Fabian Tract No. 107. 


SOCIALISM 
FOR MILLIONAIRES. 


By BERNARD SHAW. 

PuBLISHED AND SoLD BY 

THE FABIAN SOCIETY. 

PRICE ONE PENNY. 

LONDON: 

THE: FABIAK SociETY, 3 CLEMEKT's INN, STRAND, W .C. 

]ULY 19 01. 


PREFATORY NOTE. 

Sr '\l'E the appearance of the follo11 ing esmy in the Co11temporar;• Review (Feb. r8g6} 
a Millionaire l\10\ement has taken place, culminating in the recent expression of 
opinion by Mr. ,\ndrew Carnegie that no man hould die rich. 1\ reference to 
Fabian Tract No. 5, "Facts for Socialists," will c 1wince Mr. Carnegie that the 
danger he warns us against is still far from widespread. Nor is the doctline new: 
John Rust in "unloaded" and published his .recounts with the public years ago; 
and 1r. Passmore Ed11ards's annual i111·estments for the common good have come to 
he regarded as an ordinary asset, like the established Parliamentary Grants in 1\ id. 
But the modern substitution of Combination fo1 Competition a the principle of 
capitalism is producing a new crop of individual fortunes so mon trous as to make 
their possessors publicly 1 idiculous. Unloadin"' is, for the moment, the order of the 
day. The problem is, how to unload without the 11astc, pauperization,and demoralization 
that are summed up in Engoand undc1 the word ha1 ity. It seems clear fr m 
some late sensational disbursements that the 1\lillionaires have not solved this prohlem. 
For this they annot be blamed, because the problem is fundamenta lly in


soluble under the so ial condition~ which produce it; but they can at least do their 
best inste.td of their worst "ith thci1 su per nuit) : and, so far, they seem to prefer, 
l'ith the best intentions, to do their worst. In the hope that my essay may prove 
suggestive to them, the Fabi:tn ocicly has decided t<> "'PI int it, 11 ith the permission 
of the Editor of the Cimlonportll)' Ra'I<'W, as a Fabian Tmct. 

LON OON, rgor. 

G. B. S. 

SociALISM FOR MILLIONAIRES. 

The Sorrows of the Millionaire. 

THE millionaire class, a small but growing one, into which any of us 
may be flung to-morrow by the accidents of commerce, is perhaps 
the most neglected in the community. As far as I know, this is the 
first Tract that has ever been written for millionaires. In the 
ad~ert~sements of the manufactures of the country I find that everythmg 
IS produced for the million and nothing for the millionaire. 
Children, boys, youths, "gents,'' ladies, artizans, professional men, 
even peers and kings are catered for ; but the millionaire's custom is 
evidently not worth having : there are too few of him. Whilst the 
poorest have their Rag Fair, a duly organized and busy market in 
Houndsditch, where you can buy a boot for a penny, you maysearch the world in vain for the market where the £so boot, the 
sp~cial dear line of hats at forty guineas, the cloth of gold bicycling 
su1t, and the Cleopatra claret, four pearls to the bottle, can be purc~~
sed wholesale. Thus the unfortunate millionaire has the responsibility 
of prodigious wealth without the possibility of enjoying 
himself more than any ordinary rich man. Indeed, in many thingshe cannot enjoy himself more than many poor men do, nor even so 
much ; for a drum-major is better dre,sed ; a trainer's stable-lad 
often rides a better horse ; the first class carriage is shared by office-
boys taking their young ladies out tor the evening; everybody who 
goes down to Brighton for Sunday rides in the Pullman car; and of 
what use is it to be able to pay for a peJcock's-brain sandwich when 
there is nothing to be had but ham or beef? The injustice of this 
state of things has not been sufficiently considered. A man with an 
income of £zs a year can multiply his comt'ort beyond all calculation 
by doubling his income. A man with J: 50 a year can at least 
quadruple his comfort by doubling his income. Probably up to even 
£250 a year doubled income means doub ed com.ort. After that 
the increment of comfort oTows les~ in proportiun to the increment 
of i11Come until a point is :'eached at which the victim is satiated and 
even surfeited with everythincr that mllney can procure. To expecthim to enjoy another hundred .thousand pounds because men like 
money, is exactly as if you were to expect a coni"ectioner's shopboy 
to enjoy two hours more work a day because boys are fond uf sweets. 
What can the wretched millionaire do that 11eeds a million ? Does 
he want a fleet of yachts, a Rotten Row ull of carriages, an army of 
servants, a whole city of town house~, or a conunent for a_ gamepreserve? Can he attend more than one theatre 111 one evemng, or 
wear more than one suit at a time, or t.lige~t more meals than his 


4 

butler? Is it a luxury to have more money to take care of, more 
begging-letters to read, and to be cut off from those delicious 
Alnaschar dreams in which the poor man, sitting down to consider 
what he will do in the always possible event of some unknown 
relative leaving him a fortune, forgets his privation? And yet there 
is no sympathy for this hidden sorrow of plutocracy. The pooralone arc pitied. Societies spring up in all directions to relieve all 
sorts of comparatively happy people, from discharged prisoners in 
the first rapture of their regained liberty to children revelling in the 
luxury of an unlimited appetite ; but no hand is stretched out to the 
millionaire, except to beg. In all our dealings with him lies implicit 
the delusion that he has nothing to complain of, and that he ought 
to be ashamed of rolling in wealth whilst others are starving. 

