyes shut. Mr. Edison is standing ing in his house at his desk by an open window, a bushel-basketful of fortunes at his right hand, and he is absent-mindedly tossing them — big handf uls of them — out through the win- dow to people. He has selected the peo- ple who happen to be going by for for- tunes, and among all these the bullies and the boys who can pound the hardest, or grab the quickest, are the ones he has selected the fortunes for first. 197 Inspired If Mr. Edison could be prevailed upon Millionaires , i i li? i p .i .• i • t to look more semsh lor the tune being and A Million jf ]jq would keep his idea of a thousand- Dollars as an ^ Art Form doUar coucrete house in his own hands, the laborers who help to make the houses could be paid more and treated better than any other class of laborers working on any other invention in the world. All the men in the industry would be pulling up in- stead of pulling down on the other indus- tries of the world. Mr. Edison's whole industry, with its millions of men in it, could be conducted from the bottom to the top by a great, free, self-respecting, self- controlled man. Mr. Edison, or his trus- tee, would be in a position to conduct a great business without fear or favor, with- out whining, and without explaining, as most of us have to do, that he wanted to do right in business — had always wanted to, but nobody would let him. He would not have to explain that he wanted to em- ploy better foremen — foremen who had natural gifts and who could exploit and 198 make the most of men — that he had imagination wanted to employ a higher type of super- Monopoly intendents, and that he had wanted to be a gentleman and an artist and do as he liked, and carry out his own idea and con- duct a great, dignified business, — but nobody would let him. He would not be feeling it every time he went down to the office like a threat held over him day after day, that what he did in his business was not being determined by the fact that he wanted it, but by the fact that there hap- pened to be in the world men who would do meaner things than he would. When Phidias was doing the Athena on the Parthenon, if a committee from the Legislature had waited on him and inter- rupted him and said they wanted to use his chisel a while, a few of them, or that they had found someone who could do an Athena cheaper, and who had underbid him, Phidias would have insisted that he had a great conception for Athens and that no other man had conceived it and 199 Inspired that no othcr man could carry it out, and the probabilities are that, being the man A Million ^e was, he would have been able to make Dollars as an Art Form pcoplc belicve it. The moment the millionaire applies his imagination to the perfection of service and tries to give it unity and harmony and validity, monopoly follows. The moment he seeks to carry out an original or crea- tive idea, to protect his employees and to protect the public in it, he finds he must keep things in his own hands and carry out his own design like any other artist. This seems to be the first reason for mo- nopoly. The millionaire wants it. The second reason for monopoly is that society wants it. The moment the world begins to apply its imagination to getting what it wants out of its millionaires, it dis- covers that it is much easier to get what it wants out of a monopoly, that is, out of one self -controlled millionaire, or group of millionaires, than it is to get what it wants out of crowds of millionaires who 200 none of them do as they like. Men who imagination cannot do as they hke are not responsible Monopoly and cannot be blamed and cannot be praised. One of the next things this country is going to do is to put its mil- lionaires where they can be all done up compactly and dealt with conveniently as monopolists, and can be praised and blamed and held responsible. The third reason for monopoly is that when the imagination is applied to con- ducting the business of a great country, it is only by monopoly, by strong milHon- aires who can do as they like, that socialism can be dealt with. The millionaires are the men who are going to put socialism in a sieve, and have all that is true and good in it sifted out before the people and used for them, and all that is bad in it or that came from machine-made men or from dull, discouraged factory minds cast out forever upon the scrap heap of the world. Inspired 5 Millionaires jr^^ Back-fire of Socialism A Million What seems to be good in socialism is Dollars as an ^ Art Form its Spirit, the idea that every man must be thought of and represented; and what seems to be bad in it is the letter, the idea that all these crowds of men must do these things themselves, for .themselves, and that unless a man in this country repre- sents his own point of view himself, no one will do it. If there should ever come to be a time when there is nobody to represent a man but himself, in this country, we will have to fall back upon socialism in the letter. In the meantime our unpredatory millionaires, or millionaires of the first class, the ones who have thought of things and created values and who have not merely grabbed or crowded, are all of them men who have become millionaires by taking other peo- ple's points of view, and they are able to keep on being millionaires because they know what millions of people want and 202 what millions of people think. If one The were to go through the nation and pick of socialism out the men who had the greatest power of seeing things in a large way and from everybody's point of view, and of doing something about it, a large proportion of them would be found to be the men who are managing and moving around the money on the world. We have given over the power into their hands because they have known how to put more men's inter- ests together than we do. They may be selfish. So are we. One can look about almost any day and see a selfish man. One man is selfish his own size. Another man is selfish town-size, another nation- size, and now and then there is a man who braids in his desires with the people of all nations, who reaches around a world and grapples with all of it. If he will hold it steady for the rest of us, we may count ourselves happy. The socialists, who are largely men who have time to think only of themselves, would make 103 Inspired poor work of it. For that matter, Millionaires .p ii •ti ij. t • • II what sociahsts want to do is to A Million bring sociahsm to pass, the best thing Dollars as an Art Form they could do would be to pick out mil- Honaires and get them to do it for them. It is the milhonaires who understand sociahsm. They have worked through to more of the truth in it, and they have more of an idea of how to handle it, than other people, and of how to make the truth work. It was by divining society, by practicing the spirit of socialism, and by making the truth work, that the best of them have suc- ceeded as well as they have, and it is by starting a back fire of socialism among our millionaires that all that is bad in socialism is going to be headed off and that all that is good in it is going to be set to work. Our next great million- aires are going to take the things that the socialists are saying about them and say them better. They can when they want to. More people will listen to them and they can do things as well as talk ao4 about them. The trouble with socialists The is that nearly everybody is being a socialist o/sociliism for somebody else. Socialism has always been something that someone else ought to do and the millionaires are men who are in a position to do their socialism them- selves. Every millionaire his own social- ist is the next motto and the next pro- gram of the world. As a threat and as a last resort — and as temporary scaffolding — it would be hard to overlook the value of the popu- lar socialism. But in the long run our peo- ple are not going to want socialism in this country, because monopolists can be bet- ter socialists for them than they can. This is the first reason why the people are going to prefer the socialized millionaire — a million dollars as an art-form — to social- ism. The second reason why the people are going to prefer a million dollars as an art- form — the socialized millionaire — to socialism, is that as compared with a social- ized millionaire, socialism is undemocratic. Z05 Inspired Eighty million people do not want to do 1 lonaires ^^^ ^^ everything themselves. We want A Million to be free in a democracy and trust people. Dollars as an Art Form We Want to be led by men who are on the lookout farther ahead for the rest of us, and who have to be. We do not want to take time ourselves to be always climbing up to the Senate. We do not even want to watch it, and the last thing we would enjoy as live, busy people, would be standing there on the height or on the look-off day after day, seeing for everybody. We have our own special things to do that we like to do best, and what a democracy is for is to let us do them. A democracy is supposed to be a contrivance for having every man represented — millions of small men summed up in a few convenient big ones. Masses not only cannot do things, but they do not want to, and it is only through men who sum up masses and who represent them that a great nation can hope to achieve great things in the world. To 206 deny millionaires in America is to deny More America. The only fair question about ^^a^^fj'"'' a millionaire in America is "Is he really Monopoly an American? Is he handling the money that is in his hands and that has been placed there by natural selection as the trustee for all of us, or will we have to step in and meddle with him and insist and quarrel with him and represent ourselves?" The American democracy had always been supposed to be, before this, a great democ- racy, not a little, inconvenient one like Athens, where every man had to do and know everything; but a really great democracy, a country where every man feels that he has been left free to develop himself, to make the most of his own bent in the world, a country where it is safe for a man to mind his own business. 6 More Imagination and More Monopoly Another reason why the people are go- ing to work things out into monopoly, is 207 Inspired that if E millionaire is a monopolist, or is Millionaires , . ... •» ■, -, put m a position where he can do wrong, A Million doing right is going to be made some ob- DoUars as an . Art Form J^ct to him. It means something and be- comes a self -expressive act. People all know him through it. He has the pleas- ure of being received as a comrade, a big brother of the world. If he is driven to doing right he does not mean anything by it, and a man who does not mean what he does, does not do it well. One of the next things we are going to discover in America is that we must drop our national, bullying attitude and quiet down a little with our millionaires. We must stop making our millionaires do right. We will merely spoil them. They must make themselves do it. Then it will mount up and will come to something. Millionaires are hke other people, and peo- ple who are made to do a thing, do as little of it as possible. It is only the second- rate millionaires who can be driven and they will only do the second-rate, the mor- 208 ally-economical, sorts of things. People More who do second-rate things are almost aM M°te^° always people who are trying to do things Monopoly from the outside, because they feel driven to it. We are making it to-day very difficult for millionaires to be good. Nine times out of ten that people say any- thing about a millionaire, it is about things he ought not to do. Millionaires are naturally not inspired by a program of things they ought not to do. We could not do anything ourselves, most of us, with a list of things not to do, except to pick out those we do not want to not-do the most and not-do those. The trouble seems to be that in dealing with our mil- lionaires we do not treat them as if they were human beings. Why not let our millionaires be selfish like other people, \ and human? Why not see to it that their selfishness is allowed to develop, that is, have more imagination in it and include the rest of us? Uncle Joe Cannon, in the days before Z09 Inspired he was made speaker of the House, was 1 lonaires ^ff^j.^^ indirectly a bribe of two hundred A Million and fifty thousand dollars and when he Dollars as an Art Form was asked why he did not take it, he re- plied that he would not have been com- fortable. He did not like the idea of hav- ing to spend all the rest of his life, he said, with a thief. He did not take any credit for having done the right thing and the only real credit in it was that the right thing was comfortable to him. Possibly something of this sort is going to take place with our millionaires. They are going to be right because they like it bet- ter. The righteous man is covetous for the right. The sincere man is greedy for sincerity ; he wants all he can get both f oi* himself and for others, and the man who is an artist with a million dollars, who makes it an art- form both in making it and spending it, has as his supreme self- indulgence his passion for identity or for mutual selfishness with the world, his pas- sion not for accumulating, but for inter- 2IO weaving his interests with the interests of More others. He Hkes to think that he is mak- ^nd M^re"'^ ing his mind and his money a part of the Monopoly fate of nations, that he is making his mind and his money hke the rivers and the mountains, a part of the furnishings of the earth, a part of the working, every-day equipment of a planet. And we like to have him think so. We like to have him living up to it. There is no more organic daily need in the hearts of men in this world to-day, than to have men in it that they know are greater than they are, and that they would like to be like. Men who see the wider and deeper forces about them, who daily handle them with their hands, men who lift up railroads and mow down mountains, men who give nations things to do, and pile their minds up in glass and steel against the sky, and who build streets under the sea, and who swing the cities in their orbits — these men may not be perfect, they may not be arch- angels in all the details, but they serve a Inspired daily need of the human race and bring Millionaires . iir» xT-j-j. ix» j to all oi US that touch oi wonder or even A Million of worship in our thoughts which makes Dollars as an -i n i iii-i Art Form US proud 01 the world while we work, and which fills us with a kind of patriotism for the human race and for what men can do on a planet like this, and what they can be on it, and for what we shall do and be ourselves. It is all a mistake to suppose that the average man's special inspiration and joy consists in standing up for the average man. And it is a mistake to suppose that he has any special inspiration for being one. The only thing that is really inspiring to the average man to-day is having something above him that needs his best, that expects him to be better than he is, and that keeps him from being an average man any longer than can be helped. Except when he is under temporary illusion or violence, the average man for whom socialism has been invented resents equality or levelness with all his heart. A level and a fair 212 chance for all men, not to be equal, is what More Imagination he really wants. and More When he goes out to walk in Hyde Monopoly Park or on Riverside Drive and sees the miles of beautiful horses, it is a part of the beauty and the pleasure of it all to him that society has supplied these particular people with horses and with carriages, be- cause they have done more things for the world, that the world wanted, than the other people have done. Except under temporary conditions and when looked at in the large, a great house on the avenue is a receipt from society for value re- ceived. The temporary disgrace of wealth lies not in the wealth but in its | diseases. Inasmuch as some men we know, are rich, the world must have wanted the wrong things or wanted them in the wrong way. But as fast as society is be- ginning to want the right things and want them in the right way, a man's horse or carriage in the Park is going to be looked upon like a lordship or a decoration. It 213 Inspired wiU be like being given the freedom of a Millionaires •■ a ' i j City. A man s horse and carriage is a A Million special understanding with the people Dollars as an i«ii iii Art Form around him and with the world, that, con- sidering all he has done in it, he need not walk. The general effect of a thousand horses and carriages in the Park on a good work- man is to make him work. Looked at in any large or fair way, the presence of great minds in the world makes men thoughtful, and the presence of great for- tunes makes them rich. The earth is full of din and of thought and smoke and of men making things, and the great fortunes throughout the country are the draught that glow up society all through, and that keep every inch of it alive, moving, shap- ing, and welding the things that shall be. Millionaires are the bellows of great cities, the draught on the creative forces and the latent energies of men. Millionaires are the tall chimneys on the world. 