lesson on this subject than that which the Vanderbilt millions afford. They have within a generation been transferred from a single owner to probably nearly a hundred possessors, either actually or in immediate prospect. There has been no tying up there. So it was with Jay Gould's hoards. They are rapidly coming under the same law of distribution, and even Paris is enjoying a part of his hard-earned gathering, when the accumulator of it all has been but a few years dead. Other parts are being divided up among workmen in various industries, while certain amounts are expended in the encouragement of art, music, and the drama. Within a few years those hundred odd millions have been wrested by the hand of death from the original owner, from the one monopolistic hand and put into the hands of dozens of liberal distributers, who are sowing them broadcast. The communists themselves could hardly do the work faster.

If Gould himself left nothing to charity, his elder daughter is making up for that omission by devoting a large portion of her life work and a liberal amount of her fortune to that purpose. So "there's a divinity that shapes our ends." Gould "builded better than he knew," for the world and for the communists also.

If Commodore Vanderbilt was not a patron of letters, having no taste therefor, it must not be forgotten that he did a great thing for the Southern University by his bequest to that institution; and other Vanderbilt charities, such as the Clinic, must be taken into account in this important question of distribution. This natural method of division of property, unhampered by primogeniture, is far ahead in principle and in equity of anything that the world has ever seen. Certain socialists eulogize the Mosaic law of distribution, but according to that code the division and reversion took place only every fifty years, in the year of jubilee. Under the existing methods, which are constantly in operation, half a dozen apportionments may take place in the half century, and the diffusion is much better and more equitable. Certain theorists have suggested that the division to fill the aching void should be made during the mortal exist

ence of the monopolists and bondholders; but the result of the experiment made in this direction by Mr. Andrew Carnegie would seem to have cast a damper on the benevolent sentiments of such philanthropists. Mr. Carnegie has been one of the best abused men in the country since he made arrangements to spend millions for the mental and moral improvement of the people. Public ingratitude is a great enemy to benevolence, and frequently closes the door against it.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A QUESTION OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP.

How do wealthy men compare with others as good citizens? Conditions that antagonize good citizenship. The character and influence of the money hoarder and the absentee analyzed. Decline in the rate of

interest and of faith in the security of property among the most important questions of the day.

SOME

COME time ago a discussion went the rounds of the press on the subject of "good citizenship."

Special and pointed reference was made to the distinctly wealthy citizen, to the man who had become conspicuous in the eyes of the public as being classed among the millionaires; and the opinion seemed to be held by not a few that wealth has a tendency to impair a man's usefulness as a citizen. In fact, some people are disposed to think that a rich man cannot be a good citizen, any more than he can enter the kingdom of Heaven.

For the latter opinion we have the highest scriptural authority, but in neither case would it be justice to the opinion to interpret the language literally. The Nazarene simply meant that the man who made a god of his riches could not enter the kingdom of Heaven, for surely no one can imagine that Christ would have excluded from Heaven such men as we see in our times and in this nation spending millions in charity with their own hands, and make provision for having millions more spent in the same laudable cause after their death.

I am now thinking of such men as John Rockefeller, who has already spent ten or twelve millions, and Andrew Carnegie, who has spent probably an equal amount; both of whom propose to spend many more. In the same honorable catalogue I may

include the Vanderbilts and many others. If I should go into the list of the deceased, even of those who have died within my own recollection, their names and the amounts of their bequests alone would extend this chapter far beyond the limits allotted to it. The extent and number of the charities of the late Cornelius Vanderbilt will probably never be known.

Surely, Jesus of Nazareth never meant that the souls of these benevolent individuals should wallow eternally in despair, because they had been the mere instruments of collecting large fortunes, the greater portion of these fortunes being distributed where they would relieve the sufferings of humanity, and assist a large number of the community to avail themselves of a higher state of mental development than they had been provided with means to reach, merely by the accident of birth.

Peter Cooper's gifts and bequests afford vivid illustrations of this point. Who can imagine for a moment that Saint Peter would be commissioned by the Most High to send to perdition his philanthropic namesake because the modern Peter had the prudence, industry, and economy to gather the wealth that put the institute which goes by the grand old man's name on such a financial footing as to teach thousands to earn their living in intellectual pursuits who otherwise would never have enjoyed the means of raising themselves above the level of the ordinary unskilled day laborer?

Whatever the meaning of the mysterious Man of Nazareth might have been, common sense rejects the brimstone theory in its application to such a man as Peter Cooper, for instance, though he was not what was regarded in his day as an orthodox Christian. But, like another eminent man in his school of faith, "to do good was his religion," though unlike the other he did not claim "the world as his country," although in every sense it was. Peter Cooper was peculiarly and characteristically an American of the old school, and the truest type of genuine American manhood.

I think it requires, or, at least, should require no further argument to show that the strictly orthodox interpretation as

applied to a man like Peter Cooper is unutterably absurd and can be entertained only by unreasoning fanatics.

I regard the opinion of the reprobation of rich men, simply because they are rich, as the rankest heterodoxy against the science of common sense and the best interests of the social condition as at present constituted with the family as its unit, in contradistinction to socialism and a paternal government. The wealth accumulators, I contend, are, as a rule, the best citizens. In fact, they are the citizens, above all others, who make it possible under our present system to attain the highest enjoyment and development, physical, moral, and spiritual, of which mankind thus far is capable.

How far these wealth accumulators are mere automatons, working through the media of apparent selfishness, is a question with which modern philosophers are just beginning to grapple ; but the point that I wish to make clear is that the wealth producers and accumulators, with but few exceptions, are the hardest worked slaves in existence and have on the whole the least enjoyment, as the world estimates enjoyment, out of the wealth which, in common parlance, they are said to

create.

Of all writers on political economy, John Ruskin puts this condition of the wealth-creator, so-called, in the truest and most vivid, though in somewhat a ludicrous, light. He takes the position that the error in the popular view is the confusion of guardianship with possession, the real state of men of property being, too commonly, that of curators or managers, not possessors, of wealth.

Of the man of wealth viewed in this light, Ruskin says:

"He cannot live in two houses at once. A few bales of silk and wool will suffice for the fabric of all the clothes he can ever wear, and a few books will probably hold all the furniture good for his brain. Beyond these, in the best of our but narrow capacities, we have but the power of administering, or maladministering, wealth. And with multitudes of rich men, administration degenerates into curatorship. They merely hold their property in charge as trustees for the benefit of some person or persons to whom it is to be de