Millionaires Less Than Ever Able to Spend Their 
Money on Themselves. 
And please remember that his plight is getting worse and worse 
with the advance of civilization. The capital, the energy, the 
artistic genius that used to train themselves for the supply of beautiful 
things to rich men, now turn to supply the needs of the giganticproletariats of modern times. It is more profitable to add an ironmongery 
department to a Westbourne Grove emporium than it 
was to be a Florentine armorer in the fifteenth century. The verymillionaire himself, when he becomes a railway director, is forced to 
turn his back on his own class, and admit that it is the third-class 
traffic that pays. If he takes shares in a hotel, he learns that it is 
safer, as a matter of commercial policy, to turn a lord and his retinue 
out of doors than to disoblige a commercial traveller or a bicyclist in 
the smallest reasonable particular. He cannot get his coat made to 
fit him without troublesome tryings-on and alterations unless he 
goes to the cheap ready-money tailors, who monopolize all the really 
expert cutters because their suits must fit infallibly at the first 
attempt if the low prices are to be made pay. The old-fashioned 
tradesman, servile to the great man and insolent to the earner of 
weekly wages, is now beaten in the race by the universal provider, 
who attends more carefully to the fourpenny and tenpenny customers 
than to the mammoth shipbuilder's wife sailing in to order 
three grand pianos and four French governesses.-In short, the 
shops where Dives is expected and counted on are only to be found 
now in a few special trades, which touch a man's life but seldom. 
For everyday purposes the customer who wants more than other 
people is as unwelcome and as little worth attending to as the 

customer who wants less than other people. The millionaire can 

have the best of everything in the market ; but this leaves him no 

better off than the modest possessor of £s,ooo a year. There is 

only one thing that he can still order on a scale of special and reck


lessly expensive pomp, and that is his funeral. Even this melancholy 

outlet will probably soon be closed. Huge joint-stock interment and 

cremation companies will refuse to depart to any great extent from 

their routine of Class I., Class II., and so on, just as a tramway com



5 

pany would refuse to undertake a Lord Mayor's Show. The custom 
of_ t~e ~reat masses will rule the market so completely that the 
milhonatre, alreadv forced to live nine-tenths of his life as other men 
do, will be forced Into line as to the other tenth also. 

Why Millionaires Must Not Leave Too Much to 
Their Families. 


~o be a millionaire, then, is to have more money than you can 
posstbly spend on yourself, and to suffer daily from the inconsiderateness 
of those persons to whom such a condition appears one of utter 
content. What, then, is the millionaire to do with his surplus 
funds? The usual reply is, provide for his children and give alms. 

ow these two resources, as usually understood, are exactly the 
s~me thing, and a very mischievous thing too. From the point of 
new of society, it does not matter a straw whether the person 
relieved of the necessity of working for his living by a millionaire's 
bounty is his son, his daughter's husband, or merely a casual beggar.
The millionaire's private feelings may be more highly gratified in 
the former cases ; but the mischief to society and to the recipient is 
the same. If you want to spoil a young man's career, there is no 
method surer than that of presenting him with what is called "an 
independence,'' meaning an abject and total dependence on the labor 
of others. Anybody who has watched the world intelligently 
enough to compare the average man of independent means when he 
has j ust finished his work at the university, with the same man 
twenty years later, following a routine of fashion compared to which 
the round of a postman is a whirl of excitement, and the beat of a 
policeman a chapter of romance, must have sometimes said to himself 
that it would have been better for the man if his father had 
spent every penny of his money, or thrown it into the Thames. 

Parasites on Property. 

In Ireland, the absentee landlord is bitterly reproached for not 
administerin<T his estate in person. It is pointed out truly enoughthat the ab~entee is a pure parasite upon the industry of his 
country. T he indispensable minimum of attention to his estate 
is paid by his agent or solicitor, whose resistance to his purelyparasitic activity is fortified by the fact that the estate usually be~
ongs mostly to the mortgagees, and that the n_ominallandlord i~ so 
tgnvrant of his own affairs that he can do nothmg but send beggmgletters to the agent. On these estates generations of peasant_s (and 
agents) live hard but bearable lives; whilst off them generattons of 
laJies and <Tentlemen of good breeding and natural capacity are 
corrupted i~to drifters, wasters, drinkers, waiters-for-dead-men'sshoes, 
poor relations, and social wreckage of all sorts, living aimles 
lives, and often dying squalid and tragic deaths. But is there any 
country in the world in which this same wreckage does not occur? 
The typical modern proprietor is not an Irish squire but a cosmopolitan 
shareholder; and the shareholder is an absentee as a matter 
of course. If his property is all the better managed for that, 


