The "Goldfish" Part 10

This utter ignorance of actual life not only keeps us at a distance from the people of our own time but renders our ideas of history equally vague, abstract and unprofitable. I believe it would be an excellent thing if, beginning with the age of about ten years, no child were allowed to eat anything until he was able to tell where it was produced, what it cost and how it was prepared. If this were carried out in every department of the child's existence he would have small need of the superficial education furnished by most of our inst.i.tutions of learning.

Our children are taught about the famines of history when they cannot recognize a blade of wheat or tell the price of a loaf of bread, or how it is made.

I would begin the education of my boy--him of the tango and balkline billiards--with a study of himself, in the broad use of the term, before I allowed him to study about other people or the history of nations. I would seat him in a chair by the fire and begin with his feet. I would inquire what he knew about his shoes--what they were made of, where the substance came from, the cost of its production, the duty on leather, the process of manufacture, the method of transportation of goods, freight rates, retailing, wages, repairs, how shoes were polished--this would begin, if desired, a new line of inquiry as to the composition of said polish, cost, and so on--comparative durability of hand and machine work, introduction of machines into England and its effect on industrial conditions. I say I would do all this; but, of course, I could not. I would have to be an educated man in the first place. Why, beginning with that dusty little pair of shoes, my boy and I might soon be deep in Interstate Commerce and the Theory of Malthus--on familiar terms with Thomas A. Edison and Henry George!

And the next time my son read about a Tammany politician giving away a pair of shoes to each of his adherents it would mean something to him--as much as any other master stroke of diplomacy.

I would instruct every boy in a practical knowledge of the house in which he lives, give him a familiarity with simple tools and a knowledge of how to make small repairs and to tinker with the water pipes. I would teach him all those things I now do not know myself--where the homeless man can find a night's lodging; how to get a disorderly person arrested; why bottled milk costs fifteen cents a quart; how one gets his name on the ballot if he wants to run for alderman; where the Health Department is located, and how to get vaccinated for nothing.

By the time we had finished we would be in a position to understand the various editorials in the morning papers which now we do not read. Far more than that, my son would be brought to a realization that everything in the world is full of interest for the man who has the knowledge to appreciate its significance. "A primrose by a river's brim" should be no more suggestive, even to a lake-poet, than a Persian rug or a rubber shoe. Instead of the rug he will have a vision of the patient Afghan in his mountain village working for years with unrequited industry; instead of the shoe he will see King Leopold and hear the lamentations of the Congo.

My ignorance of everything beyond my own private bank account and stomach is due to the fact that I have selfishly and foolishly regarded these two departments as the most important features of my existence. I now find that my financial and gastronomical satisfaction has been purchased at the cost of an infinite delight in other things. I am mentally out of condition.

Apart from this brake on the wheel of my intelligence, however, I suffer an even greater impediment by reason of the fact that, never having acquired a thorough groundwork of elementary knowledge, I find I cannot read with either pleasure or profit. Most adult essays or histories presuppose some such foundation.

Recently I have begun to buy primers--such as are used in the elementary schools--in order to acquire the information that should have been mine at twenty years of age. And I have resolved that in my daily reading of the newspapers I will endeavor to look up on the map and remember the various places concerning which I read any news item of importance, and to a.s.similate the facts themselves. It is my intention also to study, at least half an hour each day, some simple treatise on science, politics, art, letters or history. In this way I hope to regain some of my interest in the activities of mankind. If I cannot do this I realize now that it will go hard with me in the years that are drawing nigh. I shall, indeed, then lament that "I have no pleasure in them."

It is the common practice of business men to say that when they reach a certain age they are going to quit work and enjoy themselves. How this enjoyment is proposed to be attained varies in the individual case. One man intends to travel or live abroad--usually, he believes, in Paris.

Another is going into ranching or farming. Still another expects to give himself up to art, music and books. We all have visions of the time when we shall no longer have to go downtown every day and can indulge in those pleasures that are now beyond our reach.

