MR. VANDERBILT'S EXPENDITURE.
THAT men with whom equality is an ideal should dislike the existence of millionaires is logical enough ; but why they should object to their expenditure when it does not demoralise is, to our minds, an intellectual puzzle. The more the mammoth accumulators spend, the less they will have, which, ex hypothesi, is a good result ; while if they spend to the point of ruining themselves, they are getting rid of a class which is declared to be objectionable by the very men who condemn their excessive expenditure. The absurdityexists, however, and this week it is the portion of Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt to suffer under what seems to us most unmerited blame. We have no prejudice in his favour, for he is always described as being, like his father, a singularly hard man; he is accused of foolish ostentation, and he has certainly done less for great public objects than one would expect of a man with his exceptionally large resources. He is, however, scolded on this occasion absolutely without reason. He has just finished building a palace for himself in New York, which, it is said, has cost him a million sterling, the garden alone, which is small, having involved an expenditure of 275,000 ; and this is condemned everywhere, as if the outlay were an injury to the community. We do not quite believe in the figures; for though Eaton Hall is said to have cost as much first and last, that splendid edifice has been nearly rebuilt twice; and we do not see how, on a city house, the money can have been laid out. Let us, however, accept the statement as true, and still we fail to see the ground of the popular objection. To begin with, all outlay, like all wealth, is comparative ; and a man with an ordinary fortune, who houses himself to his satisfaction, at an expenditure equal to 10 per cent. of his capital, is considered to have done a reasonable thing. Mr. Vanderbilt has not, even accepting the highest estimate of his outlay, spent 5 per cent. of his fortune on his residence, and he is denounced at once for his luxury and his folly. Why P He has realised a fancy for which, if he had been a European King or an English noble, nobody, provided he spent his own money, would have thought of censuring him. His fancy does no one any harm, while it does New York this good—that the city now possesses a private house which mast for a century or two elevate the standard of such houses, and tend, at least, to the improvement of domestic architecture. Of course, if Mr. Vanderbilt has built a vulgar house, or a house which will not last, or a house in which good materials have been badly used, so that there is no proportion between expenditure and result, he deserves, or at all events has incurred, severe criticism from artists and from experts; but that is not the charge against him. It is said boldly that he has spent too much, and we want to hear a clear reason for the charge. Setting aside the argument that if a man has a right to any part of his own fortune he has a right to 5 per cent. of it, we want to know how Mr. Vanderbilt could have expended the money better. He could have given it away, it is true, but in giving it away he would probably have enriched hundreds of people who had done nothing to earn the riches, which on the Radical theory, as well as ours, is a most injurious process ; or he could have done something for New York which should benefit the whole community, but then that is precisely what he has been doing. Mr. Vanderbilt has not wasted his million or hoarded his million; but has expended the whole of his million in the way Radicals most approve, that is, in providing work for artisans at the highest possible wages. He has probably raised the scale of wages in half-a- dozen trades, builders, masons, plumbers, carpenters, joiners, painters, paperhangers, gliders, and glaziers, and that in the very best and most educative way, by demanding from them work decidedly better and more likely to last than any they have been hitherto accustomed to execute. He has not only made, say, two hundred heads of families comfortable by finding them liberally paid work, but has made them for ever more capable of earning high wages than they were before. Suppose he has spent £20,000 on a marble stair- case, he has, if we assume, as we must, that he has paid fair rates, given the marble cutters of New York that amount of work, while increasing their capacity to choose fine marble, to lay marble " well and true," as the old phrase has it, and to fix marble with such solidity that it shall last in its place as long as the very walls. Nobody says that marble- laying is immoral work, and if it is good work, then any im. provement in choosing, in laying, or in fixing it, is work still better, is, in fact, an aid to that development of artisans' skill which we, as well as Trade-Unions, think a benefit to civilisation. If Mr. Vanderbilt had given out such work at such prices during a temporary slackness of the trades con- cerned, every one would have admired him, and the fact that he did it to gratify himself, though it detracts from his motive, in no way diminishes the beneficial character of his expenditure. There may have been something of ostentation in his building plans; but then, we take it, something of ostentation has entered into the structure of every grand secular edifice since Ninus finished that palace with its hanging gardens. Would the Daily Chronicle really wish to be rid of the noble palaces in Florence or Genoa, or to reduce London to one mighty multiple of Bethnal Green P If it would, it is daily publishing nonsense in its appeals to London to make itself cleaner and more beautiful and more worthy of its position among the great cities of the earth,—appeals with which, if they were a little less poetic in form, we should most heartily sympathise. But Mr. Vanderbilt, it is said, expended £75,000 on his garden, and actually "tore down" a house which had cost £25,000, to increase its space; and is not that abnormal or monstrous luxury P Well, we venture to say the garden of Grosvenor House is worth at least that as building land, and as for " tearing down," we only wish every rich man in London would tear down a big house or two and turn the space into garden-ground, so giving us all a little more room to breathe. It is the builder, not the destroyer, who threatens the sanitation, and therefore in the long-run the civilisation, of every great city. The London County Council will, we venture to say, before ten years are over, have far outdone Mr. Vanderbilt as a destroyer, and it is certainly not by the devotees of hygiene, or of aesthetics, or of municipal progress, that the Council will be blamed.