6 

he himself is all the more completely reduced to the condition of a 
mere parasite upon it ; and he is just as likely as the Irish absentee 
to become a centre of demoralization to his family connections. 
Every millionaire who leaves all his millions to his family in the ordinary 
course exposes his innocent descendants to this risk without securing 
them any advantage that they could not win more effectually 
and happily by their own activity, backed by a fair start in life. 
Formerly this consideration had no weight with parents, because 
working for money was considered disgraceful to a gentleman, as it 
is still, in our more belated circles, to a lady. In all the professions 
we have survivals of old pretences-the rudimentary pocket on the 
back of a barrister's gown is an example-by which the practitioner 
used to fob his fee without admitting that his services were for sale. 
Most people alive to-day, of middle age and upward, are more or 
less touched with superstitions that need no longer be reckoned with 
by or on behalf of young men. Such, for instance, as that the line 
which divides wholesale from retail trade is also a liue m:1rking a 
step in social position ; or that there is something incongruous in a 
lord charging a shilling a head for admission to his castle and 
gardens, or opening a shop for milk, game, and farm produce ; or 
that a merchant's son who obtains a commission in a smart regiment 
is guilty of an act of ridiculous presumption. 

Dignity of Labor. 

Even the prejudice against manual labor is vanishing. In the 
artistic professions something like a worship of it was inaugurated 
when Ruskin took his Ox~ord class out of coors and set them to 
make roads. It is now a good many years since Dickens, when 
visiting a prison, encountered Wainwright the poisoner, and heard 
that gentleman vindicate his gentility by demanding of his fellow 
prisoner (a bricklayer, if I remember aright) whether he had ever 
condescended to clean out the cell, or handle the broom, or, in 
short, do any work whatever for himself that he could put on his 
companion. The bricklayer, proud of having so distinguished a cell 
mate, eagerly gave the required testimony. In the great Irish 
agitation against coercion in Ireland during Mr. Balfour's secretaryship, 
an attempt was made to add to the sensation by pointing to the 
spectacle of Irish political prisoners, presumably gentlemen, sufferingthe indignity of having to do housemaid's work in cleaning their 
cells. Who cared ? It would be easy to multiply instances of the 
change of public opinion for the better in this direction. But 
there is no need to pile up evidence. It will be quite willingly admitted 
that the father who throws his son on his own exertions, 
after equipping him fully with education and a reasonable capital, 
no longer degrades him, spoils his chance of a well-bred wife, and 
forfeits the caste of the family, but, on the contrary, solidifies hi~ 
character and widens his prospects, professional, mercantile, political,
and matrimonial. Besides, public opinion, growing continually 
stronger against drones in the hive, begins to threaten, and even 
to execute, a differentiation of taxation against unearned incomes ; 


7 

so that the man who, in spite of the protests of parental wisdom 
and good citizenship, devotes great resources to the enrichment and 
probable demoralization of remote descendants for whose merit the 
community has no guarantee, does so at the risk of having his aim 
finally defeated by the income-tax collector. We, therefore, have 
the mtelligent and public-spirited millionaire cut off from his old 
resource of "founding a family." All that his children can now 
require of him, all that society expects him to give them, all that is 
good for themselves, is a first-rate equipment, not an" independence."

And there are millionaires who have no children. 

Why Almsgiving is a Waste of Money. 

The extremities to which the millionaire is reduced by this closing 
up of old channels of bequest are such that he sometimes leaves 
huge sums to bodies of trustees " to do good with," a plan as mischievous 
as it is resourceless ; for what can the trustees do but 
timidly dribble the fund away on charities of one kind or another? 
Now I am loth to revive the harsh strains of the Gradgrind political 
economy: indeed, I would, if I could, place in every Board School a 
copy of Mr. Watts' picture of a sheet profiled by the outline of a 
man lying dead underneath it, with the inscription above, " What I 
saved, I lost : what I spent, I had : what I gave, I have." But woe 
to the man who takes from another what he can provide for himself; 
and woe also to the giver! There is no getting over the fact that 
the moment an attempt is made to organize almsgiving by entrustingthe funds to a permanent body of experts, it is invariably discovered 
that beggars are perfectly genuine persons : that is to say, not 
"deserving poor," but people who have discovered that it is possible 
to live by simply impudently asking for what they want until they 
get it, which is the essence of beggary. The permanent body of 
experts, illogically instructed to apply their funds to the cases of the 
desen·ing poor only, soon become a mere police body for the frustration 
of true begging, and consequently of true almsgiving. Finally,
their experience in a pursuit to which they were originally led bynatural benevolence lands them in an almost maniacal individualism 
and an abhorrence of ordinary "charity" as one of the worst of 
social crimes. This may not be an amiable attitude; but no reasonable 
person can fail to be impressed by the certainty with which it 
seems to be produced by a practical acquaintance with the social reactions 
of mendicity and benevolence. 

