IV

It is a mistake to suppose that the great captains of industry, the great organizers and directors of manufacture and commerce and monetary exchange, are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth.  Too often they suffer the vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the idleness and ostentation of their wives and children, who “devote themselves,” it may be, “to expense regardless of pleasure”; but we ought not to misunderstand even that, or condemn it unjustly.  The masters of industry are often too busy with their own sober and momentous calling to have time or spare thought enough to govern their own households.  A king may be too faithful a statesman to be a watchful father.  These men are not fascinated by the glitter of gold:  the appetite for power has got hold upon them.  They are in love with the exercise of their faculties upon a great scale; they are organizing and overseeing a great part of the life of the world.  No wonder they are captivated.  Business is more interesting that pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot said, and when once the mind has caught its zest, there’s no disengaging it.  The world has reason to be grateful for the fact.

It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties of the man whom the world was afterward to know, not as a prince among merchants—­for the world forgets merchant princes—­but as a prince among benefactors; for beneficence breeds gratitude, gratitude admiration, admiration fame, and the world remembers its benefactors.  Business, and business alone, interested him, or seemed to him worth while.  The first time he was asked to subscribe money for a benevolent object he declined.  Why should he subscribe?  What affair would be set forward, what increase of efficiency would the money buy, what return would it bring in?  Was good money to be simply given away, like water poured on a barren soil, to be sucked up and yield nothing?  It was not until men who understood benevolence on its sensible, systematic, practical, and really helpful side explained it to him as an investment that his mind took hold of it and turned to it for satisfaction.  He began to see that education was a thing of infinite usury; that money devoted to it would yield a singular increase to which there was no calculable end, an increase in perpetuity—­increase of knowledge, and therefore of intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after generation with new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world’s fitness for affairs—­an invisible but intensely real spiritual usury beyond reckoning, because compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age.  Henceforward beneficence was as interesting to him as business—­was, indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new forces in a commerce which no man could bind or limit.