The Gospel of Wealth.

 ———<>———

We publish to-day, by the special request of Mr Gladstone (says the Pall Mall Budget, of July 18), a remarkable article by Mr Andrew Carnegie, the well-known Pittsburgh ironmaster and millionaire, which appeared in the North American Review. The article had attracted the notice of Mr Gladstone, who has spoken in the highest terms with regard to it, and strongly urged its publication in this country. Mr Gladstone writes : — I have asked Mr Lloyd Bryce (North American Review) kindly to allow the republication in this country of the extremely interesting article on " Wealth,” by Mr Andrew Carnegie, which has just appeared in America ”

 THE PROBLEM OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF WEALTH.

 The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionised, within the past few hundred years. In former days there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, and environment of the chief and those of his retainers. The Indians are to-day where civilised man then was. When visiting the Sioux; I was led to the wigwam of the chief. It was just like the others in external appearance, and even within the difference was trifling between it and those of the poorest of his braves. The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to day measures the change which has come with civilisation. This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial. It is well, nay, essential, for the progress of the race, that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilisation, rather than that none should be so. Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor. Without wealth there can be no Mæcenas. The “good old times" were not good old times. Neither master nor servant was as well situated then as to-day. A relapse to old conditions would be disastrous to both —not the least so to him who serves and would sweep away civilisation with it. But whether the change be for good or ill it is upon us, beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticise the inevitable.

 THE CHANGE, AND THE PRICE WE PAY FOR IT. 

It is easy to see how the change has come. One illustration will serve for almost every phase of the cause. In the manufacture of products we have the whole story. It applies to all combinations of human industry, as stimulated nod enlarged by the inventions of this scientific age. Formerly articles were manufactured at the domestic hearth or in small shops which formed part of the household. The master and his apprentices worked side by side, the latter living with the master, and therefore subject to the same conditions. When these apprentices rose to be masters, there was little or no change is their mode of life, and they, in turn, educated in the same routine succeeding apprentices. There was, substantially, social, equality, and even political equality for those engaged in industrial pursuits had then little or no political voice in the State.

 THE PRICE WE PAY IS VERY GREAT.

 But the inevitable result of such a mode of manufacture was crude articles at high prices. To-day the world obtains commodities of excellent quality at prices which even the generation preceding this would have deemed incredible. In the commercial world similar causes have produced similar results, and the race is benefited thereby. The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford. What were the luxuries have become the necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the farmer had a few generations ago. The farmer has more luxuries than the landlord had, and is more richly clad and better housed. The landlord has books and pictures rarer, and appointments more artistic, than the King could then obtain. The price we pay for this salutary change is, no doubt, great. We assemble thousands of operatives in the factory, in the mine, and in the counting house, of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is little better than a myth. All intercourse with them is at an end. Rigid castes are formed, and, as usual, mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust. Each caste is without sympathy for the other, and ready to credit anything disparaging in regard to it. Under the law of competition, the employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies, among which the rates paid to labor figure prominently, and often there is friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor. Human society loses homogeneity. 

THE MAN IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE MONEY.

 The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is also great; but the advantages of this law are also greater still, for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But, whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it, as we say of the change in the conditions of men to which we have referred: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race. Having accepted these, it follows that there must be great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale. That this talent for organisation and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures for its possessor enormous rewards, no matter where or under what laws or conditions. The experienced in affairs always rate the man whose services can be obtained as a partner as not only the first consideration, but such as to render the question of his capital scarcely worth considering, for such men soon create capital; while, without the special talent required, capital soon takes wings. Such men become interested in firms or corporations using millions; and estimating only simple interest to be made upon the capital invested, it is inevitable that their income must exceed their expenditures, and that they must accumulate wealth. Nor is there any middle ground which such men can occupy, because the great manufacturing or commercial concern which does not earn at least interest upon its capital soon becomes bankrupt. It must either go forward or fall behind ; to stand still is impossible. It is a condition essential for its successful operation that it should be thus far profitable, and even that, in addition to interest on capital, it should make profit. It is a law, as certain as any of the others named, that men possessed of this peculiar talent for affairs, under the free play of economic forces, must, of necessity, soon be in receipt of more revenue than can be judiciously expended upon themselves and this law is as beneficial for the race as the others.

