"T HE LANDLORD OF NEW YORK." T HERE is something pathetic about
the death, or rather the life, of John Jacob Astor. He was, in a sense, perhaps the richest private person in the world, our word " perhaps " being inserted to cover two doubtful cases of which we have heard among South American proprietors. He was not, it is true, if we may trust American estimates, some of which are based on official returns of taxation, the possessor of the largest fortune in the Union, and three or four American in- comes made there exceed his ; but of all simple citizens, he drew the largest annual revenue from sources independent of the chances of business and speculation. His house-rents, and the dividends on shares and bonds accumulated out of those house- rents, yielded him, it is said, nearly a million sterling a year, burdened only by a payment of one-sixth of that sum—a third of the income of his father's property—to his sister for life. No solid income approaching that amount belongs to any man in Great Britain, nor does any one possess it on the Continent who is not either a reigning Sovereign like the Emperor of Russia —who is said to draw £700,000 a year from his mines alone— or a quasi-sovereign like the head of the Lichtensteins, or the late Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, supposed to have been by far the richest person, not a King and not a trader, throughout the European world. The American's fortune, moreover, was unhampered by the necessity for maintaining a traditional splendour, by vast permanent establishments, or by the usual curse of rich men, sons whom neither advice nor authority will keep within reasonable bounds. Yet Mr. Astor, possessor of wealth which even to men dealing with the large figures involved in the commercial transactions of to-day seems like a day-dream, able to spend an assured income greatly exceeding £15,000 a week, derived personally no benefit whatever from the overplas of his riches, the degree,—that is, in which they exceeded a liberal idea of "competence." He is said by all accounts to have been an unusually quiet man, almost a recluse in his personal habits, and very little anxious to assert himself, and most probably was a man stilled, as were at least two men whom the writer has intimately known, by a conscious liability to the terrible form of heart-disease which ultimately caused his end. He did the work he had to do, which was considerable—for the Astors have always been the managers of their vast estate, and not mere receivers of ground-rents—conscientiously and well ; but the toil was either wearisome to him or distasteful to him, for he told a lady who once congratulated him on his unique position, that he was but the chief clerk in his own establishment, and that the money brought him nothing but a certain dull anxiety. He may have exaggerated, or the lady may; but it is quite possible that he spoke the literal truth. The priggish philo- sophy of our fathers that wealth is of no value, is as untrue as their equally priggish proverb that "beauty is only skin-deep" —who flays the beautiful P—for adequate wealth, wealth bearing some relation not only to a man's actual wants, but to his idea of what those wants should be, is at once freedom and power, freedom to live his own life, power to realise his matured projects ; but wealth like Mr. Astor's so transcends all personal wants, that, especially in America, it brings to a man like him absolutely nothing. We suppose an ambitious man could get power in the States with money, could buy a Legislature or two, for example ; but then, that would only be power to job, and a man like Mr. Astor did not want to job. He could not use the bought power to any good purpose, to place the distribution of justice, for example, beyond the mass vote ; for there is one thing an American Legislature has no power to sell, and that is the wills of its constituents on subjects they understand. A mammoth millionaire might conceivably abolish the penalty of death in New Jersey by buying the pardon of each successive criminal sentenced to death ; but all the mammoths together could not buy the abolition of trial by jury. There is no field for the gratification of ambition through money, even had Mr. Astor been actuated by ambition, which he undoubtedly was not, and in social ambition he had nothing left to gain. He was at the top, as well known by name in every State as the Duke of Westminster in England, and everywhere, too, known as a man to be personally respected. That indefinable but most influential discredit for vulgarity which attaches itself to some of the greatest of American millionaires did not attach itself to Mr. Astor, who was regarded socially as entitled to equality, apart from his
wealth, with the most exclusive. What was a man, then, born without passionate interests, and cut off by health from passionate excitements, to do with dreamy wealth ? That "sustained stateliness of daily life" of which Lord Beaconsfield wrote as the charm of the great English nobles, is not possible in America ; for even if the millionaire himself desires it, it demands two conditions, a vast retinue and public acquiescence, neither of which in the Northern States is purchasable with money. The stately servants would see something ridiculous in their servitude, and the outside public, though it not only tolerates but admires some kinds of lavishness, would jeer at a princely mode of life. You may, of course, spend anything, even a million a year, in philanthropy or public benefactions ; but the nearly or quite universal refusal of hereditary millionaires to do anything of the kind, points to some strong reason, which we believe to be this, that