"The Deserving Poor." 

Of course this difficulty is partly created by the" deserving poor" 
theory. I re'member once, at a time when I made daily use of the 
reading-room of the British Museum-a magnificent communistic 
institution-! gave a £z copying job to a man whose respectable 
poverty would have moved a heart of stone : an ex-schoolmaster, 
whose qualifications were out of date, and who, through no particularfault of his own, had drifted at last into the reading-room as less 
literate men drift into Salvation Army Shelters. He was a sober, 


8 

well-spoken, well-conducted, altogether unobjectionable man, really 
fond of reading, and eminently eligible for a good turn of the kind 
I did him. His first step in the matter was to obtain from me an 
advance of five shillings; his next, to sublet the commission to 
another person in similar circumstances for one pound fifteen, and so 
get it entirely off his mind and return to his favorite books. This 
second, or rather, third party, however, required an advance from my 
acquaintance of one-and-sixpence to buy paper, having obtained 
which, he handed over the contract to a fourth party, who wa~ 
willing to do it for one pound thirteen and sixpence. Speculation 
raged for a day or two as the job was passed on ; and it reached 
bottom at last in the hands of the least competent and lea t sober 
copyist in the room, who actually did the work for five shillings, and 
borrowed endless sixpences from me from that time to the day 
of her death, which each sixpence probably accelerated to the extent 
of fourpence, and staved off to the extent of twopence. She wa5 
not a deserving person : if she had been she would have come to no 
such extremity. Her claims to compassion were that she could not 
be depended upon, could not resist the temptation to drink, could 
not bring herself to do her work carefully, and was therefore at a 
miserable disadvantage in the world : a disadYantage exactly similar 
to that suffered by the blind, the deaf, the maimed, the mad, or any 
other victims of imperfect or injured faculty. I learnt from her that 
she had once been recommended to the officials of the Charity 
Organization Society; but they, on inquiring into her case, had 
refused to help her because she was "undeserving," by which they 
meant that she was incapable of helping herself. Here was surely 
some confusion of ideas. She was very angry with the Society, and 
not unreasonably so; for she knew that their funds were largely subscribed 
by people who regarded them as ministers of pity to the poor 
and downcast. On the other hand, these people themselves had 
absurdly limited the application of their bounty to sober, honest, 
respectable persons: that is to say, to the persons least likely to want 
it, and alone able to be demoralized by it. An intelligent millionaire, 
if tempted to indulge himself by playing the almsgiYing philanthropist 
(to the great danger of his own character) would ear-mark 
his gift for the use of the utterly worthless, the hopelessly, incorrigibly 
lazy, idle, easy-going, good-for-nothing. Only, such a policy would 
soon exhaust the resources of even a billionaire. It would conyince 
the most sentimental of almsgivers that it is economically impossible 
to be kind to beggars. It is possible to treat them humanely,
which means that they can be enslaved, brought under discipline,
and forced to perform a minimum of work as gently as the nature 
of the process and their own intense objection to it permit ; but 
there is no satisfaction for the compassionate instincts to be got out 
of that. It is a public duty, like the enforcement of sanitation, and 
should be undertaken by the public. PriYately supported colonies of 
the unemployed, like that of the Salvation Army at Hadleigh, 
are only the experiments on which an ine,·itable extension of the 
Poor Law will haye to be based. 'Vhat is urgently needed at 


9 

present by the poor is the humanization of the Poor Law, an 
end which is retarded by all attempts to supplant it by privatebenevolence. Take, for example, the hard casP of the aged 
poor, who are not beggars at all, but veterans of industry who 
have in most cases earned an honorable pension (which we are 
dishonest enough to grudge them) by a lifetime of appalling 
drudgery. We have to deal with at least 3~o,ooo of them every 
year. Very little can be done by private efforts to rescue these unfortunate 
people from the barbarity of the ratepayers by building a 
few almshouses here and there. But a great deal can be done byarousing the public conscience and voting for reasonably humane 
and enlightened persons at elections of guardians. The guardians 
of the West Derby (Liverpool) Union, instead of imprisoning agedcouples separately and miserably in their workhouse, put them into 
furnished cottages, where, provided they keep them neat and clean, 
they are no more interfered with than if they were in a private almshouse. 
The difference in happiness, comfort, and self-respect, between 
the cottage and the workhouse, is enormous : the difference 
in cost is less than two shillings a week per pair. If a millionaire 
must build almshouses, he had better do it by offering to defray the 
cost of a set of cottages on condition that the guardians adopt the 
West Derby system. This, of course, is pauperizing the ratepayer ; 
but the average ratepayer is a quite shameless creature, loud in his 
outcry against the immorality of pauperizing any one at his expense, 
but abject in his adulation of the rich man who will pauperize him by 
those subscriptions to necesssary public institutions which act as 
subsidies in relief of the rates. 

