For a bonne-bouche I have kept Mr. Andrew Carnegie, of Skibo Castle and sundry other addresses. Mr. Carnegie has the misfortune to be a Scotch American—surely the least admirable of the less admirable types of humanity. He will live in men’s memories as the sturdy, forthright Scot who managed one of the most desperate strikes that ever took place in America from the safe vantage ground of his native heath. It must be remembered that in spite of his ridiculous possessions Mr. Carnegie is an avowed democrat, and the author of a book that makes him out to be quite a benevolently minded philosopher. But during all the terrors of the Homestead lock-out, he lay snug at his shooting box of Rannoch, N.B., and refused to say a word that would tend to still the storm, although he knew that blood was being shed at Homestead, and that his own partner, Mr. Frick, had been seriously wounded. Being a Scotchman it is impossible that Mr. Carnegie should have been a coward. Let me say rather that he was cautious and canny, and indisposed to take unnecessary risks. When the row was more or less over he told a representative of the Associated Press that “the deplorable events at Homestead had burst upon him like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. They had such a depressing effect upon him that he had to lay his book aside and resort to the lochs and moors, fishing from morning to night.” Which, on the face of it, is pawky Scots, and as who should say “the deplorable news of the death of my wife had such a depressing effect upon me that I had to go to a fancy dress ball and dance and dance till cock-crow.” It will be seen, therefore, that in the main the American millionaires do not shine with any startling or blinding effulgence. With here and there an exception, they are common, vulgar, snobbish, undistinguished men who happen to have come out top-dog in a series of financial bruising matches in which few persons above the quality of a savage would have cared to engage. For the possession and administration of even reasonable wealth their qualification would seem to be of the meagrest. Outside the dull mechanical reduplication of their mammoth fortunes, their stunted intellects permit them only two very doubtful joys, namely, sensational house building and sensational charity. Mr. Morgan may be taken as the type of the house-proud money-snatcher. Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie are the charity-proud; and they have reaped the reward of the charity-proud—the colleges of the one being a by-word and a mockery in America, just as the “Free Libraries” of the other are a by-word and a nuisance in England.