214 Everything that a true or socialized More .,,.., , ,, . Imagination mimonaire does becomes the common m- and More spiration of all of us. If a millionaire is Monopoly really an artist, if he has shown it by mak- ing the men and the materials around him glow more than other men could, no one will find fault with him very long for be- ing a monopolist. He will be regarded as having been appointed to the position by a fair, free-for-all natural selection, by the men who work with him. He has turned out to be the artist who has com- bined and freed them all and expressed them and made them come to themselves. When we have more millionaires like this, men who have proved themselves artists, who hold their wealth as trustees of soci- ety, we will stop thinking of socialism, or of groping for the leaders of the world in ballot boxes. The man who handles his riches in such a way that if he were to insist upon giving them up people would insist upon his taking them back, leaves socialism or groping in ballot boxes noth- 215 Inspired ing to do. If a man's million dollars has Millionaires • • .• • •. i cc 33 miagmation m it and say "we care- A Million fully, he can be rich. If his million dol- DoUarsasan , . . Art Form l^rs has cnough maagmation in it to say '' "me '' voluntarily and spontaneously, he can be a monopolist, and the more of a monopolist he is the more people like it. 7 Millionaires Who Invent People There are several kinds of men with imagination in business. Those who invent trade-conveniences and economies, the creative merchants, brokers, storekeepers. Those who invent machines and whose imaginations play in the laws of physics. Those who invent new materials and whose imaginations play around the things that come out of the earth, the men who make new combinations of the elements, who are poets in chemistry, or botany and mineralogy. Those who invent people. 216 Men whose imaginations belong to Millionaires these four different classes are apt to con- people fine themselves merely to one of them. Edison has little imagination about men who are entangled in industrial wrongs. His imagination plays about electricity and not about the men who work with it. Alexander Graham Bell had very little imagination with regard to making men see that they wanted telephones. Thoreau made the best lead pencil in the United States, but his imagination came to a full stop. He did not care about selling it. The special need in the industrial world for the inspired millionaire is that he is the man who puts all the other men's imaginations together. He has creative power in getting, holding, and discovering for the things that these men invent, the people who can finish theiji for them, and who can give them their real value in the world. The special function of the in- spired millionaire as he looks over the field of invention, is inventing people. 217 Inspired People are the most necessary of the Millionaires . ,. rrM ^ i ii inventions. Ihey make and use the A Million others. Dollars as an Art Form Nearly all our great millionaires were invented by some other millionaire who saw what was in them and saw how it could be combined and released and put in action. We look to our millionaires in each generation to invent our new ones. Carnegie and Marshall Field and hun- dreds of others succeeded largely by dis- covering and inventing men to be rich with them, men who could be fellow-mil- lionaires and partners in creating the great values of the world. For every single thing that a creative millionaire thinks and does, he sees ten things he might do, ten fortunes that he might make, if he could invent or discover ten more people to have them. Some- times it seems as if there were getting to be but one really serious, industrial prob- lem in America, and that is the inefficiency of labor. Thousands of new and un- 218 precedented positions in this country, Millionaires worth from ten thousand to a hundred peopiJ*^^" thousand a year, are vacant because men cannot be found to fill them. The man who can earn a hundred thousand a year, that is, who can do a hundred thousand dollars' worth of labor, who can literally save all the men of the world, poor and rich, many times that sum by the way he fills his position, and by the things he thinks of in it and is creative enough to carry through — is almost impossible to find. Most of the men who apply for such positions have not the efficiency or imagination to fill them and over- flow them and make not only themselves but their positions a new thing in the world. The creative millionaire is hedged in on every side either by the inefficiency of labor among the rich or the inefficiency of labor among the poor. He has things for people to do and he wants men at four dollars a day, forty dollars a day, or four hundred dollars a day, and he cannot find 219 Inspired men who seem to be interested in the Millionaires .■, > i j. i j.i tt i thmgs enough to do them. He can only A Million find men who are interested in the four Dollars as an Art Form doUars, or the forty dollars, or the four hundred dollars a day. Nine men out of ten in the factories are not interested in working. They are working as little as possible for their money. They do not seem to be interested hour by hour, or day by day, as they work, in creating values. They are merely interested in getting all the values they can that other people have created. We are seeing the whole population of America honeycombed with labor unions or vast organizations for- higher wages, conspiracies of poor men for not working so hard, and for intimi- dating men who want to work harder, and we are seeing it honeycombed with trusts, vast organizations of rich men for higher wages, for not working so hard and for intimidating the creative millionaires who want to work harder. There is but one explanation for the up- 220 rising" against labor in this country among Millionaires the very rich and the very poor, and for the Peopie^^^^ general inefficiency of labor which con- fronts the creative millionaire and the cre- ative foreman or manager at every point to-day, and that seems to be that for the first time in the history of the world, the experiment has been tried of having two or three almost complete generations of men who have lived their lives with ma- chines and who have given up having souls, but who have not given up having children. Children that have been begot- ten and conceived in weariness and dull- ness, that have been born and brought up in factories, and with factory fathers and factory mothers, who have received their education from mechanical school-teach- ers and who have received their religion from mechanical churches, do not furnish a population from which the national sup- ply of men who earn four hundred dollars a day (in creating opportunities for others) can be replenished. The men who 221 Inspired CEii earn two dollars a day and who want Millionaires /, ,i ,, . tt i I our are the ones we are the most likely A Million to succeed in getting, or who earn Dollars as an Art Form twenty and want forty, or who are millionaires and do not work, and who merely do what other millionaires would do and are mere mechanics with money. So we are brought inevitably to the special function of the creative mil- lionaire in a world of machines, namely, inventing people and discovering and res- cuing those who are already partly in- vented, and who merely need to be put in place. The inventor-class in a factory is the most difficult and important class not to throw away. Men who are creative in the arts or in literature are assertive and can be depended on not to let themselves be thrown away, but if a man has it in him to take two hundred thousand locomotives off the tracks of the world and quietly put in electric motors instead, the chances are half and half that he could be headed off as well as not by a stupid foreman, while 222 in the making, or by a year in the factory. Millionaires If anyone could go through the factories ^^^//''^''* of the world and in some secret way could compile a list of the inventors the factories have wasted — the men who might have been — a large grim Who's Who — a book of silence and darkness, it would be a thicker book than the big, red, happy, complacent one we know so well. In- ventive men are apt to be dreamers and they are given to being disinterested and to not defending themselves, and they are whimsical and reckless, and if the at- mosphere in a factory is unfavorable to thinking of things they get over it. The men who have a way of thinking of things, too, are apt to be inconvenient and queer. They come generally in odd sizes. They have edges. The whole tendency of the foremen and the managers is to file the creative men down, and practically throw them away. The study of how not to do this is what makes a great factory a work of imagination and an art- form. 223 Inspired A million dollars is an art-form in pro- Millionaires j.« i xi. i. i* i i portion to the number oi men who have A Million been created and expressed in it. A mil- DoUars as an , , Art Form Honaire can be looked upon as an artist when he has discovered a million dollars' worth of men and the things the men have thought of, and has put the men and the things upon the markets of the world. We will all want him to be a millionaire if he will do that. We will all look upon him as appointed to the position by a fair, free-for-all natural selection if he has the power of daily making the men around him more valuable than they could make themselves, or than any of the rest of us could make them. It will be conceded by all of us and by all classes of men that the business of being a millionaire, the skilled labor of a rich man like this, is an art. It will almost seem to us sometimes — in the cases of certain priceless men that have been invented — like a religion. And yet all the time that it is a religion and all the 224 time that it is an art, and full of genius Millionaires and imagination, it will be seen that the peopiJ*^^" most business-like, the most matter-of- fact, sensible, and economical occupation in which a great manufacturer can be en- gaged is the business of inventing people, of human horticulture, the cross-fertiliz- ing, in his great buildings of machines, of machines and men. It does not follow that every shop-room, as one goes through should seem to be filled with sprouting geniuses, — but one would expect in every shop-room the atmosphere, the climate of experiment, and over in one corner at least there ought to be a cucumber- frame for ideas. Every shop-room and the whole factory as one goes by and looks up at the rows of the shining windows should be looked upon as a nursery of inventions, a great hothouse of brains. If this becomes true — if it becomes true in one single case — there will be no one to say then that making a million dol- lars with machines and men is not an art- 225 Inspired form, and that a great work of the imagi- Millionaires •• i , i i . ,i nation has not been wrought upon the A Million world. A fortune carefully and nobly Dollars as an . Art Form wrought m this Way will be looked upon like a great work of art, like Wagner's Parsifal, Raphael's Madonna, Beetho- ven's Ninth Symphony, Millet's Glean- ers, Marconi's Telegraph, and Cologne Cathedral, as an act of communion, a great, mutual, self -revelation between a man and a world. Some one is going to loom up in America and do a factory yet that will rank with Shakespeare's Hamlet, Homer's Iliad, and the Sixtieth Chapter of Isaiah. Some man who is creative with money, a Leonardo da Vinci with dollars, will yet prove that a business man can be as good as an artist, that, like the artist, he can sketch in the colors of a new world around us — if he wants to, and do some great mas- terpiece of expectation upon the human heart. He will prove that the inspired and noble conceptions of a man are quite 226 as entitled to glory and to immortality in MiiUonaires the world, and are quite as artistic when peopie^^^ done in dollars as they are when they are done in tube-paints, lace-needlesj chisels, wind in a pipe, or catgut, or words out of a dictionary. The factory that this man will do will touch us like a religion or a great work of art. It will not need to have great columns in front of it to seem beautiful to us, and it will not need to have Gothic windows to seem like a church, and it will be filled all day long, as we go by, with the whirl of the wheels in it, and the whirl of the wheels shall be as the chant of a great people. I have seen their hope and their strug- gle. I have seen that the picture of this; factory when it comes — this first master- piece by a millionaire — will be put forth as the chart or as the ground-plan of the future. It shall be looked upon as the challenge of civilization. It shall be tacked by a Martin Luther on the door of the world. 