 OUR DUTY IS TO DO WHAT IS PRACTICABLE NOW.

Objections to the foundations upon which society is based are not in order, because the condition of the race is better with these than it, has been with any others which have been tried. Of the effect of any new substitutes proposed, we cannot be sure. The Socialist or Anarchist who seeks to overturn present conditions is to be regarded as attacking the foundation upon which civilisation itself rests, for civilisation took its start from the day that the capable, industrious workman said to his incompetent and lazy fellow, " If thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap," and thus ended primitive Communism by separating the drones from the bees. One who studies this subject will soon be brought face to face with the conclusion that upon the sacredness of property civilisation itself depends—the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the right of the millionaire to his millions. To those who propose to substitute Communism for the intense Individualism the answer therefore is : The race has tried that. All progress from that barbarous day to the present time has resulted from its displacement. Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produce it. But even if we admit for a moment that it might be better for the race to discard its present foundation, Individualism—that is a nobler ideal that man should labor, not for himself alone, but in and for a brotherhood of his fellows, and share with them all in common, realising Swedenborg's idea of Heaven, where, as he says, the angels derive their happiness, not from laboring for self, but for each other—even admit all this, and a sufficient answer is, That is not evolution, but revolution. It necessitates the changing of human nature itself a work of æons, even if it were good to change it, which we cannot now. It is not practicable in our day or in our age. Even if desirable theoretically, it belongs to another and long-succeeding sociological stratum. Our duty is with what is practicable now; with the next step possible in our day and generation. It is criminal to waste our energies in endeavoring to uproot, when all we can profitably or possibly accomplish is to bend the universal tree of humanity a little in the direction most favorable to the production of good fruit under existing circumstances. We might as well urge the destruction of the highest existing type of man because he failed to reach our ideal as to favor the destruction of individualism, private property, the law of accumulation of wealth, and the law of competition; for these are the highest results of human experience, the soil in which society so far has produced the best fruit. Unequally or unjustly, perhaps, these laws sometimes operate, and perfect as they appear to the idealist, they are, nevertheless, like the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.

 [TO BE CONTINUED ]

Tasmanian News (Hobart, Tas.), 26 August 1889 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article172872416

Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE has contributed the " Gospel of Wealth " to a London journal. He is effusively described as a " well-known Pittsburg ironmaster and millionaire." He is, in fact, an adventurous Scotsman who has made a fortune in America in one of the districts where it has been proved by tho Atlantic Monthly that the wages are paid on an extremely low scale, lower even than prevails in England. We certainly do not find fault with him for making the most of the country of his adoption, any more than we should blame him because of the land of his nativity. But Mr.ANDREW CARNEGIE, having now become an ironmaster and a millionaire, is inclined to lecture the whole world, and to tell every son of ADAM, rich or poor, exactly what he ought to do in his particular station. The wealthy are to learn their duties from him, and the poor are supposed to stand agape at the benefits he condescends to offer them. Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE is a man of wealth, and he poses before the world as if he were giving a donation to a Caledonian society and expecting the applause of the members. We have no doubt that the human race will rejoice in his patronage. But he once made a vain attempt to show Great Britain what her policy ought to be, and the effort was altogether in vain. We have some fears that the society of mankind may be equally perverse and stiff-necked.

