It may have appealed to the young Rockefeller, clerk in a Chicago house, that to be rich was itself a supreme end; in the first flush of the discovery that he was immensely rich, he may have thanked Heaven as if for a supreme good, and spoken to a Sunday school gathering as if he knew himself for the most favoured of men.  But all that happened twenty years ago or more.  One does not keep on in that sort of satisfaction; one settles down to the new facts.  And such men as Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Pierpont Morgan do not live in a made and protected world with their minds trained, tamed and fed and shielded from outside impressions as royalties do.  The thought of the world has washed about them; they have read and listened to the discussion of themselves for some decades; they have had sleepless nights of self-examination.  To succeed in acquiring enormous wealth does not solve the problem of life; indeed, it reopens it in a new form.  “What shall I do with myself?” simply recurs again.  You may have decided to devote yourself to getting on, getting wealthy.  Well, you have got it.  Now, again, comes the question:  “What shall I do?”

Mr. Pierpont Morgan, I am told, collected works of art.  I can understand that satisfying a rich gentleman of leisure, but not a man who has felt the sensation of holding great big things in his great big hands.  Saul, going out to seek his father’s asses, found a kingdom—­and became very spiritedly a king, and it seems to me that these big industrial and financial organisers, whatever in their youth they proposed to do or be, must many of them come to realise that their organising power is up against no less a thing than a nation’s future.  Napoleon, it is curious to remember once wanted to run a lodging-house, and a man may start to corner oil and end the father of a civilisation.

Now, I am disposed to suspect at times that an inkling of such a realisation may have come to some of these very rich men.  I am inclined to put it among the possibilities of our time that it may presently become clearly and definitely the inspiring idea of many of those who find themselves predominantly rich.  I do not see why these active rich should not develop statesmanship, and I can quite imagine them developing very considerable statesmanship.  Because these men were able to realise their organising power in the absence of economic organisation, it does not follow that they will be fanatical for a continuing looseness and freedom of property.  The phase of economic liberty ends itself, as Marx long ago pointed out.  The American business world becomes more and more a managed world with fewer and fewer wild possibilities of succeeding.  Of all people the big millionaires should realise this most acutely, and, in fact, there are many signs that they do.  It seems to me that the educational zeal of Mr. Andrew Carnegie and the university and scientific endowments of Mr. Rockefeller are not merely showy benefactions;