227 VII How Some Money Looks THERE is reason to believe that this is coming to pass, the millionaire to whom a million dollars is an art form, because the typical American millionaire is no longer satisfied with plain, ordinary, humdrum covetousness. The more obvi- ous rich man, the kind anybody could be if he tried, feels ill at ease in America to-day. He does not need to be driven to doing bet- ter. He wants to and he is trying to see how he can. He sees that there is some- thing about plain, humdrum covetousness which, no matter how it refines and adorns itself in a man's life, keeps him uncom- fortable about himself. What is the pos- sible object of having great wealth when all that one can think of for it, is that it is a device for being dissatisfied in very large figures instead of very small ones ? There 228 is always something more some other man How Some . TT • . 1 • 1 •!_ ii Money Looks can get. How is the rich man any better than the most dependent poor man if he is dependent to the last upon a mere rudi- mentary stilted love of having things and having to handle and own them in order to love them ? He looks about the world and he sees all the other millionaires so monotonous and cheap and uninteresting — these great mobs of them, all aUke, say- ing the same great platitudes with money — of houses and lands. He is merely one more, and he finds it is not as interesting or as filling — being a millionaire — as one would have thought. This is the first reason why the typical American millionaire, the one with the mere, hum- drum covetousness, is going to be nearer to what he ought to be. He is seeing through himself. The second reason for being hopeful about him is that if the every-day, hum- drum millionaire does not do his own see- ing-through for himself, there are people 229 Inspired in this country who are going to see that Millionaires t_ j j 'j. j? u* somebody does it lor mm. Taking them as a class, it is to be ad- mitted that mere millionaires, while they may be heady and much given to their own way at times, in the long run are like other human beings and care what people think. Before they die they notice peo- ple. It is but natural and human that having slaved away and given up so many things for a million dollars, a man should want a million dollars to be becoming to him. He wants people to feel that he is better off than he was before. If there were any way in which, after he has swept in his million dollars, he could go about and pay people so much apiece for believ- ing that he liked it, he would spend it, or nearly all of it, sometimes, on people's thoughts. The moment a man discovers that his money in our modern society is displaying him to disadvantage, or is ex- posing him to social ostracism, or to the ill- will of his f ellowmen, he is bound to con- as© duct his fortune differently. This is a pro- How Some , -I , . . 1 , 1-1 Money Looks cess that is going on about us now all through the United States. It is the next cloud the size of a man's hand. The mere millionaire is thinking how he looks. He falls to comparing himself with the other millionaires. He finds that many of them have more prestige than he, that people seem to be interested in some millionaires for themselves. They seem to be the men who have not lost track of the human qual- ities in their money — its visions, its dar- ing and self-control, its chivalry, its big, earlier, joyous, wise faiths, its wagers and risks, its spirit of prophecy and adventure, and when all these things, the things that the money is really for, are gone out of it and the man is left, at last, a great, still, helpless mummy of riches, he finds that a mere millionaire is a nobody and that everybody is bored by him. Ex- cept with his check-book in his hand who cares to speak to him? And even his money is not really inter- 131 Inspired esting. Not a single faith or belief in it. Millionaires , . riM • i • • sometimes. The one smgle interesting thing he can think of about his money, when he sits down to think it over, is that there is sure to be more of it. And that does not interest a really intelligent man more than a minute. The subject is ex- hausted. He falls to thinking of ways of being agreeable and of having things to talk about with other men. He wonders vaguely about many of the men he sees about him, some of them rich and some of them poor, that people seem to regard highly, men it is some object to know and to be seen with in the world, the men who are giving great lifts on it, who are really doing things, and suddenly it is as if he fell over a great precipice in himself. He finds he is wondering where he is, and who he was and who he thought he was, when he is thrown with such men. There seems to be nothing he can do with a man who belongs in this class that will interest him. All he can do with such a man, when 232 he does not notice him enough, is to step How Some _ cc-r^'^ 1 X Money Looks up to him and say: Did you know i was worth forty million dollars? Like some? " But even after he has said that, while the man would be polite, of course, he would see he did not exactly notice him. The more prominent he grows in the world the more complicated a thing it seems, to be somebody in particular. No one takes him quite seriously, he finds, even when he gets into the United States Senate. If what a millionaire really has is nonentity, all that he can ever do with great wealth is to put his nonentity where more people will see it. Nobody pretends to deny that a millionaire, by just being a millionaire, is important in a way. People give mere millionaires as a class, or in the bulk, a cer- tain recognition, but they are not interest- ing. People try to be interested in them, but somehow money that is only interested in itself does not make an interesting man. Among the real men, who are making the real world, and that the real world knows ^33 Inspired and lovcs, the common humdrum million- Millionaires '/iJ.lil' j»T aire nnds that he is an outsider as a matter of course. If one has become a million- aire in the quick, unbelieving, or ordinary, " business is business " way, one finds one's self shut out forever from the great and from the worth while — has only the most ordinary people to associate with, or rows of college presidents ring- ing one's door bell. But that is not Soci- ety. And even the college presidents are restless. Many of them do not call on him. Some of them, the bigger ones, seem to be almost afraid sometimes he will call on them, or that he will shove off money on them, publicly, perhaps, or in some way that a dignified, scholarly institution would not like. Even more common people, he finds, not only do not pay any attention to him and do not want him for himself, but they do not want his money, without looking it over care- fully and snubbing him in public and ex- amining him — before they will let him help them convert the heathen with it. ^34 It does not follow that this picture of How Some , , , .11 '1 Money Looks how the common, covetous, humdrum mil- lionaire is made to feel is overdrawn, be- cause the world keeps on year after year still being full of humdrum millionaires who do not want to hide. It is admitted that the humdrum millionaires do not want to hide at first. They spend their first few years in learning to. Hundreds of them can be seen elbow- ing about every day and night in every center of the world. There is not a man anywhere of any real personal impor- tance or distinction in the real world to- day, but has these fresh arrivals, these im- migrants of money all about him, fawn- ing upon him, every one of them blind and clumsy with money, and out of the spirit of the times with money, and out of date with it, hoping up vaguely and dumbly out of his poor, funny, selfish, old-fashioned, little dust-heap, toward the men and toward the wealth that the world thinks worth while. 235 Inspired It is merely a matter of a few years Millionaires . ,. j ii mt expermientmg, and the mere millionaire sees these things that the people about him see. The only pleasure he has left some- times is not to let them know it, and he nat- urally makes all the arrangements he can think of for looking happy, and for not seeming to need things. But at bottom, or when nobody is looking, our millionaires grow simple. If millionaires were free, or if their spirits were free, and had a way of wandering around nights, and none of us were supposed to know, one could see scores of them — of our biggest million- aires, almost any fine moonlight night now, running like boys again, and all of them to a man, making a bee-hne for Diogenes in his Tub. Under the circumstances, and with men like these, it does not seem best to scold or to worry, or to force millionaires, or to try to get millionaires to be saints. They are hideous, many of them, and live in hideous houses, and are unpleasing and 436 uninteresting to be with, perhaps, and How Some they are down in the slums in their hearts; ^°°'^ ^°'^' but the way to do with them is not to be superior to them and keep from associat- ing with them, but to try to give them a sense of opportunity and to make them self-respecting. The way to do is to go down quietly and start settlements among them of people who are happy. There are many things to make us hope- ful about even our worst cases of mere millionaires. Being a mere millionaire is a self -limiting disease. The millionaire of the plain, piling-up sort, is making comparisons. He is beginning to take his wealth seriously. He wants it to say pleasant things about him. He is being slowly driven into taking a million dollars as an art-form because he is seeing through himself. 237 VIII How the People Show Through SOCIETY is not dependent for its hopefulness on having its million- aires see through themselves or upon their taking money as a pleasant art-form of their own accord. Every man's money reveals the man in it, and in the sense of being a self-expression has the effect of a work of art. One can look up at almost any million dollars one knows in the world to-day, as one goes by, as " A Por- trait of the Artist by Himself." What- ever it is a man has in him, if he has a mil- lion dollars, everybody finds out. It is getting to be like a challenge, a kind of threat, to all the rich men in our modern life — the frankness, the awful naivete of a great fortune. Dollars are more eloquent than words because people notice them more. Every 238 detail that is associated with a dollar in How the America is vivid and memorable. To the show Through people who get it and to the people who try to get it, and all along the line, every dollar in the modern world is read through and through and over and over again, as in the days of old a poem used to be. Dollars are short poems by every-day people. We do not miss any of the turns or shadings in a dollar. A man could talk to us, most of us, until doomsday to get acquainted, but if he puts his hand into our pockets we know what he is like. The last thing a man can do with a mil- lion dollars is to keep people from know- ing him with it. With five thousand dol- lars people will know him five thousand dollars' worth, and with a million dollars they will know him a million dollars' worth. Hetty Green and Helen Gould, Robert Ogden, Morris K. Jessup, and Russell Sage do not need to be painted by John Sargent. Every man who knows about their money and about his 439 Inspired owii moncy carries around their portraits Millionaires . , . -. , -rxn • ii ^ m his pocket. Where is the man who does not know Russell Sage, and who has not been discouraged about the world with him, and who has not carried for years a good portrait of him, a kind of miniature hanging like a little millstone about his neck? We love and hate and are seers and poets toward the men who have what we want. It is another of the clouds of the size of a man's hand, the transparency of money in the modern world. It is what makes us hopeful about our millionaires. A whole planet, now that it is all opened up and made into one big living-room, is not going to be trifled with. It is sure to do as it likes sooner or later, make the millionaire the kind of millionaire it wants, because it is always sure sooner or later to put him in an ex- posed place. The planet is all lighted by electricity now. Phonographs are hang- ing in the woods. A millionaire cannot even whisper on it — and he can only hide 240 for a minute. There is nothing Harri- How the man can do, except for a very little while, show Through to keep his money from telling the truth ahout him, from confiding to everybody what kind of a man he is. And it is be- cause his money is really telling the truth about him at last, in this great world- action that is taking place, that it is going to inspire the millionaire. At all events it comes to me of late, Hke a sudden piece of good news, that under our new and special modern conditions it is really true that a man who is clever enough to be a millionaire, does not need to be wasted if he keeps on being clever, and thinking. His money builds itself like a great show- window around him and puts him in the middle of it. The vision of the world flows past him and over him. There is getting to be nothing he can really do under the circumstances but to arrange himself to be seen through — his soul and his money together — as long as he lives and long after he is dead. Perhaps some 241 Inspired millionaires would rather die first than Millionaires be men with their money — the men the people are demanding and expecting — but I believe that the men who are watch- ing them, the men who are going to take their places, will begin differently. They will begin by being men with their money from the start, in the very making of it. They will want their money to be re- spected and loved — to be human all through. It does not seem to me that it can be dis- missed as poetry, or idealism, to believe this. It is mere force of circumstances that is going to produce reformed million- aires, a mere matter of seeing through the millionaires we already have. And the more they are seen through, the more they will improve. They will want to en- joy being seen through. The millionaire has the confirmed habit of getting what he wants. Being seen through — per- haps even being loved — is going to be what he wants next. He has had nearly 242 all the other things. In the meantime, How the whether he wants it or not, the world is show Through filled with the vision. It is peremptory. The Twentieth Century has given its order to rich men and it will be obeyed. And this would seem to be coming to pass, not by any special revelation or gospel for millionaires but by what seems to be the elemental, almost mechanical action of money upon the modern mind. There is not a man living, or who is going about his work to-day, whose mind is not being pried open by money. These great fortunes, like vast searchlights probing through the uttermost recesses of human life, are making things terrifically plain. The trusts themselves, like great gigantic stupid prophets stalking the earth, are stamping the Bible down into the souls of men. They are not meaning to do it, but they are. We men of to-day, who are living with these vast fortunes fighting out the fate of the world above our heads, are slowly coming to see that every time 243 Inspired a million dollars