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 he 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 £5,000 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,

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 pretences-the rudimentary pocket on the back of a barrister's gown is an example-by 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.

Even the prejudice against manual labor is vanishing. In the 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 companion. The bricklayer, proud of having so distinguished a cell mate, eagerly gave the required testimony. In the great Irish 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 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, and matrimonial. Besides, public opinion, growing continually stronger against drones in the hive, begins to threaten, and even to execute, differentiation of taxation against unearned incomes;

But

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.

Why Almsgiving is a Waste of Money.

The extremities to which the millionaire is reduced by this closing up of old channels of bequest are such that he sometimes leaves 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 saved, I lost what I spent, I had : what I gave, I have." But woe 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, this difficulty is partly created by the "deserving poor" theory. I remember once, at a time when I made daily use of the reading-room of the British Museum-a magnificent communistic institution-I gave a 2 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,

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