A citizen of the United States, Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE believes in advertising, and he has contrived to get the marvellous announcement that his opinions are published " at the special " request of Mr. GLADSTONE." His views, suddenly blazoned forth upon the world under such auspices, certainly demand attention ; and we can hardly do more than state them briefly. Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE believes that there was a time in English history when the master and the workman stood together in the same social and political scale. If any students should think otherwise, if they should imagine that the master had a despotic power over his apprentices even to the extent of flogging them, then we may assume that he has missed Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE'S idea of the development of society. But we are certainly surprised to hear that this ideal condition of an equality between master and workman was utterly bad. Manufacturing, it seems, was badly done, and the prices were excessive. We forbear, of course, to refer to the splendid work that came from the British looms even before the introduction of steam, or to the silver work that was one of the glories of the older industrial London, or to many other things that might be noticed. We can only follow Mr. CARNEGIE in his breath-less progress to the unequal condition of the nineteenth century. At the present time we learn with gratitude that the best work is done at the cheapest possible rate, a statement that reminds us of a "selling-off advertisement." But unfortunately the equality between master and workman has disappeared. Society has to pay a very high price for the cheap articles that it enjoys. Men and women are grouped together into factories, and the old relationship between the employer and his work-people has disappeared. It seems, so far as we can gather, that Mr. CARNEGIE is not personally acquainted with all his workmen, and that to many of them the employer is a " mere myth," a man whom they never see, and whom they cannot know. The master makes a profit, and the men make their wages, and there is no bond between them. On the one side the successful Mr. CARNEGIE finds, what many industrial pioneers have never found, that wealth accumulates in the hands of the employer. On the other side, he wishes to give his patronage to the wage earners.

Having got so far, we should naturally imagine that the " ironmaster and millionaire " of Pittsburg would seek to cultivate the acquaintance of all his workmen. This, however, is only the device, we may suppose, of aristocrats, who invite their subordinates to Christmas dinners and other festivities. At any rate, it is far from the millionaire's thoughts. He has decided to settle the whole disputes between capital and labour in one brief article. And in the pursuit of knowledge regarding human society we must follow his ideas. He has discovered that society has progressed from socialism to individualism, the meaning of which we take to be that it has advanced from the tribal to the American millionaire system. He has discovered further that even in America, the land of large fortunes and a stringent law of inheritance, too much may be made of individualism. He feels it to be his duty, therefore, in the interest of a struggling humanity, to reconcile these two things. From Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE'S point of view the solution is very easy. There ought, of course, to be the fullest scope for individual effort and for money-making on the part of every citizen. It would be a total mistake to distribute wealth among the masses in small sums in the shape of increased labour or cheaper products. The average man could not put the money to the same beneficial uses as Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE, who is helping on the development of humanity. On this point we confess that his arguments are convincing. He cites the example of Cooper's Institute, and asks triumphantly whether the donor could have done the same amount of good if he had spent his money among the poor in his lifetime. He refers with equal gusto to Tildon's Library, and asks whether the same benefit would have accrued to the community if the giver had distributed his wealth in small sums. He tells us that money used in charity is generally badly spent, and that we should only help those who help themselves. On the whole, we come to the very comfortable doctrine, which we should support on other grounds, that the man who has the faculty of accumulating money should be allowed to do so, because in order to accumulate he must know how to employ it in profitable industries. So far we might sympathise with Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE'S triumph in his own arguments. There is no necessity for distributing any man's accumulated wealth. On the contrary, it is probably employed to the better advantage of the whole community than if it were broken up.

But now Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE branches off into his theory. The man who makes money should be left undisturbed, but his family should not inherit more than a competency, whatever that may mean. The "almighty dollar " is a blessing if you live for it and accumulate it ; it is a curse if you inherit it. This is the new gospel of wealth. Increase the death duties, the probate duties, according to Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE, and society will be at peace, and the millionaire and the pauper, the economist and the socialist, will dine together. It is difficult to say what society may do, but we venture to say that Mr. ANDREW CARNEGIE'S vulgar and arrogant self-complacency is no solution of any difficulty whatever.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. ), 31 August 1889 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article6275267