touches a spiritual or 1 onaires jj^j^g^j^ truth it either grinds it into the very fiber of the lives of men with its heels, or it flames up hope with some strange, beautiful light upon the windows of fac- tories and upon the hearts of cities. We are all going to believe in money soon. We are going to have men that will make us believe in it. It will be a platitude. People will believe in money as they believe in telescopes or in X Rays, because it is all light. It shows up every one. And probably the only way to make the habit of having men in this planet a safe habit is to keep them exposed. It is going to be one of the special con- tributions of the twentieth century to the great faiths of the world that it will make money a part of its creed. It will believe that capital is not a meaningless or a dead thing. It will see that capital is an art- form, a medium of human expression, as base or noble, or as destructive or cre- ative, as cowardly or believing, as the men 244 who stand behind it. It is going to be in- How the spired with wealth — and as strong men show Through are inspired with strength. It will lift it up and make it again splendid on the earth. The twentieth-century man will see that there is no such thing as unmoral money, that all capital is either good or | bad capital. If a man is a noble or true man and really has a vision, or something he wants to fill out, he will look upon all this money going eloquent and vivid and beautiful and terrible through the world, with covetousness for his vision ; and as an artist looks for words, and a composer for mighty melodies, and a painter for the colors that build the day, he will seek out the fortune that shall publish upon the mountains and upon the seas and upon the hearts of men what he has seen and loved. Even now, one may go about every- where sight-seeing in money — seeing men loomed up in it. It is so transparent everywhere, this modern money — its 245 Inspired CTOwds of souls in it showing through, its Millionaires o -x j. j. ^ • •! t laces, its streets oi men saving themselves and being freed and expressed in it, and the souls that are being damned in it. Day after day I seem to see the streets, as I go by or as I look down upon them, flowing with gold. Everywhere these same human souls struggling up through it singing — and the dead and muffled faces sweeping past. Not a minute that money bears interest, or sings its way up into a human life, or bleeds out of a man, but it is terrible or beautiful money. Any one can look up in these days — see these huge fortunes — automobiles lunging along like splendid hells, their owners in them and the souls they have caught be- side them, all being bowled to death to- gether. It does not take a man of genius to keep from envying money, now, — sealed up in its own dullness and helpless- ness. It is getting to be the common revelation of the world, that a man's money cannot be good unless he is. If in 446 getting his money a man has let it separate How the him from his own soul, the money merely show Through goes on after him, wild and blind and cruel, separating every other man from his soul, that it touches. What could be more pathetic, for instance, than Mr. as an educator — a man who is educating-and-mowing- down two hundred thousand (?) men a day, ten hours a day, for forty years of their lives; that is, who is separating the souls of his employees from .their work, bullying them into being linked with a work and a method they despise, and who is trying to atone for it all — this vast terrible schooling, ten hours a day, forty years, two hundred thousand men's lives — by piecing together professors and dol- lars, putting up a little playhouse of learning, before the world, to give a few fresh young boys and girls four years with paper books? — a man the very thought of whom has ruined more men and devastated more faiths and created 247 Inspired morc cowaids and brutes and fools in all Millionaires n r> Tn .i ,i • n walks 01 liie than any other influence in the nineteenth century, and who is trying to eke out at last a spoonful of atonement for it all, — all this vast baptism of the business world in despair and force and cursing and pessimism, by perching up before it University, like a dove cote on a volcano. It may blur people's eyes for a minute, but everyone really knows in his heart — every man in this nation — that the only real education Mr. has established, or ever can establish, is the way he has made his money. Everyone knows also that the only possible, the only real edu- cation Mr. can give to a man would have to be through the daily thing he gives the man to do, ten hours a day, through the way he lets him do it, through the spirit and expression he allows him to put into it ten hours a day. Mr. 's real school, the one with two hundred thousand men in it, and eighty million helpless spec- 248 tators in the galleries, is a school which How the is working out a daily, bitter, lying curse show Through upon the rich, and a bitter, lying curse upon the poor, which it is going to take the world generations to redeem. I cannot but believe that when the milHonaire begins to see capital as it really is, the first moment he looks upon his own money clearly, sees how exposed he is in it, the whole curious world Out There looking right down through it, into the bottom of his soul, it will make a difference. Slowly he will be filled with terror if his money is not becoming to him, and shame will be heaped upon him. If his money is in the act of being dull and brutal in the world, if it is daily being used in bribing men, in driving them to put their souls in one place and their work in another, it will begin to tell upon him. He will feel himself being startled into a vision, into making his money say pleasant things about himself. He will begin with pleasant nothings at first, perhaps. He will make his a49 Inspired money say the same things about him that Millionaires ., -, ' i i , y-i-i-n it has said about everyone. Gradually he will grow weary of this, and will begin to suspect, besides, that the things that almost anybody would say with money cannot be the most necessary things. The mere building of slum settlements, col- leges, museums, and parks, and the tossing out of other knicknacks (like libraries) at this great appalling American public of ours — and all the other immemorial con- ventionalities and court-plasters of wealth with which it tries to mitigate the evil it has produced — will not last him long. He will want to be thorough. And he will see how he looks. When a man has spent all his life and all his money in bribing and bullying labor, in heaping up machines on the souls of men, in making a monstrous vacant-minded, hollow-eyed, weary, list- less factory-city — giving an art gallery to it just before one dies seems a small affair. He will begin to see (though it may be too late) that it is only at its earn- 250 ing end that a man's money really counts, How the and the man that goes with it. If money show Through is not superficial it must be spent in the market-place, in redeeming labor, in put- ting the soul on a business basis, in some one great industry of the world. The beautiful must not be placed around the laboring man. It must be placed in his / heart and made free there, and allowed i to work out in his hands. 251 IX The Still Revolution THE pivot of a man is his faculty for ideals. If you want to turn a world, the place to get hold to turn it, is its Soul. Its soul is what it worships. There is no reason to think that the fac- ulty of worship is lost to-day or that it ever is, or ever will be. Every man de- mands something to worship, and what we are worshiping in this present mood of the world is success. If we worshiped failure and martyrdom, which was what was worshiped in the early era of Chris- tianity, I believe that martyrs would be as common and cheap in modern life as mil- lionaires. If we worshiped military glory, as in the days of the Crusades, men would crowd into wars and throw their fortunes into the glow of death or victory. All that has happened is that the world 25a has another ideal and that the other ideal The still is concrete and scattered about amongst ^^^^^"*^°° us. If we had one more great preacher as things are going, in the pulpit to-day, one that would be half -worshipful, great preachers would be seen starting up in every quarter of the land, just as a little while ago we were starting everywhere with young mobs of Mark Hannas. It is through the faiths, the great humanized embodied ideals — the things that take hold of the imaginations of men — that the great revolution in America is going to be wrought. The vision of Fifth Avenue, like a great artery of ideals, is seen coursing like fire to-day through this whole people. Any other ideal, if a man happened to see it — the great procession of it — all embodied and stretching and glittering out before him, making a kind of perspective for his life, would do as well. Success of any kind at any price is what we really worship, and as we are con- 253 Inspired vinced just HOW that money, instead of Millionaires i • .-■ i . . being a possible accompaniment or acci- dent of success, is the way to get it, we are worshiping money. We are all ideal- ists. The appeal to a world's faith or worship is the only appeal that will really work. The one practical way to bring things to pass in this world is to touch it with its heroes, to lay across it its vision. It does not follow because the idea that is put forward in these pages is beautiful — because it makes one want to worship a little — that it is not practical. The qual- ity in an idea of drawing people, i. e., of being beautiful, is the one peremptory thing in it, the one thing in it that proves that nothing can stop it, or can keep it from coming to pass. The one energy worth reckoning with — the one ineffable, unconquerable energy that rules the world — is what it worships. To gather up the vision, to flash it across a page, and then to fling that page once, just once, upon one millionaire's life, to 454 touch his dreams to the quick — there are The stm 1 t T 1 1 'i* ii Revolution days when I have been writing these pages when I have felt that this was the one supremely practical thing just now, that any man could do. I have looked across the world upon the young new milhon- aires and I have seen that the first real artist who shall appear among them, who shall say what I have tried to say, will create a new heaven and a new earth. Sometimes I have felt, as I have looked up and as I have seen the young million- aires of this modern world and the young artists in it standing together, out there across the future, that the inspired mil- lionaire would come first. He will be his own artist. He will make his money ex- press great desires, and great discoveries, and noble experiments, sublime wagers, and will touch all the young manhood of the world. A whole generation of men shall be changed with a look. ^55 X Mr, Carnegie as an Experiment Station for Millionaires THE first and most important thing one can do with an ideal for money is to see that it is properly worked through and defined. This is already being done by a world-movement, or slow process of specimen rich men, by what might be called a sliding scale of millionaires. We see slowly — most of us — and when we think we have a truth we seem to need to have men for it — ^men to try it on. No one ever thinks of Mr. Carnegie as merely Mr. Carnegie. The world has seized him, has cornered him in a huge fortune and is now engaged in carving out on him its ideal or vision for money. All of Mr. Carnegie counts, mistakes and inspira- tions alike, so many people's minds are trooping through him. What he does and 256 does not do, and what we think he might Mr. Carnegie 1 1 1 I' ^ n /? T as an Ebcperi- do, make good practice for all of us. I ^^^^ station have not forgotten some practicing I did for Millionaires with my own mind, several years ago. I particularly remember writing a sen- tence (which I am afraid I rather admired at the time) about the callow youth of wealth. It was something like this: " Our millionaires-in-the-rough, mere Carnegies floundering in money, stum- bling thoughtlessly along, dropping rows of libraries and colleges like kernels of corn in a lot, seem to be getting a rather easy, clumsy immortality out of the mere scale in which they spend their money in not thinking of anything." But one cannot keep one's mind made up very long about Mr. Carnegie. One cannot be at all sure that Mr. Carnegie is not making his money think things out, and, though thinking in such large fig- ures is necessarily a somewhat unwieldy and cumbersome way of thinking, it has to be admitted that by sheer prominence 257 Inspired and shccr representativeness, no possible Millionaires j'ti j u ui /? device the modern world could have, for thinking out money, could excel Car- negie. All the world is thinking it out with him and for him. It is as if Mr. Carnegie were doing his thinking out loud — doing it in cities and nations. It rather encourages one when one thinks of Mr. Carnegie in this way — as a whole population working at things, thinking and butting away at truth. He may be disappointing sometimes as Mr. Carnegie. But as a World Process he does very well. The same is true of many of our other millionaires, who, looked at by and for themselves, fall so terribly short of ideals. I find myself more and more taking our millionaires as a kind of vast informal conversation of a world. Mr. Carnegie is the biographical reasoning out and thinking through of a whole planet as to what on the whole, when it really comes to the point, it will do with wealth ; as to the place and rights and duties of matter, in 258 the making of men and of cities, of Mr.Camegie crowds of heroes, on the earth. *' *" 1^"' ment Station In this connection it is impossible not to for Millionaires be grateful to Mr. Carnegie among our millionaires. He is at least interesting. And he is doing more (either in black or white) to define the ideal than most of the others. One is inclined to think, too, that the heroic endeavor he is making not to die disgraced, or not to be disgraced any longer than he can help, has something American and sterling and characteristic about it. Of course, some of us cannot help feehng that while Mr. Carnegie's determination to get out of his difficulty- is original, it is original a little late. It would have been more original if he had never got into it, or had thought of it in time and had been a self -controlled mil- lionaire. It takes a little of the glory out of being an original millionaire and not dying dis- graced, when one stops to think that not dying disgraced was after all, for Mr. 259 Inspired Camegic, a kind of last resort of original- Millionaires ., J lil-Lj.1 111 ity and was merely the best he could do now, or under the circumstances. One remembers that the greater honor of money is at its earning end and there are many things in the relation of business to politics, that it looked right to do forty years ago, that the world has painfully worked through to seeing would not be right