Unfortunately the experience of humanity demonstrates the inevitability of the law of Nature which prescribes that after a certain age it is practically impossible to change our habits, either of work or of play, without physical and mental misery.

Most of us take some form of exercise throughout our lives--riding, tennis, golf or walking. This we can continue to enjoy in moderation after our more strenuous days are over; but the manufacturer, stock broker or lawyer who thinks that after his sixtieth birthday he is going to be able to find permanent happiness on a farm, loafing round Paris or reading in his library will be sadly disappointed. His habit of work will drive him back, after a year or so of wretchedness, to the factory, the ticker or the law office; and his habit of play will send him as usual to the races, the club or the variety show.

One cannot acquire an interest by mere volition. It is a matter of training and of years. The pleasures of to-day will eventually prove to be the pleasures of our old age--provided they continue to be pleasures at all, which is more than doubtful.

As we lose the capacity for hard work we shall find that we need something to take its place--something more substantial and less unsatisfactory than sitting in the club window or taking in the Broadway shows. But, at least, the seeds of these interests must be sown now if we expect to gather a harvest this side of the grave.

What is more natural than to believe that in our declining years we shall avail ourselves of the world's choicest literature and pa.s.s at least a substantial portion of our days in the delightful companionship of the wisest and wittiest of mankind? That would seem to be one of the happiest uses to which good books could be put; but the hope is vain.

The fellow who does not read at fifty will take no pleasure in books at seventy.

My club is full of dozens of melancholy examples of men who have forgotten how to read. They have spent their entire lives perfecting the purely mechanical aspects of their existences. The mind has practically ceased to exist, so far as they are concerned. They have built marvelous mansions, where every comfort is instantly furnished by contrivances as complicated and accurate as the machinery of a modern warship. The doors and windows open and close, the lights are turned on and off, and the elevator stops--all automatically. If the temperature of a room rises above a certain degree the heating apparatus shuts itself off; if it drops too low something else happens to put it right again. The servants are swift, silent and decorous. The food is perfection. Their motors glide noiselessly to and fro. Their establishments run like fine watches.

They have had to make money to achieve this mechanical perfection; they have had no time for anything else during their active years. And, now that those years are over, they have nothing to do. Their minds are almost as undeveloped as those of professional pugilists. Dinners and drinks, backgammon and billiards, the lightest opera, the trashiest novels, the most sensational melodrama are the most elevating of their leisure's activities. Read? Hunt? Farm? Not much! They sit behind the plate-gla.s.s windows and bet on whether more limousines will go north than south in the next ten minutes.

If you should ask one of them whether he had read some book that was exciting discussion among educated people at the moment, he would probably look at you blankly and, after remarking that he had never cared for economics or history--as the case might be--inquire whether you preferred a "Blossom" or a "Tornado." Poor vacuous old c.o.c.ks! They might be having a green and hearty old age, surrounded by a group of the choicest spirits of all time.

Upstairs in the library there are easy-chairs within arm's reach of the best fellows who ever lived--adventurers, story-tellers, novelists, explorers, historians, rhymers, fighters, essayists, vagabonds and general liars--Immortals, all of them.

You can take your pick and if he bores you send him packing without a word of apology. They are good friends to grow old with--friends who in hours of weariness, of depression or of gladness may be summoned at will by those of us who belong to the Brotherhood of Educated Men--of which, alas! I and my a.s.sociates are no longer members.

CHAPTER V

MY MORALS

The concrete evidence of my success as represented by my acc.u.mulated capital--outside of my uptown dwelling house--amounts, as I have previously said, to about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This is invested princ.i.p.ally in railroad and mining stocks, both of which are subject to considerable fluctuation; and I have also substantial holdings in industrial corporations. Some of these companies I represent professionally. As a whole, however, my investments may be regarded as fairly conservative. At any rate they cause me little uneasiness.

My professional income is regular and comes with surprisingly little effort. I have as clients six manufacturing corporations that pay me retainers of twenty-five hundred dollars each, besides my regular fees for services rendered. I also represent two banks and a trust company.