the position of general benefactor speedily becomes, to any one who does not enjoy self- advertisement as a luxury, insupportable. It takes a man who is at once good and vulgar to be a money-giver on the grand scale or in a general way. We suppose a man with strong nerves might, by selecting a single object, escape some of the penalties of such an attitude; might, for example, cover the States with free libraries, or give an ample supply of water to the great cities, or found in each one of them a nursing institute devoted solely to the provision of skilled nurses for the solace of incurable disease. But to take up a life-work of that sort implies that the taker has strong, even passionate imaginative interests, which the majority of men have not. Mr. Astor certainly had not. He gave, when required, in a becoming manner ; he exercised a constant kindly charity ; and he gave largely, both of time and money, to the great library his father had founded for New York. But there, appa- rently, he stopped, devoting the immense mass of his fortune to quiet accumulation. Whether he did this, as Lord Henry Cavendish, the chemist, did, out of pure indifference, seeing no reason why his balance should not burden his banker —Lord Henry's banker, it is said, actually complained of his, possibly from dread of its sudden withdrawal—or whether there lingered in Mr. Astor's mind some trace of his grand- father's—the speculator in furs—ambition to be the richest man on the planet, was probably known only to himself, and to himself with no exactness ; but, at all events, that is what he did. He lived quietly, sought no grand end, doubled his vast fortune, and died of angina pectoris," complicated by the pre- vailing influenza," that is, probably brought up to the point at which pain kills by the depression attendant on the Russian pest.
• "There is a proof," says some one, "of the ultimate equality of men's lots : the richest man in the world dies of one of its most painful diseases." There is a proof, much more per- fect, that certain forms of priggishness are inextinguishable. Common folk, and more especially overworked or overtroubled women, die of angina so frequently that they have given to the pain a common English name, "breast-pang ;" and where is their solace from wealth P We do not believe in equality of lots, in this world at all events, any more than we believe in equality of conditions, and doubt, moreover, whether any such thing exists in any other world. Why should it P The Creator makes omnibus-horses as well as hunters, and the equality in their lots is not perceptible to human intelligence, which is all that upon this subject any one has to depend on. The lesson of such a career as Mr. Astor's, as it seems to us, is a far more useful one—at least, we 'see no use in attempting by false explanations to smooth over the fact that there is an element of the inexplicable in God's government of the world, to be met only by simple faith—that there is a limit beyond which wealth has no appreciable effect upon its possessor at all, probably brings him no misery, and certainly brings him only infinitesimal happiness. That limit is clearly freedom to act as his intellect and conscience suggest. The platitude that wealth has no value is rubbish, as great rubbish as it would be to say that health was nothing to be grateful for. A man may be happy without means, or with insufficient means ; but he is not free, and freedom is needful to make happiness other than an imperfect and intermittent condition of being. But it is true that, freedom being granted, happiness and wealth have no natural proportion to each other, and true that, after a point, they cease to have any inter-relation at all. Not only cannot any man eat two dinners a day because he is rich enough to pay for them, but he cannot buy anything whatever that
helps to make up happiness in proportion to his wealth. It is always assumed, when men are lecturing other people into giving, that he can, if he will only spend in the philanthropic way; but it is not true. It was not only as good of that widow to give her two mites, as for a well- to-do man to give his bank-balance, but if she was one of those who derive pleasure from self-sacrifice, she was just as -much pleased, or more, in exact proportion to the self-sacrifice. 'To benefit a nation is greater than to benefit a province, and may be more obligatory ; but it is not any greater cause of happiness, supposing always that in either case you have done -all you wanted to do. It is the fulfilment of the wish which muses the pleasure, not the bigness of the wish in area. It may be a duty in a man to give in proportion to his means— though Christianity seems to limit that idea by insisting on -the necessity of cheerfulness, as if the " duty " attached to the emotion rather than to the quantity given—but he has no right to expect proportionate happiness in return. He might as -well expect to get good digestion in proportion to his outlay on food. We dare say a good many people will tell us that is self-evident; but if it is so, we only wish the evidence were patent to a good many lay preachers round us. To listen to them, one would not only believe that the duty of a man like Mr. Astor was to give his whole surplus to the poor—which may be true or false, though, if true, it is fatal to civilisation —but that, if he did it, his happiness would be as great as his fortune was big. That is not true in the very least, is as false as the cognate assertion that to do one's duty is always a source of pleasure. It is very often a source of pain; and what -then P It has to be done all the same.
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