now. But it is hardly fair to judge what Andrew Carnegie did forty years ago by what he would do now. It does not follow because a man is a millionaire that he should not be allowed to see some things, afterwards, like the rest of us. In a great crisis of the world we all need to be a little more generous, perhaps, than is strictly accurate, toward the men who on the whole have been trying hard, and when I take Mr. Carnegie as a sort of ex- periment station for millionaires, when I go over the list of most of the other mil- lionaires who are in the public eye, there come moments — flitting moments at least 260 — when Mr. Carnegie looks like an arch- Mr. Camegie 1 Txii J* J? /ii * as an Experi- angel — a little dingy, of course (there is ^^^^ g J^^^ still the same Pittsburg look), but the for Millionaires Scotch shines through. And even when one thinks that a man's money must not merely go into his ideals but must come out of them, one cannot help feeling that much of Mr. Carnegie's did. It was in- evitable that, coming up in the industrial system in which life found him, he could not but have a wrong ideal or ground plan for a millionaire, but it could not have been all wrong. There is too much Carnegie left. There is no one who does not feel a certain personal, eloquent quality in Mr. Carnegie both in the making and the spending of his money — in distinction from Mr. Rockefeller, for instance. There is more ring, more workmanship to the dollar, or love of the thing itself, less politics, or manipulation. His money looks more alive all through, more based on the discovery and exploiting of human beings, and upon insight into their z6i Inspired viitucs — not all kinds of virtues, per- that come from Scotland, the land of stern glad mothers and of strong men. At all events in these present groping days, when most of us have all we can do to steer our ideals, to get even the right aim for money, we may all be grateful to Andrew Carnegie. He is not all that we want him to be, nor all he wanted to be himself, but he does to sight by. a6a XI On Being Too Big to Do Wrong ONE of the greatest difficulties with which our milHonaires who would like to be inspired have to contend, is that they have to conduct business with millionaires who do not seem to care about it. If the modern business world could be so arranged that a millionaire, if he wanted to, could go off and be inspired alone, there are not a few who would do it. But modern business is done largely with trusts, it is objected, with millionaires in the bulk, great, solid, meaningless masses of men who want to be good and will not let each other. It might seem for the moment almost as if there were something a little simple- minded and countrified about asking our millionaires, one by one, to be inspired. It is not an old-fashioned, personal busi- 263 Inspired ncss world any longer, people tell us, in Millionaires i • i . . i which one can go up to a man, a single, responsible man, buttonhole him with one's idea of what is right and expect him to step off promptly and do it. Our mil- lionaires are not free. They are all tangled in with the system and with one another and with unscrupulous competi- tors, and cannot do as they like. There are two replies to this position. In the first place, the millionaire who in- vents something that all the world wants, who saves all the men on the planet several dollars a year and who takes it for granted the men are willing to go halves with him and who, therefore, keeps the mo- nopoly of his invention, can run his factory or chain of factories as he thinks best, and can be as free as anybody, almost as free as a poor man or a man who is not in business at all, if he likes. This kind of millionaire, who gains his freedom and the freedom of others by invention or by a world-service 264 is, of course, the most natural way out for On Being a world that is trying to be hopeful about ^^^^ ^^^^^ wealth. He is the man this book is about, and that we must look to first for the gen- uine and fair sample of the inspired mil- lionaire. But in the second place, we are not lim- ited to free millionaires. While it is true that all the myriads of millionaires who are helplessly tangled up in one another in one vast ganglion of money ruling the world, cannot be expected to be as inspired as the free milhonaire, and while it is true that most of our millionaires cannot select the men they will be with, and cannot say whom they shall employ or who shall em- ploy them, and cannot say what they shall do, or even what their money shall do, and therefore cannot be held responsible, one by one, like free millionaires or like poor people, they are going to be held responsi- ble all together by the world around them, and they are going to be inspired all to- gether in a slow and embarrassed way as 265 Inspired fast as they find it pays. It is merely a Millionaires ,, r» , . n ^^ '^ m • matter oi tmie, — nnding it pays. Trusts have only just been thought of, and not unnaturally, for the first few years, being enormous and anonjmious and unformed, they have had an idea that they are too big to do right. The next idea they are going to have is that they are too big to do wrong. They will try to do wrong, but they will want to make money — great, innocent, vague, pulpy things — and they will find that they cannot do it more than a few years, without spinal col- umns and without morals and without see- ing and feeling a world. In the long run, the very bigness of the trusts instead of keeping them from being inspired is the one thing of all others that is going to hand them over helplessly into the hands of inspired men. There are not going to be very many more trusts that will be as stupid and as unsuccessful and short- lived as the Standard Oil Company, an institution founded upon a great, natural 266 resource, and which instead of being a On Being failure and running its course in a single ^^'^^ wrong generation should have been the establish- ing of a business house that should have lasted for hundreds of years and should have been one of the great dignities, one of the monuments of America in the eyes of the world. If it had had inspired men, men who saw a whole world, men who saw the times and the nations and the newspapers and the governments and the peoples, it would not have been so inef- ficient as an organization, so incapable as a mere machine, as in a comparatively few years to get into a head-on collision with a nation, put itself where it has no stand- ing or credit or liberty, and is not allowed to conduct its own business in its own way. The real reason the managers of the Standard Oil Company have been at- tacked by the people is not that they have been wicked, but that they have been in- competent and have not been big enough to conduct their business. The modern 267 Inspired busincss world is getting too big for small Millionaires •,! n -i , .1 i 'j. men with small morals to see through it or to see around it or to do permanent things in it. Nearly all of the trusts are learning that they are up against the whole world in business and that they will have to get great men, men who know a whole world and who see it and live in it — to conduct their business. The things the modern men are trying to do are too big and too perma- nent not to be moral. It is merely a mat- ter of a few more experiments and every- body will believe it. A big house has to be permanent, and if it is to be permanent it must have a great deal of capital and if it is to have a great deal of capital it must make people believe in it — and believe in it a hundred years ahead, and it is not prac- tical for such a business house not to be good. The more successful and prominent business men propose to be, the more they are driven into doing right. If they are big enough men to make their business everybody's business, everybody is going 268 to watch it. Instead of having firms, as we On Being have for some time, that are too big to to^o^^rong have to do right, we are going to have firms very soon that will be so big that the right will be the only practical course left open to them. This is what we are com- ing to. We are this very day, with our boundless railroads, our mighty canals, and our steamers like great cities swing- ing across the sea, watching the birth of a new ethics. The whole modern business world with its immense com- binations is full of hope. We are all beginning to guess it. The very news- papers are full of it. If you are very big, it is really not quite bright to be wicked. If you are little or short-lived, it might not matter or seem to matter so much — that is, less will be done to you. You will not be picked out and punished. We are going to have our big men good first, in the modern business world, and those who would like to be big. Then after that, when the big men have been made good, — 269 Inspired been fairly crowded over to it, the little ones will be attended to. This perhaps is the main experience one gets out of tak- ing up a morning paper and reading from day to day the news about the trusts — ^the sense of this sublime solar march or force of gravity in morals, swinging us on into righteousness, into a kind of inevit- able matter of fact hope. Some one will write a book very soon, and he will relate the bare facts, sum up ten years of news- columns, and tell the trusts to be good. And there will not be any cant or religi- osity or benevolence in the book. It will be pure business, business at white heat, or raised to the nth power, and all the while it will be such nice worldly read- ing and make one feel precisely as if one had been at church ! All that there would have to be in such a book would be some real religion underneath and some real facts on top (statistics almost would do it), showing what the moral experi- ments of the trusts have been and how 270 underwitted it is to take all the money On Being one can get. We have always known that ^^^o Wron it ought to be underwitted, but we have been wanting to have it proved and built into the world. We could not be optimistic about having a new ethics — or what many people seem to think is a new ethics — adopted by a whole world, if it were just a little thing of our own, an idea we had worked up by our- selves or that some good, kind gentleman somewhere had just thought of. But it is in the nature and momentum of things. In an age when one can look out, almost any day, and watch people, the more prominent, superior people, being fairly pushed or jostled over into goodness, it does not seem (as it has lately) merely weak-minded and hopeful to be good, or to keep on believing in it. There is no denying that if a manufac- turer wants to do wrong he can do it in a small way by picking carefully out of a whole world, people he can cheat here and 271 Inspired there, but if he wants to do a big business Millionaires -l* i x • i* J t» • — a big characteristic modern business, a business in which he will have to cheat everybody — he will sooner or later — it is merely a matter of experiment — be good and practical. The larger advertisers have already found — most of them — that the more they advertise the more hon- est they have to get. It is everybody's affair when one does wrong to a planet. One man or a single newspaper can stop it, or a novelist who spends six weeks in Chicago. One single thorough-minded, honest woman, with a fountain pen, can touch off the world like a bomb, and bring down the weight of a whole nation upon a man with a can of kerosene in Cleveland. " The way of the transgres- sor is hard " in a world with the printing press and with the electric light in it, and Ida Tarbell. " The way of the transgres- sor is hard " instead of being an old, worthy, and rather helpless remark tucked safely away in a bible, is being »7* writ large across the world. It is seen in On Being shop windows now as well as in Sunday to^^oo Wrong Schools, and is attracting attention. It is not strictly true, perhaps, that we are going to have a new ethics to go with the new unity of the world. But it is going to look like a new ethics and seem for a time to many people like an exact con- tradiction of what we have. When business houses were small and were all tucked away into separate nations or pigeon-holes on the planet, many wrong things were practical, or at least practical-looking, that are not practical now. Modern thought and mod- ern machinery have torn nearly all of our little pigeon-hole nations down. Every na- tion is penetrated in business with every other nation. The empires are all being j umbled together into buying their kerosene at the same place. The nations stand and gossip on the corner, and there are no con- veniences now for being mean privately. Business houses that are too big to find room on the world to do wrong in, do right. 273 Inspired This f act of being so crowded that there Millionaires . i j. i • i • in IS no place to hide, is merely of itself bringing to pass what would look like a new ethics. The ordinary old- fashioned business principle of getting all one can, did well enough, perhaps, when applied to a butcher business in a village. But let the same principle be applied to the feeding of a whole world, to the Armour Packing Co., for instance, and everybody sees that there is some- thing the matter with it. When the Armour Packing Co. remarks to a hungry planet, politely but firmly, " Business is business " (a thing they have always be- lieved before), nobody believes it. The very governments of the world (the slow- est of all) have stopped believing it. It was always a lie even in a small village butcher business, but the lie was on such a small scale that only a few people here and there noticed it. If the great mass of people are to be convinced of a spir- itual truth it takes a man like John P. »74 %^ Rockefeller to do it. This is why the On Being situation is so encouraging. Mr. Rocke- to^oo Wrong feller and Mr. Armour and Mr. Harri- man are doing us so much good. Every- body prefers the truth, and it is merely a matter of getting the truth put in enough dollars — and enough of their own dollars — for people to see it. This seems to be what the trusts are for — getting the truth big enough — taking just any ordinary truth from out of the New Testament and mak- ing it so big almost anybody could see it. One at a time, the trusts are cornering lies. They are putting the devil where he cannot help himself. In religion, of course, and, perhaps, in education and in the arts, there will be some important things left to the devil ; but in business, in the grosser forms of business, at least, where people care so much and think so hard and have Mr. Rockefeller and Pres- ident Baer to help, they are going to see through him. He will have to move on. 275 XII The Neoot Corner of the World FIFTEEN years ago one could hardly have found a government in the civilized world, which when it had something to say to another government, did not suppose it would not have to tell the truth very economically. Individual men when they were dealing with one another told the truth, fifteen years ago, but nations were too big. About this time John Hay, a poet and