All this is fixed business and most of it is attended to by younger men, whom I employ at moderate salaries. I do almost no detail work myself, and my junior partners relieve me of the drawing of even important papers; so that, though I am constantly at my office, my time is spent in advising and consulting.

I dictate all my letters and rarely take a pen in my hand. Writing has become laborious and irksome. I even sign my correspondence with an ingenious rubber stamp that imitates my scrawling signature beyond discovery. If I wish to know the law on some given point I press a b.u.t.ton and tell my managing clerk what I want. In an hour or two he hands me the authorities covering the issue in question in typewritten form. It is extraordinarily simple and easy. Yet only yesterday I heard of a middle-aged man, whom I knew to be a peculiarly well-equipped all-around lawyer, who was ready to give up his private practice and take a place in any reputable office at a salary of thirty-five hundred dollars!

Most of my own time is spent in untangling mixed puzzles of law and fact, and my clients are comparatively few in number, though their interests are large. Thus I see the same faces over and over again. I lunch daily at a most respectable eating club; and here, too, I meet the same men over and over again. I rarely make a new acquaintance downtown; in fact I rarely leave my office during the day. If I need to confer with any other attorney I telephone. There are dozens of lawyers in New York whose voices I know well--yet whose faces I have never seen.

My office is on the nineteenth floor of a white marble building, and I can look down the harbor to the south and up the Hudson to the north. I sit there in my window like a cliffdweller at the mouth of his cave.

When I walk along Wall Street I can look up at many other hundreds of these caves, each with its human occupant. We leave our houses uptown, clamber down into a tunnel called the Subway, are shot five miles or so through the earth, and debouch into an elevator that rushes us up to our caves. Only between my house and the entrance to the Subway am I obliged to step into the open air at all. A curious life! And I sit in my chair and talk to people in mult.i.tudes of other caves near by, or caves in New Jersey, Washington or Chicago.

Louis XI used to be called "the human spider" by reason of his industry, but we modern office men are far more like human spiders than he, as we sit in the center of our webs of invisible wires. We wait and wait, and our lines run out across the length and breadth of the land--sometimes getting tangled, to be sure, so that it is frequently difficult to decide just which spider owns the web; but we sit patiently doing nothing save devising the throwing out of other lines.

We weave, but we do not build; we manipulate, buy, sell and lend, quarrel over the proceeds, and cover the world with our nets, while the ants and the bees of mankind labor, construct and manufacture, and struggle to harness the forces of Nature. We plan and others execute.

We d.i.c.ker, arrange, consult, cajole, bribe, pull our wires and extort; but we do it all in one place--the center of our webs and the webs are woven in our caves.

I figure that I spend about six hours each day in my office; that I sleep nearly nine hours; that I am in transit on surface cars and in subways at least one hour and a half more; that I occupy another hour and a half in bathing, shaving and dressing, and an hour lunching at midday. This leaves a margin of five hours a day for all other activities.

Could even a small portion of this time be spent consecutively in reading in the evening, I could keep pace with current thought and literature much better than I do; or if I spent it with my son and daughters I should know considerably more about them than I do now, which is practically nothing. But the fact is that every evening from the first of November to the first of May the motor comes to the door at five minutes to eight and my wife and I are whirled up or down town to a dinner party--that is, save on those occasions when eighteen or twenty people are whirled to us.

This short recital of my daily activities is sufficient to demonstrate that I lead an exceedingly narrow and limited existence. I do not know any poor men, and even the charities in which I am nominally interested are managed by little groups of rich ones. The truth is, I learned thirty years ago that if one wants to make money one must go where money is and cultivate the people who have it. I have no petty legal business--there is nothing in it. If I cannot have millionaires for clients I do not want any. The old idea that the young country lawyer could shove a pair of socks into his carpetbag, come to the great city, hang out his shingle and build up a practice has long since been completely exploded. The best he can do now is to find a clerkship at twelve hundred dollars a year.