Never Endow Hospitals. 

Hospitals are the pet resource of the rich man who e money i 
burning a hole in his pockets. Here, however, the verdict of sound 
social economy is emphatic. Never give a farthing to an ordinaryhospital. An experimental hospital is a different thing: a millionaire 
who is interested in proving that the use of drugs, of animal food, 
of alcohol, of the knife in cancer, or the like! can be and should be 
dispensed with, may endow a temporary hosp1tal for that purpose;
but in the charitable hospital, private endowment and pnvate 
management mean not only the pauperization of the ratepayer, b~t 
irresponsibility, wa te and extravagance checked by spasmod1cstinginess, favoritism, almost unbridled licence for experiments .on 
patients by scientifically enthusia tic doctors, and a system of beggmgfor letters of admission which would be denounced as intolerable 
if it were part of the red tape of a public body. A safe rule for the 
millionaire is never to do anything for the public, any more than 
for an individual, that the public will do (because it must) for itself 
without his intervention. The provision of proper hospital accommodation 
is pre-eminently one of these things. Already more than 
a third of London's hospital accommodation is provided by the ratepayers. 
In Warringt~n the hospital rate, which wa~ .zci..in the 
pound in 1887-8, rose 1n five years to Is. zd. If a bdhona1re had 


IO 

interposed to take this increase on his own shoulders, he would have 
been simply wasting money for which better uses were waiting, 
demoralizing his neighbors, and forestalling good hospitals by bad 
ones. Our present cadging hospital system will soon go the way of 
the old Poor Law ; and no invalid will be a penny the worse. 

Be Careful in Endowing Education. 

Education comes next to hospitals in the popular imagination as 
a thoroughly respectable mark for endowments. But it is open to 
the same objections. The privately endowed elementary school is 
inferior to the rate-supported one, and is consequently nothing but 
a catchpit in which children, on the way to their public school, are 
caught and condemned to an inferior education in inferior buildings 
under sectarian management. University education is another 
matter. But whilst it is easy to found colleges and scholarships, it 
is impossible to confine their benefits to those who are unable to 
pay for them. Be ides, it is beginning to be remarked that university 
men, as a class, are specially ignorant and misinformed. The 
practical identity of the governing class with the university class in 
England has produced a quite peculiar sort of stupidity in English 
policy, the masterstrokes of which are so very frequently nothing but 
class solecisms that even the most crudely democratic legislatures 
of the Colonies and the most corrupt lobbies of the United 
States are superior to ours in directness and promptitude, sense of 
social proportion, and knowledge of contemporary realities. An 
intelligent millionaire, unless he is frankly an enemy of the human 
race, will do nothing to ext~nd the method of caste initiation practised 
under the mask of education at Oxford and Cambridge. Experiments 
in educational method, and new subjects of technical 
education, such, for instance, as political science considered as partof the technical education of the citizen (who is now such a disastrously 
bungling amateur in his all-important political capacity as 
voter by grace of modern democracy); or economics, statistics, and 
industrial history, treated as part of the technical commercial education 
of the wielder of modern capitals and his officials: these, abhorrent 
to uni\'ersity dons and outside the scope of public elementaryeducation, are the departments in which the millionaire interested 
in education can make his gold fruitful. Help nothing that is already 
on its legs is not a bad rule in this and other matters. It is the 
struggles of society to adapt itself to the new conditions which 
every decade of modern industrial development springs on us that 
need help. The old institutions, with their obsolete routine, and 
their lazy denials and obstructions in the interests of that routine, 
are but too well supported already. 

Endowing Societies. 

The objection to supplanting public machinery by private does 
not apply to private action to set public machinery in motion. 
Take, for example, the National Saciety for the Prevention of 
Cruelty to Children. If that society were to undertake the punish



II 

m~nt of c~uel parents by building private prisons and establishing 
pnv~t~ tnbunals, ~ven the most thoughtless subscriber to privatechant1es and. hosp1tals would shake his head and button up his 
pocket, knowmg that there are public laws and public prisons and tribunals 
to do the work, and that they alone should be trusted with such 
functions. But here the public machinery requires the initiative 
of an a!Sgriev~d pers~n to set it in motion ; and when the aggrieved 
person IS a ch!ld, and 1ts "next friend" the aggressor, the machinerydoes not get started. Under such circumstances, Mr. Waugh's 
society, by stepping in and taking the child's part, does a great deal 
of good ; and this, observe, not by supplanting the State, or competing 
with it, but by co-operating with it and compelling it to do 
its duty. Generally speaking, all societies which are of the nature 
of Vigilance Committees are likely to be useful. The odium which 
attaches to the name came from the old-fashioned American Vigilance 
Committee, which, in the true spirit of private enterprise, not 
only detected offenders, but lynched them on its own responsibility. 
We-have certain State Yigilance officers : sanitary inspectors, School 
Board visitors, a Public Prosecutor (of a sort), the Queen's Proctor, 
and others. The only one of these who is an unmitigated publicnuisance is the censor of the theatre, who, instead of merely having 
power to hale the author of an obnoxious play before a public 
tribunal, has power to sentence him to suppression and execute him 
with his own hands and on his own responsibility, with the result 
that our drama is more corrupt, silly, and indecent than any other 
department of fine art, and our unfortunate censor more timid and 
helpless than any other official. His case shows the distinction 
which it is essential to observe in vigilance work. But though we 
haye an official to pre\·ent Tolstoy's plays from being performed, we 
have no official to pre\·ent people from stealing public land and stopping 
up public footpaths. The millionaire who gives money to 
"Days in the Country" for city children, and will not help 
Commons Preservation Societies and the like to keep the count1;y 
open for them, is unworthy of his millions. 

