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Fabian Society 2008

OTitANIX

SOCIALISM
The

NOTE.

SINCE the appearance of the following essay in the Conlevorary Review (Feb. 1896)
a 'Millionaire Movement has taken place, culminating in the recent expression of
opinion by Mr. Andrew Carnegie that no man should die rich. A reference to
Fabian Tract No. 5, " Facts for Socialists," will convince Mr. Carnegie that the
danger he warns us against is still far from widespread. Nor is the doctrine new :
John Ruskin "unloaded " and published his accounts with the public years ago ;
and Mr. Passmore Edwards's annual investments for the common good have come to
be regarded as an ordinarY asset, like the established Parliamentary Grants in Aid.
But the modern substitution of Combination for Competition as the principle of
capitalism is producing a new crop of individual fortunes so monstrous as to make
their possessors publicly ridiculous. Unloading is, for the moment, the order of the
day. The problem is, how to unload without the waste, pauperization, and demoralization that are summed up in England under the word charity. It seems clear from
some late sensational disbursements that the Millionaires have not solved this problem. For this they cannot be blamed, because the problem is fundamentally insoluble under the social conditions which produce it ; but they can at least do their
best instead of their worst with their superfluity ; and, so far, they seem to prefer,
with the best intentions, to do their worst. In the hope that my essay may prove
suggestive to them, the Fabian Society has decided to reprint it, with the permission
of the Editor of the ContetVorary Review, as a Fabian Tract.
LONDON,

1901.

G. B. S.

Sorrows

MILLIONAIRES.

of the Millionaire.

millionaire class, a small but growing one, into which any of us

may be flung to-morrow by the accidents of commerce, is perhaps
the most neglected in the community.
As far as I know, this is the
first Tract that has ever been written for millionaires.
In the
advertisements of the manufactures of the country I find that everything is produced for the million and nothing for the millionaire.
Children, boys, youths, " gents," ladies, artizans, professional men,
even peers and kings are catered for ; but the millionaire's custom is
evidently not worth having : there are too few of him.
Whilst the
poorest have their Rag Fair, a duly organized and busy market in
Houndsditch, where you can buy a boot for a penny, you may
search the world in vain for the market where the /5o boot, the
special dear line of hats at forty guineas, the cloth of gold bicycling
suit, and the Cleopatra claret, four pearls to the bottle, can be purchased wholesale. Thus the unfortunate millionaire has the responsibility of prodigious wealth without the possibility of enjoying
himself more than any ordinary rich man.
Indeed, in many things
he cannot enjoy himself more than many poor men do, nor even so
much ; for a drum-major is better dressed ; a trainer's stable-lad
often rides a better horse ; the first class carriage is shared by officeboys taking their young ladies out tor the evening ; everybody who
goes down to Brighton for Sunday rides in the Pullman car ; and of
what use is it to be able to pay for a peacock's-brain sandwich when
there is nothing to be had but ham or beef ? The injustice of this
state of things has not been sufficiently considered.
A man with an
income of 125 a year can multiply his comfort beyond all calculation by doubling his income. A man with .5o a year can at least
quadruple his comfort by doubling his income. Probably up to even
125o a year doubled income means doub ed coimort. After that
the increment of comfort grows less in proportion to the increment
of income until a point is reached at which the victim is satiated and
even surfeited with everything that money can procure. To expect
him to enjoy another hundred .thousand pounds because men like
money, is exactly as if you were to expect a confectioner's shopboy
to enjoy two hours more work a day because boys are fond of sweets.
What can the wretched millionaire do that needs a million ? Does
he want a fleet of yachts, a Rotten Row lull of carriages, an army of
servants, a whole city of town houses, or a continent for a game
preserve ? Can he attend more than one theatre in one evening, or
wear more than one suit at a time, or digest more meals than his
THE