Big business gravitates to the big offices; and when the big firms look round for junior partners they do not choose the struggling though brilliant young attorney from the country, no matter how large his general practice may have become; but they go after the youth whose father is a director in forty corporations or the president of a trust.

In the same way what time I have at my disposal to cultivate new acquaintances I devote not to the merely rich and prosperous but to the multi-millionaire--if I can find him--who does not even know the size of his income. I have no time to waste on the man who is simply earning enough to live quietly and educate his family. He cannot throw anything worth while in my direction; but a single crumb from the magnate's table may net me twenty or thirty thousand dollars. Thus, not only for social but for business reasons, successful men affiliate habitually only with rich people. I concede that is a rather sordid admission, but it is none the truth.

Money is the symbol of success; it is what we are all striving to get, and we naturally select the ways and means best adapted for the purpose.

One of the simplest is to get as near it as possible and stay there. If I make a friend of a struggling doctor or professor he may invite me to draw his will, which I shall either have to do for nothing or else charge him fifty dollars for; but the railroad president with whom I often lunch, and who is just as agreeable personally, may perhaps ask me to reorganize a railroad. I submit that, selfish as it all seems when I write it down, it would be hard to do otherwise.

I do not deliberately examine each new candidate for my friendship and select or reject him in accordance with a financial test; but what I do is to lead a social and business life that will constantly throw me only with rich and powerful men. I join only rich men's clubs; I go to resorts in the summer frequented only by rich people; and I play only with those who can, if they will, be of advantage to me. I do not do this deliberately; I do it instinctively--now. I suppose at one time it was deliberate enough, but to-day it comes as natural as using my automobile instead of a street car.

We have heard a great deal recently about a so-called Money Trust. The truth of the matter is that the Money Trust is something vastly greater than any mere aggregation of banks; it consists in our fundamental trust in money. It is based on our instinctive and ineradicable belief that money rules the destinies of mankind.

Everything is estimated by us in money. A man is worth so and so much--in dollars. The millionaire takes precedence of everybody, except at the White House. The rich have things their own way--and every one knows it. Ashamed of it? Not at all. We are the greatest sn.o.bs in the civilized world, and frankly so. We worship wealth because at present we desire only the things wealth can buy.

The sea, the sky, the mountains, the clear air of autumn, the simple sports and amus.e.m.e.nts of our youth and of the comparatively poor, pleasures in books, in birds, in trees and flowers, are disregarded for the fierce joys of acquisition, of the ownership in stocks and bonds, or for the no less keen delight in the display of our own financial superiority over our fellows.

We know that money is the key to the door of society. Without it our sons will not get into the polo-playing set or our daughters figure in the Sunday supplements. We want money to buy ourselves a position and to maintain it after we have bought it.

We want house on the sunny side of the street, with facades of graven marble; we want servants in livery and in b.u.t.tons--or in powder and breeches if possible; we want French chefs and the best wine and tobacco, twenty people to dinner on an hour's notice, supper parties and a little dance afterward at Sherry's or Delmonico's, a box at the opera and for first nights at the theaters, two men in livery for our motors, yachts and thirty-footers, shooting boxes in South Carolina, salmon water in New Brunswick, and regular vacations, besides, at Hot Springs, Aiken and Palm Beach; we want money to throw away freely and like gentlemen at Canfield's, Bradley's and Monte Carlo; we want clubs, country houses, saddle-horses, fine clothes and gorgeously dressed women; we want leisure and laughter, and a trip or so to Europe every year, our names at the top of the society column, a smile from the grand dame in the tiara and a seat at her dinner table--these are the things we want, and since we cannot have them without money we go after the money first, as the _sine qua non_.

We want these things for ourselves and we want them for our children. We hope our grandchildren will have them also, though about that we do not care so much. We want ease and security and the relief of not thinking whether we can afford to do things. We want to be lords of creation and to pa.s.s creation on to our descendants, exactly as did the n.o.bility of the _Ancien Regime_.