a gentleman from Cleveland, Ohio — a sort of spirit- ual step-son of Abraham Lincoln — was made Secretary of State by William McKinley, and it came over Mr. Hay, after not very many weeks, that being Secretary of State would be really a much pleasanter position if one did not have to be so economical with the truth in it. It took away the breath of Europe almost at 276 first to have a novice from America, a The Next comparatively new diplomat come trip- onheVorid ping into the grave two thousa^d years of diplomacy, and in that quiet, natural western way begin telling the truth right and left among the great governments of the world. But they noticed that Mr. Hay did things and they became thought- ful. There is a rumor going the rounds now that since John Hay has shown how easy it was to be a Secretary of State and say what one really thought, the whole face of diplomacy — the atmosphere of foreign legations the world around has been changed. Lying, except among the smaller and weaker nations, in dealing with the other smaller and weaker nations is not considered practical nor quite busi- nesslike and up-to-date. Eight years ago the regular politicians of this country rose up en masse almost to a man, and told us that Theodore Roose- velt would never do as the leader of the 277 Inspired Republican party, and that he was not Millionaires x*ij.ij-i j. tt t j* practical, that he was too candid and free with people, that he was not politic enough to be a President of the United States. To-day these same men are finding fault with Mr. Roosevelt because they were mistaken about him and because, by being open with the people and by not being politic- looking, he can do with the people almost anything he likes, and is the biggest politician of us all. The people seem to have been convinced, even the politicians have been — that a President of the United States does not need to be somebody else to succeed, and can quite resemble himself, if he likes. And now that it has been proved, that a public man's being himself in America is good poli- tics, thousands of little Roosevelts are springing up all over the country, men who are like Roosevelt and have always had it in them, but had never let anybody know it. The very ward politicians, 278 many of them, are being built to-day on The Next Roosevelt lines. of the World Entirely aside from approval or dis- approval of his policies no one would probably deny that whether it be for bet- ter or worse or richer or poorer, such an arrangement or invention as Theodore Roosevelt as a President of the United States would not have been thought pos- sible ten years ago. Two years ago, people were saying of Charles E. Hughes that he never would really do for a governor. He was all very well, but he could not get things done, and he could not dicker with the regular poli- ticians enough to put things through. And it looked as if they were right, and as if the governor were what they sup- posed at first. For weeks, day after day, in the capitol at Albany the supposed exec- utive was seen sitting in the supposed ex- ecutive chair (the supposed icicles dripping from it) in a supposed attitude of mixed moral grandeur and helplessness, and 279 Inspired gibcs and threats were thrown at him by 1 lonaires ^^^ ^. j^ ^^^ ^j^^ worldly legislators return- ing to their homes. And what did the whipped-looking gov- ernor, with all his threats and dares heaped up upon him and upon his icicles, do? He did one of the most memorable and enlightened silences that has ever been done by any man in the United States. And suddenly it was as if in that silence one could hear a whole State being taken up bodily and moved over — moved over calmly and quietly — by one man simply by that one man's being right. It was one of the biggest, stillest, most imcon- scious acts of pure energy that this coun- try has ever seen. It came like a revelation — almost like an apocalypse — in our national politics, of how a single and simple natural man merely by being right, and being right in a plain, two-plus- two-equals-four way, could make six mil- lion people, a whole stateful of people, all sitting quietly in their homes, step out and do things. The politicians were all kindly The Next but firmly sent back to the Legislature, of the World the humble servants of a governor of the people who without lifting his hand or without saying a word apparently could make politicians do right. It was like one of the great, quiet acts of nature. Who would have thought three years ago it would be practical in American politics just to be still and be right? But now that righteousness and silence judiciously mixed have been tried in a great State like New York, and where everyone could see, the whole face of national politics has changed. People have learned that a silence by Charles E. Hughes in this country is so practical that it is going to be hard to keep him many years, from being a President of the United States. All that was necessary was to give a sample silence to the country at large and prove that the thing could be done and now in two or three years, thousands of these little Hughes's silences will be seen 281 Inspired Springing up all over this country, onaires ^^^ thousauds of the httle Hughes's silences and thousands of the little talking Roosevelts will be seen going on side by side from Maine to California. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hughes, both vital and unlike, have released and set in ac- tion all the men who are like them in the United States. The people have always wanted men like these — now and then one like Lincoln has broken through in public life, men of courage and indi- viduality, and who incorrigibly resemble themselves, but the experiment had not been tried where everybody could see it for some time, and men like these had been keeping out of politics for years. It was supposed if you wanted to make the most of yourself in pohtics in this country, the people would want you to look as much like somebody else as you could. And now the entire political atmosphere of the country has been cleared and politics is full of zest and ozone again and looks like a place for doing things. 282 People are right only in a minor sense The Next when they say, as they almost always do, of the World that in this old world we may expect new things now and then, if we must, but we must not expect new human nature, and that Man only never changes. There is not a man on the whole planet, nor has there been one for hundreds of \ years, who has not been a different man all over in his ideas and personality and in the motives of his Hf e because of Co- pernicus, or who does not see himself and the little, comical, out-of-the-way planet he is on, in an opposite hght. Let men be confronted with one great new fact, some sudden turn of science, some great new corner of the world, like Copernicus, and we can almost stand by and see human nature changing before our eyes. Pre- cisely the same people may suddenly be seen ahnost any time doing precisely op- posite things. They come to the next corner of the world and stand a minute and look. That is all that happens. a83 Inspired Probably there is a man this very minute, Millionaires -, ••! ii/«ii. 'x somewhere m the world (m the tropics), who is thinking that he knows all about water, that water is wet, and that it is warm, and that it flows, and if he were told that all the while, at the very time that he was thinking about it, dried, cold rain in chunks was being carried from house to house and peddled about in wagons, he would not believe it. And yet it is all done easily enough. Precisely opposite things are true in the same half inch on a thermometer. What people will do at / one temperature of public opinion does [ not show what they will do at another. Over and over again in history something will seem almost impossible or like a revo- lution in morals and there will come a rise of temperature in public opinion, and all ! is changed with a look. Our very air- castles turn suddenly solid and things in the sky men have looked on for years, they walk up and down on calmly. They go about cutting water with axes or run- 284 ning railroad trains with a shut-up cloud The Next as if nothing had happened. These of the World things are nothing to us and human na- ture boils, freezes, and evaporates with i new facts and the moral nature of man is \ a live thing and it becomes solid, liquid, or ' iron, or like water or cloud, according to the last new facts and according to what we saw when we turned the last corner of the world. ^ This is the way evolution affected us, many of us, within our memories. It turned our whole world over in a minute. Some of us who had been wondering about the world, and wondering vaguely and unconsciously all the time why it had not been turned over before, were glad, and those who were not good evolution- swimmers, were sorry, but the fact re- mains, whether people liked it or not, that the world had been turned over by Dar- win and an earth-worm and was warming a whole new side of itself, and that nothing in a man's brain will ever be done, 285 Inspired ov evcr be thought, since evohition has Millionaires , ^. , . *, ,^ been discovered, m quite the same way. New styles and new geologies are sweep- ing past his consciousness — past all his little, old, funny, pompous, hemmed-in thoughts, and the very structure of his brain is changed. Infinity flowing out of the infinite and on to the infinite across the little cells in his skull is making him a new creature. Evolution, which is the last great corner of the world, has created in most of us whole new sets of motives and emotions and has cut away our old ones. It has brought us face to face suddenly with this great new stretch of the souls of men. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez. wlien with ea^jle eyes He stared at the Pacitic — and all his men Looked at each otlier with a M'ild sm*mise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien. ' ' In the same way a new ethics in busi- ness, or what will look like it, is bein^ brought to pass by the changes in our 2S6 physical ideas of the earth and of the The Next furnishings and conveniences of the little ,J[^e World strip of atmosphere around it. The mod- em ideas about dust and germs are revo- lutionizing men's conduct toward one an- other. The germs are at work day and night, millions of them to a cubic inch, socializing us. They are making men respect each other and notice each other. They are making men care about one another's very breathing in the streets. Who would have thought fifteen years ago that one would come on a sign Hke this in a car in New York? SPITTING ON THE FLOOR OF THIS CAR IS A MISDEMEANOR FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS FINE OR IMPRISONMENT FOR ONE YEAR OR BOTH MAY BE THE PUNISHMENT THEREFOR No one would have believed, who had declared when Dickens was in America in '42, that the time would come in this coun- try before many years, when a man could 287 Inspired be charged, or informed seriously that he 1 lonaires j^jgjj^ j^^ charged, five hundred dollars for spitting in the streets. And yet this is merely one instance of the way that all scientific discoveries to-day are bring- ing men closer together and putting their conduct on a closer and more mutual and ethical basis. In a world where science has made even another man's breathing a personal matter, the way another man does his business becomes a personal mat- ter. Religion and poetry for thousands of years have tried to make men intimate enough to understand, and now science is making men intimate enough to be good. A telephone on a man's desk puts a whole continent in the next room, and he begins to act as if it were there. The very structure of his brain is changed by it. His sins and his virtues come back in a minute and in whatever he does, he is immeasurably aware of others. Rail- roads, telephones, wireless telegraphs, and great cities are making new human zS8 beings, and new incredibly socialized men The Next out of all of us, and the lonely each-on- of theVorW your-own-hill morals of the Old Testa- ment, when we have had a hundred years of telephones, will look palezoic. Christ and St. Paul converted a few thousand individuals in each generation out of mil- lions of so-called Christians. Railroads, gas-bills, and coal trusts, and telephones are going to convert us all. No one would have imagined sixty years ago, when people were giving up stage coaches for railroads, how religious railroads were. People are being crowded in such close quarters that they have to be converted to stand it. The rich and the poor, and the good and the bad, and the weak and the strong, can no longer be kept carefully sorted out by themselves, and when men do right or wrong to-day it is no longer their own affair. The germ theory or policy has precipitated upon men an entirely new conduct of hu- man affairs. Kodaks, moving pictures, 289 Inspired Public Utilities Commissions follow our Millionaires ii i.j. j ^ i. ±i no jy i leaders about and shut them oii from hav- ing separate interests. Mosquitoes and reporters vie with each other in inoculat- ing everybody with everybody else. \ Every man's business is every other man's business. Germs, tuberculosis, the gypsy moth, canned meats, railroads, and tele- phones and all the other terrifically inti- mate things work day and night jostling the world together to be good. There is no known way in the modern world for men to be strictly selfish or strictly in a class by themselves. A sick rat in San Francisco startles the whole United States and New York builds the sewers of Havana. We care if they have the bu- bonic plague in India and if they adulter- ate drugs in China, and when the Penn- sylvania Railroad wants to reduce the wages of its employees it begins by cut- ting the salaries of the president and the directors and of the men at the top. The old, neat, safe, pleasant, and comfortable 290 moral compartments the world was di- The Next vided into, twenty years ago, have been of^theVorid broken down. Bacteria, influenza, mail- orders, country trolleys, and rural deliv- eries, and newspapers, and socialist-mil- lionaires championing the cause of the poor, street railway magnates and Tom L. Johnsons fighting for the rights of the people, have jumbled the world together and Fifth Avenue and the Bow- ery may be seen at last trooping daily through each other, and the rail- way presidents and brakemen are arm in arm. The old conventional business ethics of getting all that one can out of everybody looks old-fashioned in a minute, in a world hke this, a world so terribly and closely arranged, where the chickens come home to roost, where germs and rebates and tuberculosis and life in- surance and even the very railroads come home to roost. The new business ethics of not getting all that one can, whether or no, and of conducting a bargain so that 29 1 Inspired all conccmed will be glad and will want to Millionaires -lit ••j.ii \ u come back, becomes mevitable. A world where if one wants to get rich, one must do it by dealing with the same people over and over again, invents