_-\\1 these considerations point in the same direction. The intellicrent 
millionaire need not hesitate to subsidize any vigilance society 
~r reform society that is ably conducted, and that recognizes the fact 
that it is not croing to reform the world, but only, at best, to persuadethe world to"' take its ideas into consideration in reforming itself. 
Subject to these conditions, it matters little whether the millionaire 
acrrees with the society or not. No individual or society can possibly 
b~ absolutely and completely right; nor can any view ?r theory be 
so stated as to comprise the whole truth and nothmg but the 
truth. A millionaire who will not subsidize forces that are capable 
of a mischievous application will subsidize nothing at all. Such 
justice as we attain in our criminal courts is the ou~come of a ve~emently 
partial prosecution and de~ence; and a_ll parham~I}tary samtyis the outcome of a conflict of vtews. For 1nstance, tt we try to 
figure to ourselves a forcible reconstruction of society on lines ~ig~dly 
-deduced either from the Manchester School or from State Soc1ahsm, 


12 

we are at a loss to decide which of the two would be the more 
intolerable and disastrous. Yet who hesitates on that account, if 
such matters interest him, to back up the Fabian Society on the one 
hand, or the Personal Rights Association on the other, according to 
his bias? Our whole theory of freedom of speech and opinion for 
all citizens, rests, not on the assumption that everybody is right, but 
on the certainty that everybody is wrong on some point on which 
somebody else is right, so that there is a public danger in allowing 
anybody to go unheard. Therefore, any propagandist society which 
knows how to handle money intelligently and which is making a 
coutribution to current thought, whether Christian or Pagan, Liberal 
or Conservative, Socialist or Individualist, scientific or humanitarian, 
physical or metaphysical, seems to me an excellent mark for a 
millionaire's spare money. 

Yet afrer all, mere societies are good marks for anybody's spare 
money. Most of them may be left to the ordinary guinea subscriber; 
and though millionaires are such inveterate subscribers and donors 
that I dare not leave the societies out of account, I confess I despise 
a millionaire who dribbles his money away in fi.tties and hundreds, 
thereby reducing himself to the level of a mere crowd of ordinary 
men, instead of planking down sums that only a millionaire can. 
My idea of a millionaire is a man who never gives less than ten 
thousand pounds, ear-marked for the purchase of something of the 
best qu1lity costing not a penny less than that amount. The millionaire 
should ask himself what is his favorite subject? Has it a school, 
with scholarships for the endowment of research and the attraction 
of rising talent? Has it a library, or a museum ? If not, then he 
has an opening at once for his ten thousand or hundred thousand. 

Starting Snowballs. 

There is always something fascinating to the imagination of a 
very poor man in the notion of leaving a million or so to accumulate 
at compound interest for a few centuries, and then descend in fabulous 
riches on some remote descendant and make a Monte Cristo of 
him. Now, even if there were likely to be any particular point in 
being Monte Cristo after a couple of hundred years further social 
and industrial development, a modern millionaire, for the reasons 
already stated, should be the last person in the world to be much 
impressed by it. Still, the underlying idea of keeping a great muneyforce together, multip'ying it, and finally working a miracle with it, 
is a tempting one. Here is a recent example, quoted from a local 
paper : 

·• The gift of a farm to the Parish Council of St. Bees by the Rev. Mr. Pagan,
of Shadforth, Durham, is accompanied by some peculiar conditions. The farm is 
33a. 3r. 2p. in extent, and is valued at £ r,og8. The rent of the farm is to be allowed 
to accumulatt, with two reservations. Should the grantor ever require it, the counciL 
may be called upon during his lifetime to pay him from time to time out of the 
accumulated investments any amounts not exceeding £r,og8. Not more than £ ro 
may be 'pent in charity. but uot in relief of tht rates. The balance is to be invested 
in land and houses until all the land and hou,es in the parish have hecn secured by 
the parish council. When that is accompli .hed, the sum of £r,og8 may be handed 
over to some adjacent parish, which shall deal with the gift similarly to St. Bees." 


Beware of the Ratepayer and the Landlord. 