PREFATORY

FOR

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4
butler ? Is it a luxury to have more money to take care of, more
begging-letters
to read, and to be cut off from those delicious
Alnaschar dreams in which the poor man, sitting down to consider
what he will do in the always possible event of some unknown
relative leaving him a fortune, forgets his privation ? And yet there
is no sympathy for this hidden sorrow of plutocracy.
The poor
alone are pitied. Societies spring up in all directions to relieve all
sorts of comparatively happy people, from discharged prisoners in
the first rapture of their regained liberty to children revelling in the
luxury of an unlimited appetite ; but no hand is stretched out to the
millionaire, except to beg. In all our dealings with him lies implicit
the delusion that lie has nothing to complain of, and that he ought
to be ashamed of rolling in wealth whilst others are starving.
Millionaires
Less Than Ever Able to Spend Their
Money on Themselves.
And please remember that his plight is getting worse and worse
with the advance of civilization.
The capital, the energy, the
artistic genius that used to train themselves for the supply of beautiful
things to rich men, now turn to supply the needs of the gigantic
proletariats of modern times. It is more profitable to add an ironmongery department to a Westbourne Grove emporium than it
was to be a Florentine armorer in the fifteenth century.
The very
millionaire himself, when he becomes a railway director, is forced to
turn his back on his own class, and admit that it is the third-class
traffic that pays. If he takes shares in a hotel, he learns that it is
safer, as a matter of commercial policy, to turn a lord and his retinue
out of doors than to disoblige a commercial traveller or a bicyclist in
the smallest reasonable particular.
He cannot get his coat made to
fit him without troublesome tryings-on and alterations unless he
goes to the cheap ready-money tailors, who monopolize all the really
expert cutters because their suits must fit infallibly at the first
attempt if the low prices are to be made pay. The old-fashioned
tradesman, servile to the great man and insolent to the earner of
weekly wages, is now beaten in the race by the universal provider,
who attends more carefully to the fourpenny and tenpenny customers than to the mammoth shipbuilder's wife sailing in to order
three grand pianos and four French governesses:
In short, the
shops where Dives is expected and counted on are only to be found
now in a few special trades, which touch a man's life but seldom.
For everyday purposes the customer who wants more than other
people is as unwelcome and as little worth attending to as the
customer who wants less than other people. The millionaire can
have the best of everything in the market ; but this leaves him no
better off than the modest possessor of 15,000 a year. There is
only one thing that he can still order on a scale of special and recklessly expensive pomp, and that is his funeral. Even this melancholy
outlet will probably soon be closed. Huge joint-stock interment and
cremation companies will refuse to depart to any great extent from
their routine of Class I., Class II., and so on, just as a tramway com-

pany would refuse to undertake a Lord Mayor's Show. The custom

of . the great masses will rule the market so completely that the
millionaire, already forced to live nine-tenths of his life as other men
do, will be forced into line as to the other tenth also.
Why

Millionaires

Must Not Leave Too Much to

Their Families.
To be a millionaire, then, is to have more money than you can
possibly spend on yourself, and to suffer daily from the inconsiderateness of those persons to whom such a condition appears one of utter
content.
What, then, is the millionaire to do with his surplus
funds ? The usual reply is, provide for his children and give alms.
Now these two resources, as usually understood, are exactly the
same thing, and a very mischievous thing too. From the point of
view of society, it does not matter a straw whether the person
relieved of the necessity of working for his living by a millionaire's
bounty is his son, his daughter's husband, or merely a casual beggar.
The millionaire's private feelings may be more highly gratified in
the former cases ; but the mischief to society and to the recipient is
the same. If you want to spoil a young man's career, there is no
method surer than that of presenting him with what is called " an
independence,'meaning
an abject and total dependence on the labor
of others.
Anybody who has watched the world intelligently
enough to compare the average man of independent means when he
has just finished his work at the university, with the same man
twenty years later, following a routine of fashion compared to which
the round of a postman is a whirl of excitement, and the beat of a
policeman a chapter of romance, must have sometimes said to himself that it would have been better for the man if his father had
spent every penny of his money, or thrown it into the Thames.
Parasites
on Property.
In Ireland, the absentee landlord is bitterly reproached for not
administering his estate in person. It is pointed out truly enough
that the absentee is a pure parasite upon the industry of his
country.
The indispensable minimum of attention to his estate
is paid by his agent or solicitor, whose resistance to his purely
parasitic activity is fortified by the fact that the estate usually belongs mostly to the mortgagees, and that the nominal landlord is so
ignorant of his own affairs that he can do nothing but send begging
letters to the agent. On these estates generations of peasants (and
agents) live hard but bearable lives ; whilst off them generations of
ladies and gentlemen of good breeding and natural capacity are
corrupted into drifters, wasters, drinkers, waiters-for-dead-men'sshoes, poor relations, and social wreckage of all sorts, living aimless
lives, and often dying squalid and tragic deaths. But is there any
country in the world in which this same wreckage does not occur ?
The typical modern proprietor is not an Irish squire but a cosmopolitan shareholder ; and the shareholder is an absentee as a matter
of course. If his property is all the better managed for that,