a new busi- ness man. The new business man sees that in the twentieth century jumping on another man's toe in business, is merely a more round-about way of jumping on one's own. The best millionaire has al- ready reckoned with this. He does not like to have to stand by and see a fellow millionaire getting rich by ruining the business in which they are both engaged. There were hundreds of millionaires a few years ago during the great coal strike who saw how President Baer looked and who wished they could control him a little, and could make him look more in- telligent, and more aware of things. They could not quite bear to see him all that long winter, morning after morning as the papers appeared, going out calmly day after day in the sight of all of us 292 dumpinff his garbage into his own The Next ^ , . Corner spring. Rebates and suppressed inven- of the World tions, hold-up trusts, monopolies based on position rather than invention, or upon number rather than merit and service, fail to work in a world as intimate and as highly organized as this and as nervously endowed with telegraph all through, where everything that happens to one part of the body of society is flashed through to the other parts, and where a rich man's panic or a mere poor man's hardship is an impossibility. A few winters ago, at the time of the great public hold-up in coal, when the whole United States ahnost had to go to bed to keep warm, and was lying there wondering what kind of a man President Baer was, and what he could be thinking of or had been thinking of all these years, the United States thought the whole mat- ter out and invented its first rough sketch or outHne of the new millionaire. Scores of semi-inspired millionaires were begun 293 Inspired that winter and one or two, it has always Millionaires t , j? n • seemed to me, young, anonymous, fully m- spired millionaires must have been begun, too. And yet President Baer had been doing nothing new, that winter. He had been merely proceeding upon the old common business ethics of always getting all one can. It was not that he was merely differ- ent from what he ought to be, but that he brought the difference out for us when we were chilled-through and thoughtful. He was merely another corner of the world and when the world got to him it was not pleased with the way he made human nature in business look. It was not merely that President Baer was hard and blind as he stood there all that winter and seemed to us, as a typical business man, a little underwitted. He made us begin to suspect our whole business ethics. Per- haps he had not been after all more under- witted in proportion than the rest of us. He had merely put more capital into it. 294 We began quite generally to conceive The Next slowly, as we thought about these things of the World out in the cold, a new and different type of business man, the type of business man that would not have to be apologized for by always saying what a fine personality he was in private life. The coal strike caught us hoping and wondering, and making up our minds about business. We made up our minds that business should not be any longer a specially marked-off barbarian country, a fighting-place or cock-pit where a man can go out and crowd and bully and strike below the belt and steal for his family, and then come back into the house and put on his coat and coo to the baby and be a beautiful character until ten the next morning. Since the coal strike, we have been con- fronted with new facts. We have turned the next corner of the world. Nothing is more wildly romantic or sentimental than despair or than being ^95 Inspired discouragcd about the world and judging Millionaires i ■ • • , i i -, i . . what IS going to be merely by what is. In a world where new inventions are giv- ing new powers, new areas of insight and fields of action at every turn it is not prac- tical not to calculate on new and opposite things in men, and it is not hard-headed not to have visions of what men will be like. We are already beginning to see that there are going to be such things as sky-scraper rights to consider soon and automobile laws of the road, that there is going to be such a thing as balloon terri- tory, with ethical, legal problems. How many miles high can a man own air above his own real estate? All the new inven- tions are introducing about us new ethical considerations and all the new scientific relations of the world are being followed by new moral relations. The impossibili- ties become the platitudes when men have turned another corner of the world. Peo- ple would have said once that bicycles were impossible. People would have 296 said two years ago that a rail- The Next way train balanced high up on a single of the World rail and running like a bicycle on a tight- rope, at no one knows how many miles an hour, would be absurd, and the same people are saying that an inspired mil- lionaire, a millionaire who happened to enjoy making and spending his money in a little more mutual, permanent way than others would be out of the question. And yet when the idea of an inspired millionaire has been invented and per- fected and one has been finished off — or one or two — they will be introduced and installed like electric lights, tele- phones, and trollies and central power houses in every city in the United States. The fact seems to be coming out all about us that the world is not inventing merely new kinds of machines, but, with Coperni- cus, Jesus, Darwin, Bell, Lord Kelvin, Rousseau, Columbus, Wordsworth, Lin- coln, Whitman, Emerson, Edison, and Marconi, it is slowly inventing new kinds 297 Inspired and new sizes of men. Out of all these Millionaires i • -i i • o ii •ii i kinds and sizes oi men there will be one inspired millionaire. I was talking on this general subject with Brim the other day and he remarked that I must try not to be too hopeful. Brim is wise in the wisdom of this world. " Why? " I said. I then gathered from the general tenor of Brim's remarks that in his opinion when a man sees poetry in machinery and wants other people to, he ought to hold in a little and not be too hopeful about it. He intimated that it would not do, while peo- ple were going by, to stand mooning around a factory looking up at it as if it were a sunset or an aurora borealis. It did not do any good, he intimated; and in the same way, when a man sees poetry in business or almost a new religion in being rich, it would be much better to feel one's way on it carefully and not expect people to hope much. 298 I could see that Brim was veering The Next slowly around to what I had just been of the World telling him was in this book, and he ad- mitted, finally, that for all practical pur- poses — at least according to my own ac- count of it — I had written a very dis- couraging book. It would not do, he said. It antagonized people to have any- one expect so much. The very title I had taken, he thought, would drive people away. I confess that he made me feel lonely and morbid for a little, while he went on. There was no getting at me after all, apparently, I thought, I was in a bottomless pit of hope. I asked him how he thought it would do to hope just as much, but, perhaps put the hope off for two or three hundred years. He thought it would help. I asked him how it would strike him if I took the hope, the same hope that is in the book, not changing it in the least, and keeping all its elements in it, and nar- rowed it down to one millionaire. Inspired He thought it would help, and that a Millionaires r i 'ii i . • • i 'it • • book With but one inspired millionaire in it might do, perhaps. A Httle memory of this conversation (I felt during it a little the way Abraham did, probably, when he was trying to nar- row down God as to how few people he would save Sodom for) has just come over me while I am in this last chapter and am taking my last chance at the reader, and perhaps it can do no harm, in bringing to a close what I have had to say about inspired millionaires, to call attention to the fact that I have not given dates in this book or lists of names. One inspired millionaire is all that this book is about — my responsibility stops with him. I have not found it hard to confine myself to believing in one inspired millionaire, because it has seemed to me that one inspired millionaire would be enough. One telephone was enough. 300 Epilogue WE HAVE come to the parting of the ways. We are about to choose between the socialized millionaire and socialism. We must either believe that human na- ture is a success or is yet a possible success, that it is possible to evolve out of what we have a man who is great enough to be rich — a socialized millionaire — or we must believe that human nature is a failure and that it is going to be, and that the best that can be done with it now, is to fall back on socialism. The human race is gathering itself to- gether for a last great struggle around the world, to respect itself. The better and more obvious aims and criticisms of the socialists belong to all of us, and our quarrel with socialism is with socialism as a means. We do not believe 301 Inspired in Curing the evils of society by emascula- Millionaires , • tj. i j j. xi j. • t tion. It has seemed to us that sociahsm is born of despair and infidelity, and of the mere natural first failures of human na- ture in dealing with the great new ex- periments like trusts and railroads and with the new sudden unity of the world. It has seemed to us that socialism has been based upon an ignoble and temporary and one-sided interpretation of human nature, and that America has come to the point where we must choose which interpreta- tion we shall now believe. Shall we beheve in natural selection, in freedom, and man- hood, in the volimtary service, and the nobiUty of men; or shall we believe that men have failed, that it must be accepted as a truth that men are vulgar and mean in their motives, and that their righteous- ness must be the righteousness of slaves, that they must be emasculated, their power to do wrong taken away from them, and must be managed like automatons by society or by a machine from the outside? 302 It has seemed to us that what the Epilogue American people is really believing to-day is not socialism, a tired, discouraged im- portation from an older world, but that it is ready to believe that men may be de- liberately true and enviable and generous, and that society may be based from the bottom to the top on the capability of men for noble, voluntary, individual social de- velopment. We have believed in America that a noble individualism can produce a noble society. This is our American vis- ion. And in spite of all the noble-hearted men among the ranks of the socialists it has seemed to us that socialism is a momentary failure of the modern imagi- nation, the imagination to see the real facts about us as they are, and in their larger and more noble and permanent rela- tions. This supreme act of imagination upon our modern world is what America is for. What has made this country seem great in the eyes of the world before has always been its imagination, its habit of bold con- 303 Inspired ceptioii, of boundless initiative, and its Millionaires .. /?.• j j> n . in Visions of action and of future men and of future events. What has made this country seem small, and, for so great a country, a little mean and common in spirit at times, has been its occasional seizure with a lack of imagi- nation. Where there is no vision the peo- ple perish. In the years before the Civil War when we failed or nearly failed, and when the nations of the older world were taunting us, we nearly failed because we broke with our national genius or our imagina- tion, our power of shaping and welding unsettled things and decided like the older peoples, that perhaps, after all, we would better fall back into settled ones. We failed or nearly failed because we stopped working on the world with our imagina- tions and abandoned our national instinct, our national temperament, our native air of the possible or of the future, and sud- denly, in the sight of all the older peoples 304 of the earth, did not dare to believe more Epilogue than they could. It had been our believing more than they could that had made us what we were. And when both in the North and the South our leading men, both in pubHc and private, stopped believing and tried patching and compromising instead, and when most of us in the North and the South were hving our lives and arranging our convictions from hand to mouth as best we could, now up and down and now down and up, from day to day in a kind of see-saw of expedi- ency, we were taunted by half the earth. It was not American to be morally diplo- matic. We did not know how to do it. They do these things better in Paris, or among the older, more wearily experienced peo- ples. With their moral old age and moral anodynes they can make at least an ele- gant, becoming, or almost graceful-look- ing thing out of half -belief or half -action and compromise. 305 Inspired But wc are young — a kind of splendid child nation — and our strength, like the strength of the child, and like the strength of the West, lies in our seeing the truth and doing it together. It is particularly true of us, " Where there is no vision the people perish." It has been because we imagined more and believed harder about ourselves than the older nations that we have led the nations of the earth, and that in these things they have wanted us to. They have silently given the future into our hands and have called it our territory. They have seen that out of all of them it belongs to us to be the ones that should lead in the things of the future, because we seemed to believe easily and naturally where they have to try, and because we track out the future with nonchalance. In the things that are settled the older nations lead us; but in those greater things, the things that are still unsettled, the ennobling and ful- filling of the daily labor of the common 306 men of the earth, we are touched with a Epilogue strength that is not our own. The strength of the desires and the postponed hopes of the old and of the tired nations is upon us. We are strong because we are the spokesmen of the prayers of a world. America is not a theory — a map or chart of what men might be. America is a vis- ion that a great people have wrought — out of wars and revolutions they have wrought it — a vision of free voluntary men, rich and poor, in a new, fresh land, fulfilling themselves and fulfilling one another together. The real vision or ideal of the typical American is the aristocrat. He has come to America because he has a new and noble idea of what an aristocrat is. The aristo- crat in America is the man who is more of a democrat than other people have the brains to be, the man who can identify himself with the interests and with the points of view of the most kinds of people. The man who is the working vision of 307 Inspired ouF people, who is Hiost regarded, who is Millionaires -, , i • i • a • i i almost worshiped m America, wherever he emerges, is the man who is most individual and mutual, who stands the most for him- self, and the most for all the people. If what I have tried to put in this book is a mere theory or map or chart, it will not live and reproduce itself, but if it is a vision, if it is the live actual thing itself — merely the more spiritual, more intangible body with which it comes at first, I have seen that it shall live and multiply, that a great people shall rise in it and daily dwell in it, that they shall embody it in them- selves and imbed it in the world, that they shall materialize it before our eyes. Then it shall be seen by all of us. Then slowly day by day, and man by man — the cities and the fields and the factories lifting to- gether, it shall come to pass. 308 BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE SHADOW CHRIST. A Study of the Hebrew Men of Genius. THE LOST ART OF READING. A Sketch of Civilization. THE CHILD AND THE BOOK. A Constructive Criticism of Education. ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH. A Picture of the Good Old Days. MOUNT TOM. An All Outdoors Magazine. Devoted to Rest and Worship and to A Little Look-off On The World. ROUND WORLD SERIES: I THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES. An Introduc- tion to the 20th Century. II INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES. An Introduction to the 20th Century. Ill CROWDS. (In Preparation.) An Introduction to the 20th Century. (For publishers and particulars with regard to the above, see following pages.) THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES An Introduction to the 20th Century $1 . 35 . Mount Tom Press It is a big book. Mr. Lee is a writer of great power of expression and of singular insight. His humor is gigantic, and he has flashes of eloquence that not a dozen living men can rival. — The New York Evening Mail. Here is a book to try our minds — to see whether they be quick or dead. . . . Lee has the happiness, and the unhappiness, of being a man who thinks with his senses, and feels with intelli- gence — in an age that has, in the main, determined to keep its head-business separate from all affairs of the heart. But Lee's way of working his head and heart in one circulatory system is the way of nature and sound physiology; it follows that he is longer for this world than most of his contemporaries. The salt THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES of the earth will find here a book that is great — simply great — by all the ultimate tests of greatness. That is to say, it has all the qualities of a human character that is exceptionally and astonishingly sane. — Kansas City Star. Mr. Lee's writing is certainly like a breath of fresh air, though sometimes coming, let us say, straight from the North Pole. It may bite us or sting us or slap us in the face, but it is wonder- fully bracing. It pricks our conventional bubbles of thought, quickens our blood, and makes us think. It is not too much to say after reading a description of the passing of a railroad train, that quite takes one's breath away, that the locomotive is "a kind of Zeit-Geist, or passing of the spirit of the age." — The Christian Register. *' Poetry," declared Wordsworth in one of the most frequently quoted prose sentences he ever wrote, *'is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge ; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." . . . Some minstrel may even find in the colossal factories of this great town, in their giant enginery, their vast host of men and women doing useful toil, their wonderful conversion of the common soils and ores of earth into things of beauty — may perceive in all this the quality of majesty. Then he will realize with Lowell that "beauty underlies each form of use. . . . " Seldom, if ever, has this conception been developed so fully and with such power to inspire as in "The Voice of the Machines." — Newark Evening News. It is one of the striking books of the year, and in a very differ- ent way quite equal to Mr. Lee's preceding work, "The Lost Art of Reading," which has been more highly praised than almost any recent American volume of essays. — The Springfield Republican. Not even Emerson, in his conjuring up of the poet who is to be, let his mind fare so far into space as thus does Gerald Stanley Lee in his very remarkable book "The Voice of the Machines." — The New York Evening Mail. A book of pretty fancies. . . . — St. Louis Globe Democrat. . . . At times it would seem as if his thoughts bordered on the whimsical, but it will be found upon consideration that this lies rather in its unusualness of view than in any special quality of style. — Brooklyn Eagle. THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES . . . It is difficult to leave off quoting from this book. It is so almost beyond comparison beautiful, in this generation. . . . New as the name of Gerald Stanley Lee is to the pubhc, one dare write of him as a poet like few, for the beauty and power that are greatest, that come from the deeps of intellectual sincerity and human sympathy. . . . How should one de- scribe Mr. Lee's style — its peculiar dignity and strange beauty, its strength and originahty ? It is a style hke no other, the style of the intellectual ascetic, so clear of all ornament that it might convey an impression of angularity, were not its exquisite work- manship, the polished reserve, the clean, straight, fine hues of the artist who is master of his tools, evident in every sentence. There is something in the style that reminds one of Carlyle, Ruskin, Maeterlinck— these are almost the only names that rise for com- parison in the memory ; and yet it is not in the least hke any of them, except in its force and originality. — -L05 Angeles Times. Pungency is carried too far in Gerald Stanley Lee's '* Voice of the Machines." There are so many puzzles in the world that we have to guess, or suffer for it, that it is a pity to offer us puzzles that we don't have to guess, and perhaps have no time to ex- amine. What are Mr. Lee's "Machines?" What is their •* Voice," — and how do they happen to have a voice instead of a noise ? Shall we know any better, or live any better, or look any better, after we have read his $1.25 book through ? Such is the shorter catechism which the possible reader may be saying to himself, while he looks so poUte or so vacant. Pepper and even horse-radish are good condiments, but who would order three meals a day of horse-radish, or pungent parables ? Affidavits are not the most romantic and thrilling reading; but for myself I should choose a volume of 100 affidavits rather than 100 hypo- thetical questions. I wish Mr. Lee would construct a few affi- davits,— about his machines.— Frank Sanborn, in Boston Liter- ary Letter to The Springfield Republican. Gerald Stanley Lee is one of those who, hke McAndrew, believe that all but "damned ijjits " see poetry in machinery, and his "Voice of the Machines" is a long, spasmodic argument, which practically means that there is more poetry in a locomotive than in Shakespeare. Most of this kind of talk is, of course, mere nonsense, resulting from a failure to observe distinctions. . • • These are paragraphs which show at once his intellectual confu- THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES si on and his best quality of picturesqueness. . . . The Evening Post. Gerald Stanley Lee is a name that has been known for long and greatly respected, in Europe and America, by all those who are on the outlook for news in the world of letters. But he belongs by natural affinity not to the professional bookmen, but to the shop, the fireside, and the open road. Hasten the day when he shall come unto his own ! — Kansas City Star. Mr. Lee has insight and a fresh way of seeing things, and he is alive with the inspiration of the world about him. In this latest book he is making it his business to reveal to us the meaning and beauty of that world, and no one can read the book through with- out having his vision cleared and his heart warmed. It is tonic in every sentence, and it is not the less so for the presence of that vital humor that bubbles up in the work of an untrammeled genius who has a clear eye for things as they are. — Mail and Times. . . . Gerald Stanley Lee, of the Mount Tom Magazine, is a man gifted with a vision. ... — The Independent. But whether we agree with Mr. Lee or not, we want right here to acclaim him the most stimulating thinker we have come across in many a day — and that's a deal better than agreeing with everybody. — Springfield Union. Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee has written a book with a great purpose, to wit, to prove that — since everything in our modern age is bound up with machinery — there is poetry and religion in machinery, a beautiful and glorious interpretation of it for our modern life. ... I do not think Mr. Lee is right, though I wish he were. But at least he is as eloquent about machinery as the author of Job about Leviathan, and it is impossible not to ap- prove his eloquence, whatever reservations one may have about his philosophy. — Putnam* s Monthly. " Can a machine age have a soul ?" This is the question which Gerald Stanley Lee asks in his latest book, and answers, with all the insight plus humor which people have come to expect of him. The man with such a passion for both machines and poetry is the man to make others understand how the two are inseparable. . . . His is the spirit of youth and joy, the spirit which exhales faith and courage — and which wins. To read him is like reading "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world" amplified into vivid prose. — Book News. BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE SHADOW CHRIST The Century Co. ($1.25) "The author's name — Gerald Stanley Lee — has been hitherto unknown to us in England, but the work he has here offered to the world indicates that he has that in him which will soon make it familiar. The style is the author's own, shot through at times with flashes of intenseat lightning, reminding us anon of Coleridge, and again of Shelley." — The Christian World {London). "A book by itself. It would be very difficult to search out its fore- castings in literary or theologic writing. It is a free writing, quite outside of any precedents, and to be judged on its own merits intellectually and emotionally. As a literary work, this book places Mr. Lee in a very high rank as a writer of imaginative prose. — Irresistible current of thought. — It is more than attractive. It is an absorbing book." — The Springfield Republican. "We venture to say that no more powerful, profound, and effective tribute to the Jewish faith and intellect has ever come from a Christian source than the chapter on "The Hagar Nation." The author is incisive and suggestive in an extraordinary degree. He is fresh, audacious, even humorous, yet reverent in the highest sense. Few living writers could match for eloquence and force the pages in which he is at his best." — The Critic. "Let me be one of the first to recognize in this book what every man who reads it thoughtfully will feel, a spirit of life stirring among the dry bones of biblical criticism. Heaps of the books that have been written about the Bible are desiccated to the last grain of their dust. They are the desert which lies around Palestine. Now and then a man appears who makes his way straight into the Promised Land, by sea if necessary, and takes you with him." — Dr. Henry van Dyke, in The Book Buyer. " One might pick it up and put it down a dozen times without making anything of it, but let a page be fairly mastered, and all indifference must give way to delighted interest and ever-deepening fascination." — Inde- pendent {London). "No theologian or biblical scholar will entirely agree with Mr. Stanley Lee. But he compels thought. We have not met with anyone quite like him in the arrestive quality of his work. One of the most extraordinary books of the day." — The Recorder {London). ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH A Sketch of Colonial Days Mount Tom Press. (|1.00) "I have read it twice and enjoyed it the second time even more than the first." — Oliver Wendell Holmes. " Capital. A picture as faithful as it is lively." — Charles Dudley Warner. " I read the preface and that one little bite out of the crust made me as hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evemng fml of laughter, touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us I do not know how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to endorse as I would a note — right across the face and present it for payment m any man a library. — Robert F. Burdette. BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE CHILD AND THE BOOK G. P. Putnam's Sons. ($1.25) "I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthu- siasm I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were laid aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form, and all suf- fused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tingUngly alive "I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. It is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes me believe that after all we haven't a great kindergarten about us in author- ship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can conceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long been scanning the horizon." — Wm. Sloane Kennedy, in Boston Transcript. THE LOST ART OF READING G. P. Putnam's Sons. ($1.25) "It is a real pleasure to chronicle an intellectual treat among the books of the day. Some of us will shrug at this volume. Others of us, having read it, will keep it near us." — Life. "Mr. Lee is a writer of great courage, who ventures to say what some people are a little alarmed even to think." — Springfield Republican. " You get right in between the covers and live." — Denver Post. "Wherein lies the power and charm of these books? It is in the fact that they are abiding books, for the reader will turn to them again and again. "The thoughts in them will widen 'with the process of the suns' and become universal. The author should be mentioned with Carlyle, Emerson, Sir Thomas Browne, and Marcus Aurelius, who have known and helped hand down through the ages that real literature which stands because it is the ' inward voice of the times ' speaking to all people for all time. " From their first publication these books have been recognized as classics on reading; they are to be unreservedly commended to teachers and to pare nts as well." — Atlantic Ediication Journal. MR. GERALD STANLEY LEE Introduces (To The Rockies, and The Andes, and The Mississippi Valley, and to all Hills, Valleys, and Cities) MOUNT TOM AN ALL OUTDOORS MAGAZINE Devoted to Rest and Worship and to a Little Looh-off on the World Edited by Mr. Lee. Every other Month. Twelve Ninnbers, $1.00. Mount Tom Press, Northampton, Massachusetts. The Magazine is in the form of personal impressions — mostly those of the editor, and is entirely written and dated from the Mountain. It is supposed to cultivate those various friendly but distant feelings toward the world, and toward chimneys, and institutions, that a moimtain gives one when it has the chance. Class iL©8M Book^ t-4€ (L'^ /I f / i *