TILE DIGNITY OF MONEY.
T is very curious to notice the rapid decay of the old contempt 1 for " mere riches " among the aristocracy. Their idea a hundred years ago was to look down on wealth as something any tradesman might obtain, to prefer pedigree and privilege to all things ; but after these to exalt intellectual ability, or still better, artistic power. An actor or a sculptor might be a gentleman, but a millionaire could not be, was necessarily a parvenu who relied on his contemptible money and called for " some more curricles." The old peer had rather a pride in contrasting his poverty with the nabob's or merchant's wealth, in showing how little his social position depended upon such an accidental circumstance as the amount of his rent-roll. Wealth, when it included a right to dispose of seats in the Lower House, was indeed important as a direct source of power ; but wealth in itself was an attribute of vulgarity,—a feeling still surviving, we believe, in the Faubourg St. Germain, where the freaks of a Due de Doudeauville are tolerated, not because he is wealthy, but because he is also Larochejaquelein. Great nobles very often rejected wealth. Many of those who fought the Railways as nasty levelling things saw quite clearly the wealth they would bring, and many more struggled hard against suffering cities to rise upon their lands. The Earls of Abergavenny, we have been told, regarded the rise of Tunbridge Wells, a rise which will bring them scores of thousands a year, with a bitter hostility, and, as far as they could, prohibited it ; and mine after mine lay unopened in the North because great landlords could not endure the contact with the commercial world which would have resulted from opening them. That tone has been changing slowly for more than thirty years. Kings are now eager for money, eager to a degree which wonderfully diminishes their divinity in popular estimation, and great peers do not hesitate to attribute to money in itself and by itself a sort of dignity. The Prince Consort was a man who fairly sympathized with intellectual power, and had a good insight into the way the world was drifting, yet he wrote to say that his household ought to consist exclusively of persons very high born, very distinguished, " or very rich," the latter being quite a novel idea among German Princes, who up to 1815 liked wealth for themselves, though they managed their great estates most wretchedly, but did not respect it in their subjects. The Elector of Hesse's remark to a constitutional reformer was nearer their true feeling,—" What are you ?" " A brewer, your Highness." " Brewers shan't govern !" One would have expected that feeling to linger among the great nobles, but they are doing all they can to invest the possession of money with a sort of dignity,—of social dignity, at all events,— which is opposed to all the traditions of their order, as well as to their own real interests. Lord Salisbury, though head only of an Elizabethan family, is for many reasons a big Peer, and only three weeks ago he said in his place that in his opinion great wealth accumulated in business gave a claim to a seat in the Upper House ; that he wished the claim were allowed ; that the Lords ought to represent all kinds of property ; thereby, in his own judgment at all events, doing all the honour he could to the possession of cash. Lord Granville this very week talked from his place of the money Lord Cairns had made in his profession as one of his highest titles to respect, and the Peers do not seem to have thought the remark anything unusual. Even Lord Derby, who is supposed to represent aristocratic feeling more closely than any English statesman, and who for that reason carries the Lords in his pocket, and appoints the Irish representative Peers as fully as his father appointed members of the Lower House, treated wealth as if it were in itself a greatness, something which not only gave dignity to its possessor, but which ought to give dignity. This " House," he said, "rests upon a foundation of sure and settled property ; " it "ought to consist of men with large hereditary possessions," —ideas which, a hundred years ago, even if entertained, would scarcely have been expressed, and would have seemed to the House, then very poor, almost revolutionary.
This reverence for Money in masses is a new thing in the great, and one for which it is not very easy to account. We usually explain its existence in the little as a form of the servility which is the bane of English middle-class character ; but that theory,— the correctness of which we should dispute, believing that selfishness has more to do with the matter than servility,—will not account for its existence among long-descended magnates. It must rather be due to an unconscious exaggeration of the truth that in the modern world money is power, that when great things have to be done it is only the possessors of large masses of treasure who can do them, who can set multitudes in motion by their mere fiat. A man with a couple of millions, say, can do so much. We do not find, as a rule, that he does do it ; in this country, at all events, the old spirit which induced men to expend wealth in public enterprises having apparently decayed, partly from a decline, it may be, of care for the State, partly from a feeling that great things have passed beyond the range of individual capacities. The very rich own cities, but do not build them, though the Groavenors, in a curious, indirect way, are doing something like it ; and we cannot recall an instance of an immense benefaction,—say, full water-supply to a city, or a new university, or even a harbour,—unless given with a notion of ultimate repayment. Still, the potentiality of doing is always there,—Miss Burdett Coutta, for example, creates, as it were, by volition a market which is like a cathedral, and removes one grand trouble of a district, — and the magnates, relieved by their own wealth, wealth which is in many cases quite as new as that of the parvenus, from the ancient feeling of jealous dislike and suspicion, recognize that potentiality to the full. Or rather, to put it still more plainly, they always recognized it, but not possessing it themselves, tried hard to deny its existence, and now that the necessity for expressing an unreal contempt has passed away, they once more permit themselves to be sincere and frank.