Fabian Society 2008

6
he himself is all the more completely reduced to the condition of a
mere parasite upon it , and he is just as likely as the Irish absentee
to become a centre of demoralization to his family connections.
Every millionaire who leaves all his millions to his family in the ordinary
course exposes his innocent descendants to this risk without securing
them any advantage that they could not win more effectually
and happily by their own activity, backed by a fair start in life.
Formerly this consideration had no weight with parents, because
working for money was considered disgraceful to a gentleman, as it
is still, in our more belated circles, to a lady. In all the professions
we have survivals of old pretencesthe rudimentary pocket on the
back of a barrister's gown is an exampleby which the practitioner
used to fob his fee without admitting that his services were for sale.
Most people alive to-day, of middle age and upward, are more or
less touched with superstitions that need no longer be reckoned with
by or on behalf of young men. Such, for instance, as that the line
which divides wholesale from retail trade is also a line marking a
step in social position ; or that there is something incongruous in a
lord charging a shilling a head for admission to his castle and
gardens, or opening a shop for milk, game, and farm produce ; or
that a merchant's son who obtains a commission in a smart regiment
is guilty of an act of ridiculous presumption.

Dignity of Labor.
In the
Even the prejudice against manual labor is vanishing.
artistic professions something like a worship of it was inaugurated
when Ruskin took his Oxford class out of doors and set them to
make roads. It is now a good many years since Dickens, when
visiting a prison, encountered Wainwright the poisoner, and heard
that gentleman vindicate his gentility by demanding of his fellow
prisoner (a bricklayer, if I remember aright) whether he had ever
condescended to clean out the cell, or handle the broom, or, in
short, do any work whatever for himself that he could put on his
The bricklayer, proud of having so distinguished a cell
companion.
In the great Irish
mate, eagerly gave the required testimony.
agitation against coercion in Ireland during Mr. Balfour's secretaryship, an attempt was made to add to the,sensation by pointing to the
spectacle of Irish political prisoners, presumably gentlemen, suffering
the indignity of having to do housemaid's work in cleaning their
cells. Who cared ? It would be easy to multiply instances of the
But
change of public opinion for the better in this direction.
there is no need to pile up evidence. It will be quite willingly admitted that the father who throws his son on his own exertions,
after equipping him fully with education and a reasonable capital,
no longer degrades him, spoils his chance of a well-bred wife, and
forfeits the caste of the family, but, on the contrary, solidifies his
character and widens his prospects, professional, mercantile, political,
Besides, public opinion, growing continually
and matrimonial.
stronger against drones in the hive, begins to threaten, and even
to execute, a differentiation of taxation against unearned incomes

so that the man who, in spite of the protests of parental wisdom

and good citizenship, devotes great resources to the enrichment and
probable demoralization of remote descendants for whose merit the
community has no guarantee, does so at the risk of having his aim
finally defeated by the income-tax collector. We, therefore, have
the intelligent and public-spirited millionaire cut off from his old
resource of "founding a family." All that his children can now
require of him, all that society expects him to give them, all that is
good for themselves, is a first-rate equipment, not an "independence."
And there are millionaires who have no children.