In the above bequest, we have a remarkable combination of 
practical sagacity and colossal revolutionary visionariness. Mr. 
Pagan s~t a thousand p_ound snowball rolling in such a way as to 

natJOnaltze the land pansh by parish until the reYolution is complete. 
Observe-and copy-his clause, " not in relief of the rates.'' 
Le~ the millionaire never. forget that the ratepayer is always lying in 
watt to malversate public money to the savina of his own pocket. 
P?ssibly the ~illion~ire may sympathize with hi~, and say that he 
wtshes to relieve h1m. But in the first place a miliionaire should 
never sympathize with anybody : his destiny is too high for such 
petty self-indulgence ; and in the second, you cannot relieve the 
ratepayer by reducing, or even abolishing, his rates, since freeing a 
house of rates simply raises the rent. The millionaire might as well 
leave his money direct to the landlords at once. In tact, the ratepayer 
is only a foolish catspaw for the landlord, who is the great 
eater-up of public bequests. At Tonbridge, Bedford, and certain 
other places, pious founders have endowed the schools so splendidlythat education is nobly cheap there. But rents are equivalently 
high ; so that the landlords reap the whole pecuniary value of the 
endowment. The remedy, however, is to follow the example of the 
Tonbridge and Bedford founders instead of avoiding it. If every 
centre of population were educationally etJdowed with equal 
liberality, the advantage of Bedford would cease to be a dijfermtial 
one ; and zl is only advantages whtdz are both di!fermtial and 
peczmiarzly 1'ealz:Zable by the indz'vzdttal czil:Zeus that produce rent. 

Meanwhile, the case points to another form of the general rule above 
deduced for the guidance of millionaires: namely, that bequests to 
the public should be for the provision of luxuries, never of necessaries. 
We must provide necessaries for ourselves; and their gratuitous 
provision in any town at present constitutes a pecuniarily realizable 
differential advantage in favor of living in that town. Now, a luxury 
is something that we need not have, and consequently will not payfor except with spare or waste money. Properly speaking, the.refore, 
it is something that we will not pay for at all. And yet nothmgis more vitally right than the attitude of the French gentleman who 
said : "Give me the luxuries of life, and I will do without the 
necessaries." For example, the British Library of Political Science 
is prodiaiously more important to our well-being than a thousand 
new cha~itable soup-kitchens; but as ordinary people do not care a 
rap about it it does not raise the rent of even students' lodgings in 
London by ; farthing. But suppose a misguided billionaire, instead 
of founding an institution of this type, were to take on h1mse.f the 
cost of paving and lighting some London parish, and set on foot a 
free supply of bread and milk ! All that .would happen would be 
that the competition for houses and shops 111 that pansh wou.d rage 
until it had brouaht rents up to a point at which there w JUld be no 
advantaae in livi~a in it more than in any other parish. Even parks

b b .

and open spaces raise rents 111 London, though, strange to say, 


London statues do not diminish them. Here, then, is the simple 
formula for the public benefactor. Never give the people anything 
they want : give them something they ought to want and dont. 

Create New Needs: the Old Ones Will Take Care of 
Themselves. 
Thus we find at the end of it all, appositely enough, that the 
great work of the millionaire, whose tragedy is that he has not needs 
enough for his means, is to create needs. The man who makes the 
luxury of yesterday the need of to-morrow is as great a benefactor 
as the man who makes two ears of wheat grow where one grewbefore. John Ruskin set a wise example in this respect to our rich 
men. He published his accounts with the public, aud shewed that 
he had taken no more for himself than fair pay for his work of giving 
Sheffield a valuable museum, which it does not want and would 
cheerfully sell for a fortnight's holiday with free beer if it could. 
Was not that better than wasting it heartlessly and stupidly on 
beggars, on able-bodied relatives, on ratepayers, on landlords, and all 
the rest of our social absorbents? He has created energy instead 
of dissipating it, and created it in the only fundamentally possible 
way, by creating fresh needs. His example shows what can be done 
by a rich expert in fine art ; and if millions could bring such expertness 
tu their possessor, I should have discoursed above of the beautification 
of cities, the endowment of a standard orchestra and theatre 
in every centre of our population, and the building of a wholesome, 
sincere, decent house for Parliament to meet in (noble legislation is 
impossible in the present moustrosity) as an example for parish halls 
and town halls all through the country, with many other things of 
the same order. But these matters appeal only to a religious and 
artistic faculty which cannot be depended on in millionaires-which, 
indeed, have a very distinct tendency to prevent their possessor from 
ever becoming even a thousandaire, if I may be permitted that 
equally justifiable word. The typical modern millionaire knows 
more about life than abont art ; and what he should know better 
than anyone else, if he has any reflective power, is that men do not 
succeed nowadays in industrial lite by sticking to the methods and 
views of their grandfathers. And yet not until a method or a view 
has attained a grandfatherly age is it possible to get it officiallyrecognized and taught in an old country like ours. In bringingindustrial education up to date, the millionaire should be on his own 
ground. Experiment, propaganda, exploration, discovery, political 
and industrial information : take care of these, and the pictures and 
statues, the churches and hospitals, will take care of themselves. 

