ar's books and a scholar's slender savings,
and he won a gracious immortality. Mr Carnegie, in endowing education,
is endowing that which he has publicly condemned. Desiring to teach the
youth of his country how to become as wealthy as himself, he has poured
contempt upon learning. He has declared that "the college-made" man had
"little chance against the boy who swept the office." He is to be found,
this victim of an intellectual ambition, in the salaried class, from
which the aspiring millionaire is bidden to escape as quickly as
possible by the customary methods of bluff and bounce. Why, then, if Mr
Carnegie thinks so ill of colleges and universities does he inflict his
millions upon them? He has known "few young men intended for business
who were not injured by a collegiate education." And yet he has done his
best to drive all the youth of Scotland within the gates of the despised
universities, and he has forced upon his own Pittsburg the gift of "free
education in art and literature." Is it cynicism, or vain inconsequence?
Cynicism, probably. The man who, having devoted his whole career to
the accumulation of superfluous wealth, yet sings a paean in praise
of poverty, is capable of everything. "Abolish luxury, if you
please,"--thus he rhapsodises,--"but leave us the soil upon which alone
the virtues and all that is precious in human character grow,--poverty,
honest poverty!" Has he shed the virtues, I wonder; or is he a
peculiarly sanctified vessel, which can hold the poison of wealth
without injury?

Of all millionaires, Mr Carnegie is at once the least picturesque and
the most dangerous. He is the least picturesque, because he harbours in
his heart the middle-class ambition of philanthropy. He would undertake
a task for which he is manifestly unfit, in the spirit of provincial
culture. For the same reason he is the most dangerous. He is not content
to squander his immense wealth in race-horses and champagne. He employs
it to interfere with the lives of others. He confers benefits with a
ready hand which are benefits only when they are acquired by conquest.
Of a very different kind is Mr Thomas W. Lawson. He, too, is a
millionaire. He, too, has about him all the appurtenances of wealth. His
fur-coats are mythical. He once paid 30,000 dollars for a pink. "He owns
a palace in Boston," says his panegyrist, "filled with works of art;
he has a six-hundred acre farm in Cape Cod, with seven miles of fences;
three hundred