is a Waste of Money.
Why Almsgiving
The extremities to which the millionaire is reduced by this closing
up of old channels of bequest are such that he sometimes leave'
huge sums to bodies of trustees " to do good with," a plan as mischievous as it is resourceless ; for what can the trustees do but
timidly dribble the fund away on charities of one kind or another ?
Now I am loth to revive the harsh strains of the Gradgrind political
economy : indeed, I would, if I could, place in every Board School a
copy of Mr. Watts' picture of a sheet profiled by the outline of a
man lying dead underneath it, with the inscription above, " What I
But woe
saved, I lost : what I spent, I had : what I gave, I have."
to the man who takes from another what he can provide for himself ;
and woe also to the giver ! There is no getting over the fact that
the moment an attempt is made to organize almsgiving by entrusting
the funds to a permanent body of experts, it. is invariably discovered
that beggars are perfectly genuine persons : that is to say, not
" deserving poor," but people who have discovered that it is possible
to live by simply impudently asking for what they want until they
get it, which is the essence of beggary. The permanent body of
experts, illogically instructed to apply their funds to the cases of the
deserving poor only, soon become a mere police body for the frustration of true begging, and consequently of true almsgiving. Finally,
their experience in a pursuit to which they were originally led by
natural benevolence lands them in an almost maniacal individualism
and an abhorrence of ordinary " charity " as one of the worst of
social crimes. This may not be an amiable attitude ; but no reasonable person can fail to be impressed by the certainty with which it
seems to be produced by a practical acquaintance with the social reactions of mendicity and benevolence.
" The Deserving Poor."
Of course, tbis difficulty is partly.created by the "deserving poor "
I remember once, at a time when I made daily use of the
theory.
reading-room of the British Museuma magnificent communistic
institutionI gave a 12 copying job to a man whose respectable
poverty would have moved a heart of stone : an ex-schoolmaster,
whose qualifications were out of date, and who, through no particular
fault of his own, had drifted at last into the reading-room as less
literate men drift into Salvation Army Shelters. He was a sober,

Fabian Society 2008

well-spoken, well-conducted, altogether unobjectionable man, really

fond of reading, and eminently eligible for a good turn of the kind
I did him. His first step in the matter was to obtain from me an
advance of five shillings ; his next, to sublet the commission to
another person in similar circumstances for one pound fifteen, and so
get it entirely off his mind and return to his favorite books. This
second, or rather, third party, however, required an advance from my
acquaintance of one-and-sixpence to buy paper, having obtained
which, he handed over the contract to a fourth party, who was
willing to do it for one pound thirteen and sixpence. Speculation
raged for a day or two as the job was passed on ; and it reached
bottom at last in the hands of the least competent and least sober
copyist in the room, who actually did the work for five shillings, and
borrowed endless sixpences from me from that time to the day
of her death, which each sixpence probably accelerated to the extent
of fourpence, and staved off to the extent of twopence. She was
not a deserving person : if she had been she would have come to no
such extremity.
Her claims to compassion were that she could not
be depended upon, could not resist the temptation to drink, could
not bring herself to do her work carefully, and was therefore at a
miserable disadvantage in the world : a disadvantage exactly similar
to that suffered by .the blind, the deaf, the maimed, the mad, or any
other victims of imperfect or injured faculty. I learnt from her that
she had once been recommended to the officials of the Charity
Organization Society ; but they, on inquiring into her case, had
refused to help her because she was "undeserving," by which they
meant that she was incapable of helping herself. Here was surely
some confusion of ideas. She was very angry with the Society, and
not unreasonably so ; for she knew that their funds were largely subscribed by people who regarded them as ministers of pity to the poor
and downcast. On the other hand, these people themselves had
absurdly limited the application of their bounty to sober, honest,
respectable persons : that is to say, to the persons least likely to want
it, and alone able to be demoralized by it. An intelligent millionaire,
if tempted to indulge himself by playing the almsgiving philanthropist (to the great danger of his own character) would ear-mark
his gift for the use of the utterly worthless, the hopelessly, incorrigibly
lazy, idle, easy-going, good-for-nothing.
Only, such a policy would
soon exhaust the resources of even a billionaire. It would convince
the most sentimental of almsgivers that it is economically impossible
to be kind to beggars.
It is possible to treat them humanely,
which means that they can be enslaved, brought under discipline,
and forced to perform a minimum of work as gently as the nature
of the process and their own intense objection to it permit ; but
there is no satisfaction for the compassionate instincts to be got out
of that. It is a public duty, like the enforcement of sanitation, and
should be undertaken by the public. Privately supported colonies of
the unemployed, like that of the Salvation Army at Hadleigh,
are only the experiments on which an inevitable extension of the
Poor Law will have to be based. What is urgently needed at