Conscience Money and Ransom. 
I must not conclude without intimating my knowledge of the 
fact that most of the money given by rich people in "charity" is 
made up of conscience money,'' ransom," political bribery, and bids 
for titles. The traffic in hospital sub criptions in the name of Royalty 
fulfils exactly the same function in modern society as Texel's traffic 


I 


J 

in indulgences in the name of the Pope did before the Reformation. 
One buys moral credit by signing a cheque, which is easier than 
turning a prayer wheel. Tam aware, further, that we often give to 
public objects money that we should devote to raising wages among 
our own employees or substituting three eight-hour shifts for two 
twelve-hour ones. But when a millionaire does not really care 
whether his money does good or not, provided he finds his conscience 
eased and his social status improved by giving it away, it is useless 
for me to argue with him. I mention him only as a warning to the 
better sort of donors that the mere disbursement of large sums 
of money must be counted as a distinctly suspicious circumstance in 
estimating personal character. Money is worth nothing to the man 
who has more than enough ; and the wisdom with which it is spent is 
the sole social justification for leaving him in possession of it. 


F
F
ABIAN SOCIETY.-The Fa.bia.n Society consists of Socia.lists. A st~tement 
of itE Rules a.nd the followin~ publications ca.o be obta.ined from the 

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FABIANISM AND THE EMPIRE: A Manifesto. 
Edited by BERNARD SHAW. l s. post free. 
FABIAN ESSAYS IN SOCIALISM. (35thThousa.od.)
Paper cover, I/-; pla.io cloth, 2/-, post free from the Secretary. 
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I.-On General Socialism in its various aspects.
TRACTS.-79· A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich. By JoHN 
WooLMAN. 78. Socialism and the Teaching of Christ. By Dr. JOHN CLIFFORD. 
87. The same in Welsh. 42. Christian Socialism. By Rev. S.D. HEADLAM. 
75· Labor in the Longest Reign. By SIDNEY WEBB. 72. The Moral 
Aspects of Socialism. By SIDNEY BALL. 6g. Difficulties of Individualism. 
By SIDNEY WEBB. SI. Socialism: True and False. By S. WEBB. 45· The 
Impossibilities of Anarchism. By BERNARD SHAW (price 2d.). IS. EnglishProgress towards Social Democracy. By<;, WEBB. 7· Capital and Land. 
5· Facts for Socialsts (8th edn. revised 1899.) LEAFLETS-13. What Socialism 
Is. I. Why are the Many Poor? 38. The same in Welsh . 

ll.-On Application of Socialism to Particular Problems. 
TnACTS.-106. The Education Muddle and the Way Out. g8. State 
Rail\,·ays for Ireland. 88. The Growth of Monopoly in English Industry.
By H . \'>. MACROSTY. 86. Municipal Drink Traffic. 85. Liquor Licensing 
at Home and Abroad. By E. R PEASE. 84. Economics of Direct Employment 
83. State Arbitration and the Livmg Wage. So. Shop-life and tts 
Reform. 74· The St3!e and its FunctiOns in New Zealand. 73· Case for 
State PensiOns in Old Age. By G. TURNER. 67. Women and the FactoryActs. By Mrs. WEBB. so. Sweating: its Cause and Remedy. 48. EightHours by Law. 23. Case for an Eight Hours Bill. 47· The Unemployed.
By J . BuRNS, M.P. LEAFLETS.-8g. Old Age Pensions at Vl.'ork. 19. What 
the Farm Laborer Wants. I04. How Trade Unions benefit Workmen. 

lii.-On Local Government Powers: How to use them. 
TRACTS.-Ios. Five Years' Fruits of the Parish Councils Act. I03. Overcrowding 
in London and its Remedy. By W. C. STEADMAN, L.C.C. Ioi. 
The House Famine and How to Relieve it. 52 pp. 76. Houses for the 
People. IOO. Metropolitan Borough Councils: their powers and duties. 
gg. Local Government in Ireland. 82. Workmen's Compensation Act: 
what it means and how to make use of it. 77· Municipalization of Tram-
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Bakeries. Municipal Hospitals. Municipal Fire Insurance. 
M unictpal Steamboats. Eac-h Series in a. red cover tor ld. (9d. per doz.) ; 
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IV.-On Books. 

29. What to Read. A List of Books for Socia.! Reformers. 6d. ea.ch . 
V.-On Fabian Policy.
70. Report on Fabian Polley. 41. The Fabian Society: its Early History.
By BERNARD SHA\1. 
VI.-Question Leaflets, containing Questions for Candida.tes for the 
following bodies :-20, Poor Law Gua.rdians. 24, Pa.rliament. 25, School 
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Urba.n District Councils. 102, Metropolitan Borough Councils. 

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