An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary MattersWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Great Britain -- Social conditions; Social problems; United States -- Social conditions
In the making of very rich men there is always a factor of good fortune
and a factor of design and will. One meets rich men at times who seem to
be merely lucky gamblers, who strike one as just the thousandth man in a
myriad of wild plungers, who are, in fact, chance nobodies washed up by
an eddy. Others, again, strike one as exceptionally lucky half-knaves.
But there are others of a growth more deliberate and of an altogether
higher personal quality. One takes such men as Mr. J.D. Rockefeller or
Mr. Pierpont Morgan--the scale of their fortunes makes them public
property--and it is clear that we are dealing with persons on quite a
different level of intellectual power from the British Colonel Norths,
for example, or the South African Joels. In my "Future in America" I
have taken the former largely at Miss Tarbell's estimate, and treated
him as a case of acquisitiveness raised in Baptist surroundings. But I
doubt very much if that exhausts the man as he is to-day. Given a man
brought up to saving and "getting on" as if to a religion, a man very
acquisitive and very patient and restrained, and indubitably with great
organising power, and he grows rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And
having done so, there he is. What is he going to do? Every step he takes
up the ascent to riches gives him new perspectives and new points of
view.
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?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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