present by the poor is the humanization of the Poor Law, an

end which is retarded by all attempts to supplant it by private
benevolence.
Take, for example, the hard case of the aged
poor, who are not beggars at all, but veterans of industry who
have in most cases earned an honorable pension (which we are
dishonest enough to grudge them) by a lifetime of appalling
drudgery.
We have to deal with at least 350,000 of them every
year. Very little can be done by private efforts to rescue these unfortunate people from the barbarity of the ratepayers by building a
few almshouses here and there. But a great deal can be done by
arousing the public conscience and voting for reasonably humane
and enlightened persons at elections of guardians.
The guardians
of the West Derby (Liverpool) Union, instead of imprisoning aged
couples separately and miserably in their workhouse, put them into
furnished cottages, where, provided they keep them neat and clean,
they are no more interfered with than if they were in a private almshouse. The difference in happiness, comfort, and self-respect, between the cottage and the workhouse, is enormous : the difference
in cost is less than two shillings a week per pair. If a millionaire
must build almshouses, he had better do it by offering to defray the
cost of a set of cottages on condition that the guardians adopt the
West Derby system. This, of course, is pauperizing the ratepayer
but the average ratepayer is a quite shameless creature, loud in his
outcry against the immorality of pauperizing any one at his expense,
but abject in his adulation of the rich man who will pauperize him by
those subscriptions to necesssary public institutions which act as
subsidies in relief of the rates.

Never Endow
Hospitals.
Hospitals are the pet resource of the rich man whose money is
burning a hole in his pockets. Here, however, the verdict of sound
social economy is emphatic.
Never give a farthing to an ordinary
hospital. An experimental hospital is a different thing: a millionaire
who is interested in proving that the use of drugs, of animal food,
of alcohol, of the knife in cancer, or the like, can be and should be
dispensed with, may endow a temporary hospital for that purpose ;
but in the charitable hospital, private endowment and private
management mean not only the pauperization of the ratepayer, but
irresponsibility,
waste and extravagance
checked by spasmodic
stinginess, favoritism, almost unbridled licence for experiments on
patients by scientifically enthusiastic doctors, and a system of begging
for letters of admission which would be denounced as intolerable
if it were part of the red tape of a public body. A safe rule for the
millionaire is never to do anything for the public, any more than
for an individual, that the public will do (because it must) for itself
without his intervention.
The provision of proper hospital accommodation is pre-eminently one of these things. Already more than
a third of London's hospital accommodation is provided by the ratepayers. In Warrington the hospital rate, which was 2d. in the
pound in 1887-8, rose in five years to is.. 2d. If a billionaire had

Fabian Society 2008

11

I0

interposed to take this increase on his own shoulders, he would have

been simply wasting money for which better uses were waiting,
demoralizing his neighbors, and forestalling good hospitals by bad
ones. Our present cadging hospital system will soon go the way of
the old Poor Law ; and no invalid will be a penny the worse.

Education.
Be Careful in Endowing
Education comes next to hospitals in the popular imagination as
But it is open to
a thoroughly respectable mark for endowments.
the same objections. The privately endowed elementary school is
inferior to the rate-supported one, and is consequently nothing but
a catchpit in which children, on the way to their public school, are
caught and condemned to an inferior education in inferior buildings
University education is another
under sectarian management.
But whilst it is easy to found colleges and scholarships, it
matter.
is ,impossible to confine their benefits to those who are unable to
Besides, it is beginning to be remarked that univerpay for them.
The
sity men, as a class, are specially ignorant and misinformed.
practical identity of the governing class with the university class in
England has produced a quite peculiar sort of stupidity in English
policy, the masterstrokes of which are so very frequently nothing but
class solecisms that even the most crudely democratic legislatures
of the Colonies and the most corrupt lobbies of the United
States are superior to ours in directness and promptitude, sense of
An
social proportion, and knowledge of contemporary realities.
intelligent millionaire, unless he is frankly an enemy of the human
race, will do nothing to extend the method of caste initiation pracExtised under the mask of education at Oxford and Cambridge.
periments in educational method, and new subjects of technical
education, such, for instance, as political science considered as part
of the technical education of the citizen (who is now such a disastrously bungling amateur in his all-important political capacity as
voter by grace of modern democracy) ; or economics, statistics, and
industrial history, treated as part of the technical commercial education of the wielder of modern capitals and his officials : these, abhorrent to university dons and outside the scope of public elementary
education, are the departments in which the millionaire interested
in education can make his gold fruitful. Help nothing that is already
It is the
on its legs is not a bad rule in this and other matters.
struggles of society to adapt itself to the new conditions which
, every decade of modern industrial development springs on us that
need help. The old institutions, with their obsolete routine, and
their lazy denials and obstructions in the interests of that routine,
are but too well supported already.
Endowing Societies.
The objection to supplanting public machinery by private does
not apply to private action to set public machinery in motion.
Take, for example, the National Society for the Prevention of
If that society were to undertake the punishCruelty to Children.

