Inspired millionaires; a forecast

PART ONE (Which Says They are Coming)

I Millionaires and Other People T

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

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 Millionaire Who is as Good as Anybody . 152 ,,^^ V A Million Dollars as a Profession 163

VI A Million Dollars as an Art Form:

(1) Surplus and Aristocracy 170

(2) The MiUionaire and His Imagination . 174

(3) Imagination and the Higher Selfishness 187

(4) Imagination and Monopoly 195

(5) The Back-fire of Socialism 202

(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

Millionaires 256

XI On Being Too Big to Do Wrong ..... 263

XII The Next Corner of the World 276

Epilogue 301

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 gods, and I mil call on the name of the Eord; and the God that answereth hy fire, let him be God.^ And all the people answered and said, 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 millionaires — 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 Httle. 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 the planet and talk to every man on it beforehand, and ask him if he would be willing, in case you saved him several dollars 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 unquestioned 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 anyone 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 invention in the twentieth century who will be professional with it — act like a gentleman or an artist, with it, who will dedicate it to humanity and himself together, who Millionaires will keep absolute control of his invention q^jj^^. p^^^i^ in order to make it creative and emancipating at every point where it touches human life, who will scatter the opportunity 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 modern times. Incidentally, he will accomplish 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 millionaire more religious than being in a monastery, or than any of the other rather

Inspired religious-looking, but comparatively easy Millionaires ^^^^^ j.j^^ ^^j^^ ^ g^ Francis of Assisi.

But the main point will be that he will have done something practical and spiritually business-like with our whole modern manufacturing world. He will have suggested, and carried out, and settled the one way in which the industries of the world can be civilized, viz, one new imperious 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 factory windows one shall think of them together there, the men and the things, making and being made together, each after their kind.

But it is not merely because he will be the redeemer of industry that I am look- Millionaires ing forward to this man. I am looking o°her 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 creative spirit, to liberate the same creative spirit in others will be looked back upon, I believe, 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

Inspired vision of Opportunities. Like a great

Millionaires ,■, • ■• 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 would almost do to have made a whole re- Millionaires ligion out of, for one of those old- fash- o°her People 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 millionaires have been less improved by Christianity in two thousand years than any other class, but it must have done something with the rich. Even the Christianity-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 millionaires that could not have been helped. 13

Inspired They are a new kind of man — many of human nature had been produced — rolled up upon us by the sheer development, 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 picking out the men who had them, and gathering them around them, that the success has been kept. Many of them are rich by some mighty, silent, sudden service 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.

At all events, I cannot help believing Millionaires we have come to the point at last, where, q^^^^ people with two thousand years of The New Testament struggling up through the himian spirit it is time for men to begin to beheve that a man may be good enough to be rich. Times have changed. It is coming 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, millionaires 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 obHged 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 beheve that the

IS

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 everybody 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 begin to beheve, 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 singing from them out through the open doors of other men's Kves. Everyone will see then that holding on to a million dollars and doing things with it is more religious

i6 than giving it all up with one wave of Miuionaires one's hand, and merely being self-sacrific- ^ , p , ing with it. Being a millionaire will continue 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 noblyblinded, 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 Testament (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- MUhonaires .^^y. people as a faith or a religion, to accept Tolstoi's vision for the world, wipe away four thousand years with a sweep — temples, orchestras, libraries, Michel Angelo, Copernicus, Shakespeare, steamships, 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 approaching men — the rich and the poor alike — and making them believe in themselves and see visions for their own lives. The one thing of all others that Christ

i8 did with people was to make them believe Muiionaires 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 conceive 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, instead 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 vision or ideal that belongs with a fortune. He would not advocate ( as we have taken it for granted he did in the New Testament) throwing away the man and the fortune both. If one is to make any inference at all from the general nature of his utter- 19

Inspired Eiices, and his attitude toward human

Millionaires ^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^ ^hat he WOuld do with a

millionaire now, one would be inclined to say that the first thing he would do, probably, 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 something 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 industry and be a monopolist with it, i. e., MiiUonaires will run it — not in a scared helpless way, ^^^^^ p^^ ,^ as his competitors like, but as he likes himself, who will run it as he likes in behalf of the laborer, in behalf of the inventor, and in behalf of the public, 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 inspired millionaires as a class. But I do believe that the next great thing that is going to happen in the world is one inspired millionaire. I believe that one will be enough. He will make the rest unhappy. They will watch him really hving with his money, and doing big, inter-

Inspired esting thuigs with it, and they will feel

Millionaires

bored.

And it will not be by being righteous, and noble-looking that the inspired millionaire will appeal to other miUionaires, 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 without 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.

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 insubordination. 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

»3

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 hundred 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 millionaire is going to believe in, with his money, is Long Johns. He is going to believe that the only way to keep ahead in modern manufacturing, that is, in manufacturing 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 investments, 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 machines he already has, and the more and better machines he is going to have with which to hold the market.

»s

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 z6 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 tripping literary promptness. I said that it seemed to me there would be no way out for our machine-civihzation 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 Holbrook 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, 1 lonaires ^^^ .^ ^^^ ^ beautif ul 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 reasonable 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 f roni the car windows in the middle West. The mill has, no one knows how many acres of floors, seven big chimneys, 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 themselves. So the Firm publishes its own magazine, oiFers 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, hopeful 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 Hien's minds were not interested in the 1 lonaires ^^^.^ ^^ Other men through the work they are interested in themselves. It merelyproved 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 intelligent 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 conditions 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 employer 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

3»

Inspired qucstion, the tenement question, the cock 1 lonaires ggj^^^ |.jjg political boss, the walking delegate, 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 millions of such men with whom we are obliged to live, and vote, and worship, which

3* 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 labor. Subdivision 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

Inspired the full breadth of the entire question of 1 lonaires j^Q^j^pj^ civiHzation with which we all