We do not know that the new tone will be very beneficial to society, rather fear that it tends to inflict a more lasting injury than the old one. The pride of birth was a more absurd feeling, because it had leas of fact on which to rest,—the royal caste of Europe, which, on the theory of pedigree, would be the noblest, consisting, on the whole, of a number of inefficient and rather vulgar persons, who add little or nothing to human thought, and do not succeed in their hereditary business of governing ;—but still the pride of birth could not hurt any but those who displayed it. It was an incommunicable quality, and the aspiration for it could not increase the unrest or immorality of society. If there are Brahmins, there are Brahmins; let there be Brahmins, and Sudras are not hurt. But to give dignity to mere money is to increase, and in England to increase very rapidly, that thirst for its possession which of all the myriad tendencies of our time alarms observers most. It is not a new vice, for it developed itself in its most extreme forms in the later days of the Roman Republic, when capitalists like Cruses were openly recognized as powers in the State, and patricians of genius plunged into crime to repair their fortunes ; but it is new in our day in this form, as part of the thirst for power and for distinction, and it may work frightful mischief. In the United States, where it rages unchecked, it is destroying the purity of the Legislatures, of the judicial Bench, and of many branches of the Executive,—an Ambassador, for example, has just been convicted of selling his privilege of import in a way which must have destroyed his independence,—and is directly impairing the power of the Union, which finds every step unbearably expensive. The great capitalists there are gaining with the position the power of nobles. The laws are openly defied by men strong enough in their command of capital to " secure " not only juries but judges, and not only juries and judges, but entire legislatures, who pass their decrees with at least as much readiness as the Parliaments used to pass entailing Acts, such as the Newcastle, Shrewsbury, Pembroke, and other Acts, at the dictation of potent nobles. We do not hesitate to say that Mr. Vanderbilt, or Mr. Drew, or Mr. Fish, or Mr. Sprague could get things done by legislatures such as no English noble in the worst days of the oligarchy could have attempted; while as to their position, it is beginning to be that of the English county kings two hundred years ago. We have before us a number of the New York Tribune in which three columns of close type are devoted to an elaborate and slightly admiring history of a grand feud which has been raging for years between two families of Rhode Island, Sprague and Brown, and which affects all the politics of the State, and is not unfelt even in the politics of the Union. The two families belong to the manufacturing aristocracy, count their property by millions, and their " hands" by the ten thousand, and fight like the Cavendishes and the Stauleya of old whenever they can get a chance. The antagonism between them was distinctly felt in the war, affecting the Rhode Island regiments, to which the Browns really appointed officers, who are now censured by Mr. Sprague, and is now affecting the financial policy of the Union, Senator Sprague denouncing inflation with immense effect, moved, as he half-admitted in his speech, by antagonism to the rival House. As to the State offices, it seems clearly understood that the present representatives are nominees of Brown, and that Mr. Sprague, therefore, intends to turn them out, an end he will effect partly through his personal popularity, but chiefly through his position as a great employer of labour, he driving 250,000 spindles, employing 2,000 men in one only of seven sets of mills, and being master of nine immense companies, chiefly engaged in iron, the control of any one of which " would make a first-class man." In this very account, which appears in a journal at variance with him, he being suspected of free-trade proclivities, he and his rival are treated exactly as great nobles were a hundred years ago, their possessions are described with a sort of awe, the confidence of their retainers In them is eulogized, and their family ramifications are shown to be matters of grave political importance. The positions of Mr. Brown and Mr. Sprague are in fact held up as ideals to be attained, and as theycan be attained only by money, money in masses becomes the one thing sought, and its possession is held to extenuate almost any act, breaking open safes, buying judges, and bribing or " controlling legislatures included. Such acts are regarded as the purchase of seats was once regarded in England, as theoretically wrong, but still quasi-legitimate incidents in the use of power ; and we are not sure that the same toleration does not extend to those who take the money. We declare, strong Northerners as we are in sympathy, we begin to doubt if this thirst for wealth will not undermine the Republic, and its first cause is the dignity which American opinion begins to give to cash, the legitimacy with which it begins to invest its political and even its violent use. It is this tone which our aristocracy, it seems to us, are openly ready to foster, and it is one which may yet produce mischiefs greater than that mercantile readiness to swindle which has in the past five years created such a terrible amount of suffering. If Money ever gives dignity in England, we may rely upon it that the toleration alwal accorded in this country to the offences of the great will be extended to those of the plutocracy, and then it will take a national bankruptcy to bring back our moral tone.
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