ment of cruel parents by building private prisons and establishing

private tribunals, even the most thoughtless subscriber to private
charities and hospitals would shake his head and button up his
pocket, knowing that there are public laws and public prisons and tribunals to do the work, and that they alone should be trusted with such
functions. But here the public machinery requires the initiative
of an aggrieved person to set it in motion ; and when the aggrieved
person is a child, and its "next friend" the aggressor, the machinery
Under such circumstances, Mr. Waugh's
does not get started.
society, by stepping in and taking the child's part, does a. great deal
of good ; and this, observe, not by supplanting the State, or competing with it, but by co-operating with it and compelling it to do
its duty. Generally speaking, all societies which are of the native
of Vigilance Committees are likely to be useful. The odium which,
attaches to the name came from the old-fashioned American Vigilance Committee, which, in the true spirit of private enterprise, not
only detected offenders, but lynched them on its own responsibility.
We have certain State vigilance officers : sanitary inspectors, School
Board visitors, a Public Prosecutor (of a sort), the Oueen's Proctor,
and others. The only one of these who is an unmitigated public
nuisance is the censor of the theatre, who, instead of merely having
power to hale the author of an obnoxious play before a public
tribunal, has power to sentence him to suppression and execute him
with his own hands and on his own responsibility, with the result
that our drama is more corrupt, silly, and indecent than any other
department of fine art, and our unfortunate censor more timid and
helpless than any other official. His case shows the distinction
which it is essential to observe in vigilance work. But though we
have an official to prevent Tolstoy's plays from being performed, we
have no official to prevent people from stealing public land and stopThe millionaire who gives mOney to
ping up public footpaths.
Days in the Country " for city children, and will not help
"
Commons Preservation Societies and the like to keep the country
open for them, is unworthy of his millions.
All these considerations point in the same direction. The intelligent millionaire need not hesitate to subsidize any vigilance society
or reform society that is ably conducted, and that recognizes the fact
that it is not going to reform the world, but only, at best, to persuade
the world to take its ideas into consideration in reforming itself.
Subject to these conditions, it matters little whether the millionaire
agrees with the society or not. No individual or society can possibly
be absolutely and completely right ; nor can any view or theory be
so stated as to comprise the whole truth and nothing but the
A millionaire who will not subsidize forces that are capable
truth.
of a mischievous application will subsidize nothing at all. Such
justice as we attain in our criminal courts is the outcome of a vehe-,
mently partial prosecution and defence ; and all parliamentary sanity
is the outcome of a conflict of views. For instance, if we try to
figure to ourselves a forcible reconstruction of society on lines rigidly
deduced either from the Manchester School or from State Socialism,