We have met our adversaries fairly on their own ground, with their own argument of the good of the community, but we have another to bring forward which is even stronger, though we do not expect them to sympathise with it. We maintain that every man has a right to make the largest fortune he honestly can, even though that fortune should appear to his poorer neighbours too colossal. It is understood of course that the word " honestly " includes liberal dealing with subordinates, fair consideration for public convenience, and an avoidance of all kinds of unjust competition, in which we should include underselling intended only to get rid of a rival or to establish a monopoly. Subject to those reserves we cannot see where a limit is to be placed on human energy, or why, if we allow a man to accumulate a thousand pounds in excess of his immediate needs, we should not allow him to accumulate a hundred millions. He can- not do it without producing something or distributing something, — that is, without providing thousands with means of livelihood which without him they would not have obtained. Take the largest and most successful concern opened out in our time—the Suez Canal—and just consider how many thousands are " employed," that means " made happy," by a work which might easily have belonged to a single man, and very nearly did. The right to inherit is another matter, not within our present purview ; but the right to accumulate seems to us clear, and the right to accumulate involves the right to spend at will. The owner, of course, is responsible for his spending, whether his fortune is ten pounds or ten millions, but, subject to the laws of the land and some easily understood social rules, his responsibility is to God, and not to his fellow-men. If he likes to save, let him save ; if he likes a fine house, let him outdo the domes aurea ; if he prefers a pleasaunce, let kim make a pleasaunce just as large as he chooses, up to the point where he is visibly interfering with the power of his poorer neighbours to earn their bread. He is a free man spending his own money, and indulging his own whims. The right of society to give him orders as to his spendings no more exists than the right of a Sultan. Every one who writes of Constantinople or Teheran or Pekin, tells us that in those -cities no one, unless protected by official rank or foreign influence, dare make a public exhibition of his wealth, lest it should excite the envy of the powerful; and that statement, we notice, is always quoted by reviewers as proof positive of the absence of civilised se _way. Is the tyranny any better
because the tyrant is a mob ? The secret idea underlying the criticisms on Mr. Vanderbilt—of whose personal history we know little except that his railways usually pay dividends— is that he has no business in a Republic to " !;aunt" his wealth so insolently, precisely the argument on which Mahmoud the Terrible used to base his orders for stripping an over-rich Armenian. If Mr. Vanderbilt is vulgar enough to flaunt wealth, why should he not flaunt it, or what does the community gain when he hides it up in jewels or State bonds ? But it is said, when Mr. Vanderbilt gives a ball he lines an enormous ball-room with flowers, which may cost thousands of pounds sterling. That is true enough, and because he does it, the florists in half-a-dozen Southern States are en- couraged to grow flowers, and forward them to New York to the benefit of all who believe that of all the amenities of civili- sation, flowers are at once the most beautiful and the most inno- cent. If Mr. Vanderbilt, to get the flowers, neglects other and higher duties—the duty, for instance, of distributing a portion of his wealth, namely, the portion which he can bring himself voluntarily to give, for the benefit of the indigent—he may be deserving of reprehension ; but in the purchase of the flowers themselves there is nothing to reprehend. Every man has a right to a certain amount of waste, if that is his reward for exertion; and it is the proportion of waste to means, not the total wasted, which involves a moral question. It is the hunger for equality which prompts all these lectures, implied or openly expressed; and in satisfying that hunger " society " is raised into a sort of Czar or Sultan with prerogatives which the most autocratic Monarch never claimed. Even Henry VIII. never reprimanded Wolsey for building too beautiful a house, though Wolsey found it expedient to give it to his Sovereign. The Radicals of England and America would apparently forgive a new Wolsey if he kept his wealth in barrels of coin, and only flame with wrath if he expended it in finding work for thousands upon the adornment of a palace home.
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