THE MOTIVES OF MILLIONAIRES.
IT is quite possible that American millionaires may become, without exactly intending it, gl eat nuisances in the world. Their rivals in Europe usual:y seek either luxury or rank, and when they have attained r'certain position retire from the world of business content, And quiet. There are excep- tions, especially among the unea-sy tribe who have acquired their wealth in South Africa, but the majority are satisfied to be rich, and are little heard of and never felt. What does Lord Iveagh do that injures or alarms anybody? The American millionaires, on the other hand, who cannot found families, or obtain rank, or slake their thirst for distinction by becoming great collectors, continue in business, and naturally seek in business successes equal to the resources they control. They set to themselves fields of enterprise, they come to regard those fields as kingdoms which belong to them, and they by degrees display most of the foibles of Kings. They regard their "territories," be they sections of railway, or special trades, or certain fields of speculation, as dominions which it concerns their honour as well as their interest to defend, they grow madly jealous of one another, and they become ready to sacrifice their subjects as well as themselves to the desire of victory. An extension of business is to them a con- quest, the acknowledgment that they have made a "grand deal" is to them fame, and when successful after a bitter contest they feel the "triumph and the vanity, the rapture of the strife," which the poet attributed to a great conqueror on a hundred battlefields. It would be found, we believe, if the truth were known, that in the Stock Exchange contest which has this week brought ruin to so many thousand American households neither of the chieftains was particularly seeking profit. They were jealous of one another, or hostile to one another, and they brought their enmity to the test of a financial pitched battle, in which both sides might have suffered very heavily. The province to be fought for was control of the Northern Pacific Railway, the method of controlling was to own shares, and both the factions, with Mr. Pierpont Morgan said in all newspapers to be Emperor on one side, and Mr. Harriman said to be King on the other, began buying furiously. The shares went up and up, the public, which saw them rise, began buying too, and at last it was discovered that the shares very often could not be delivered. The sellers had been selling in hope of buying, or rather of pocketing differences without ever seeing the shares. The price went up by leaps and bounds, those who ,were "short" pitched securities in masses into the market to pay differences, and there was a wild fall, producing to thousands of outside speculators, who had bought all kinds of securities with borrowed money under an impression that the Emperor and King were going to make every company prosper, immediate ruin. At last the chief- tains, either alarmed at the slaughter or from some other motive, eelled a truce, and their armies retired from an unde- cided field, leaving it covered with the undistinguished slain. In other words, the heads of ten thousand or more house. holds, who were foolishly tempted by a prospect of rapid and unearned gain from the rise in prices consequent on the " operations " of the millionaires, had lost among them six millions sterling, and were left, probably for life, poor instead of comfortable men.
It is probable that this particular contest may be renewed, for the parties to it are strongly excited, and, as we under- stand the matter, neither can claim a decided victory; and even if a peace is arranged this time it is certain that cam- paigning will shortly be renewed. What else are the million- aires to do ? They will not sit still and let the world roll on without their help any more than the Governments will. They want excitement like other Kings, they have the ambitions of other Kings, they enjoy "war with its happy chances" like other Kings, and they will at intervals fight like other Kings, utterly regardless of the suffering their contests may inflict upon the lookers-on. We have called them Kings,
but perhaps we could better describe their position as that of the great feudal Barons of old, with their instincts, their ambitions, their jealousies, and above all, their pride. Those who come closer to their proceedings than we can pretend to do, declare that American millionaires have learned from long experience, especially in the rate-cutting wars, an incurable distrust of each other, that their feuds often outlast their battles, and that they will, when provoked, fight like the old Barons, for prizes which they know from the first are not worth the expenditure and the risks they are certain to incur. To use the old terminology, they feel dishonoured if they reject a challenge, they will fight for a reputation which is to them quite real, and if they cannot plead that they fight for their ladye's eyes," they can and do plead that the jeering of their acquaintance and rivals because they have shown the white feather is to them intolerable. It may be said that, as they only injure themselves, their fighting does no harm; but it is not so. Their charges are not in staked-out lists like those of the pleasant field of Ashby, but over wayfarers on the road. In every joust on the Stock Exchange dozens of unarmed citizens must and do fall. In other phrase, every one of their contests opens a grand lottery in which the prizes are so great that average men will at any risk buy tickets and suffer for the buying. Let them suffer, you say, it is their own fault. So it is, and so is the ruin of those who visit Monte Carlo ; but it is the kind of fault for which moralists and statesmen in all countries have refused, after long and painful experience, to allow opportunity, and which the wise, even though they can think of no formula completely justifying their opinion, have unanimously con- demned.
We suspect that before the century is old, even if no attempt is made to limit fortunes—and though this now appears to be a dream, an enlargement of the scope of Thellusson's Act is not beyond the bounds of possibility— many efforts will be made to prevent these grand Stock Exchange tournaments, and to impede the possession of national systems of communication or of necessaries vital to the community by single individuals. The latter end could be secured by utilising the idea once strongly pressed by Lord Dalhousie upon a Ministry and carried out by him in India,— that is, by asserting the right of the State to take over any monopoly whatever. Nobody could then buy a railway, or all the coal mines in a country, or all the salt mines, or all the electric shares without the risk, when he became a nuisance, of the representatives of the people smashing his combina- tions. The former is, however, excessively difficult. We
suppose it could be done by insisting that any Stock Ex- change should be a legal corporation, and authorising that
corporation to stop business or cancel bargains whenever public good imperatively required it. The Committee of our Stock Exchange claims some such power now, and has in a way used it in this very week, and we suppose its claim could be fortified by legal enactment. The reluctance to seek such an enactment will no doubt be very great, busi- ness men being wisely jealous of interference from Legis- latures, and the instinct of gambling being inherent in every Stock Exchange; but still, after some bigger scene of slaughter than usual opinion might grow fierce, as it did on the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, and demand some very strong measure indeed. And though the "scene of slaughter," as we have called it, is not anticipated, it is as certain to come as a war for the distribution of, say, Turkey. Pride grows with what it feeds on, the millionaires of to-morrow will be men of less self-restraint than those of to-day, the hunger of the public for unearned wealth will increase with every development of the intelligence which enables them to see what wealth really gives, and there may be a mania to which even the Mississippi scheme was a faint excitement. The millionaires who come out of that still prosperous will have a bad quarter of an hour, and the Stock Exchanges may be placed under laws a good deal more stringent than those by which William II. has tried to limit financial aberrations on the Berlin Stock Exchange.
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