Fabian Society 2008

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13

we are at a loss to decide which of the two would be the more

intolerable and disastrous. Yet who hesitates on that account, if
such matters interest him, to back up the Fabian Society on the one
hand, or the Personal Rights Association on the other, according to
his bias ? Our whole theory of freedom of speech and opinion for
all citizens, rests, not on the assumption that everybody is right, but
on the certainty that everybody is wrong on some point on which
somebody else is right, so that there is a public danger in allowing
anybody to go unheard.
Therefore, any propagandist society which
knows how to handle money intelligently and which is making a
contribution to current thought, whether Christian or Pagan, Liberal
or Conservative, Socialist or Individualist, scientific or humanitarian,
physical or metaphysical, seems to me an excellent mark for a
millionaire's spare money.
Yet after all, mere societies are good marks for anybody's spare
money. Most of them may be left to the ordinary guinea subscriber ;
and'though millionaires are such inveterate subscribers and donors
that I dare not leave the societies out of account, I confess I despise
a millionaire who dribbles his money away in fifties and hundreds,
thereby reducing himself to the level of a mere crowd of ordinary
men, instead of planking down sums that only a millionaire can.
My idea of a millionaire is a man who never gives less than ten
thousand pounds, ear-marked for the purchase of something of the
best qu ility costing not a penny less than that amount.
The millionaire should ask himself what is his favorite subject ? Has it a school,
with scholarships for the endowment of research and the attraction
of rising talent?
Has it a library, or a museum ? If not, then he
has an opening at once for his ten thousand or hundred thousand.

Starting
Snowballs.
There is always something fascinating to the imagination of a
very poor man in the notion of leaving a million or so to accumulate
at compound interest for a few centuries, and then descend in fabulous riches on some remote descendant and make a Monte Cristo of
him. Now, even if there were likely to be any particular point in
being Monte Cristo after a couple of hundred years further social
and industrial development, a modern millionaire, for the reasons
already stated, should be the last person in the world to be much
impressed by it. Still, the underlying idea of keeping a great money
force together, multip:ying it, and finally working a miracle with it,
is a tempting one. Here is a recent example, quoted from a local
paper :
"The gift of a farm to the Parish Council of St. Bees by the Rev. Mr. Pagan,
of Shadforth, Durham, is accompanied by some peculiar conditions.
The farm is
33a. 3r. ap. in extent, and is valued at .e1,098. The rent of the farm is to be allowed
to accumulate, with two reservations. Should the grantor ever require it, the council
may be called upon during his lifetime to pay him from time to time out of the
accumulated investments any amounts not exceeding Z.1,098. Not more than C10
may be spent in charity. hut not in relief of the rates. The balance is to be invested
in land and houses until all the land and houses in the parish have been secured by
the parish council. When that is accomnli-hed, the sum of S1,098 may be handed
over to some adjacent parish, which shall deal with the gift similarly to St. Bees."

Beware

of the Ratepayer
and the Landlord.
In the above bequest, we have a remarkable combination of
practical sagacity and colossal revolutionary visionariness.
Mr.
Pagan sets a thousand pound snowball rolling in such a way as to
nationalize the land parish by parish until the revolution is complete. Observeand copyhis clause, " not in relief of the rates."
Let the millionaire never forget that the ratepayer is always lying in
wait to malversate public money to the saving of his own pocket.
Possibly the millionaire may sympathize with him, and say that he
wishes to relieve him. But in the first place a millionaire should
never sympathize with anybody : his destiny is too high for such
petty self-indulgence ; and in the second, you cannot relieve the
ratepayer by reducing, or even abolishing, his rates, since freeing a
house of rates simply raises the rent. The millionaire might as well
leave his money direct to the landlords at once. In fact, the ratepayer is only a foolish catspaw for the landlord, who is the great
eater-up of public bequests. At Tonbridge, Bedford, and certain
other places, pious founders have endowed the schools so splendidly
that education is nobly cheap there. But rents are equivalently
high ; so that the landlords reap the whole pecuniary value of the
endowment.
The remedy, however, is to follow the example of the
Tonbridge and Bedford founders instead of avoiding it. If every
centre of population were educationally
endowed with equal
liberality, the advantage of Bedford would cease to be a diferential
one ; and it is only advantages which are both differential and
pecuniarily realizable by the individual citizens that produce rent.
Meanwhile, the case points to another form of the general rule above
deduced for the guidance of millionaires : namely, that bequests to
the public should be for the provision of luxuries, never of necessaries.
We must provide necessaries for ourselves ; and their gratuitous
provision in any town at present constitutes a pecuniarily realizable
differential advantage in favor of living in that town. Now, a luxury
is something that we need not have, and consequently will not pay
for except with spare or waste money. Properly speaking, therefore, it is something that we will not pay for at all. And yet nothing
is more vitally right than the attitude of the French gentleman who
said : "Give me the luxuries of life, and I will do without the
necessaries."
For example, the British Library of Political Science
is prodigiously more important to our well-being than a thousand
new charitable soup-kitchens ; but as ordinary people do not care a
rap about it, it does not raise the rent of even students' lodgings in
London by a farthing.
But suppose a misguided billionaire, instead
of founding an institution of this type, were to take on himse,f the
cost of paving and lighting some London parish, and set on foot a
free supply of bread and milk ! All that would happen would be
that the competition for houses and shops in that parish wou,d rage
until it had brought rents up to a point at which there w mild be no
advantage in living in it more than in any other parish. Even parks
and open spaces raise rents in London, though, strange to say,

Fabian Society 2008

15

London statues do not diminish them. Here, then, is the simple

Never give the people anything
formula for the public benefactor.
they want : give them something they ought to want and dont.

in indulgences in the name of the Pope did before the Reformation.

One buys moral credit by signing a cheque, which is easier than
turning a prayer wheel. I am aware, further, that we often give to
public objects money that we should devote to raising wages among
our own employees or substituting three eight-hour shifts for two
twelve-hour ones. But when a millionaire does not really care
whether his money does good or not, provided he finds his conscience
eased and his social status improved by giving it away, it is useless
for me to argue with him. I mention him only as a warning to the
better sort of donors that the mere disbursement of large sums
of money must be counted as a distinctly suspicious circumstance in
Money is worth nothing to the man
estimating personal character.
who has more than enough ; and the wisdom with which it is spent fs'
the sole social justification for leaving him in possession of it.

Needs : the Old Ones Will Take Care of

Themselves.
Thus we find at the end of it all, appositely enough, that the
great work of the millionaire, whose tragedy is that he has not needs
enough for his means, is to create needs. The man who makes the
luxury of yesterday the need of to-morrow is as great a benefactor
as the man who makes two ears of wheat grow where one grew
before. John Ruskin set a wise example in this respect to our rich
men. He published his accounts with the public, and shewed that
he had taken no more for himself than fair pay for his work of giving
Sheffield a valuable museum, which it does not want and would
cheerfully sell for a fortnight's holiday with free beer if it could.
Was not that better than wasting it heartlessly and stupidly on
beggars, on able-bodied relatives, on ratepayers, on landlords, and all
the rest of our social absorbents ? He has created energy instead
of dissipating it, and created it in the only fundamentally possible
way, by creating fresh needs. His example shows what can be done
by a rich expert in 'fine art ; and if millions could bring such expertness to their possessor, I should have discoursed above of the beautification of cities, the endowment of a standard orchestra and theatre
in every centre of our population, and the building of a wholesome,
sincere, decent house for Parliament to meet in (noble legislation is
impossible in the present monstrosity) as an example for parish halls
and town halls all through the country, with many other things of
the same order. But these matters appeal only to a religious and
artistic faculty which cannot be-depended on in millionaireswhich,
indeed, have a very distinct tendency to prevent their possessor from
ever becoming even a thousandaire, if I may be permitted that
equally justifiable word. The typical modern millionaire knows
more about life than about art ; and what he should know better
than anyone else, if he has any reflective power, is that men do not
succeed nowadays in industrial lite by sticking to the methods and
And yet not until a method or a view
views of their grandfathers.
has attained a grandfatherly age is it possible to get it officially
recognized and taught in an old country like ours. In bringing
industrial education up to date, the millionaire should be on his own
Experiment, propaganda, exploration, discovery, political
ground.
and industrial information : take care of these, and the pictures and
statues, -the churches and hospitals, will take care of themselves.
Create New

Money and Ransom.

Conscience
I must not conclude without intimating my knowledge of the
fact that most of the money given by rich people in " charity " is,
made up of conscience money, " ransom," political bribery, and bids
for titles. The traffic in hospital subscriptions in the name of Royalty
fulfils exactly the same function in modern society as Texel's traffic

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EMPIRE : A Manifesto.
AND THE
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V.-On

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41. The Fabian

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for the
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following bodies :-20, Poor Law Guardians.
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r mr, for Cts a year. or 2'6 a quarter
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VI.-Question

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