Israel Zangwill, the novelist, the play-wright, the psychologist--really
thought, that millionaires "Before and After" were as different as they
looked.

I imagine he would say--and practically without looking at the
pictures--that of course to him or to me perhaps, or to any especially
interested student of human nature, millionaires are not really
different at all "Before and After Taking"; that they merely had a
slightly different outer look. They would merely look different, Mr.
Zangwill would say, to the common run or majority of people--the people
one meets in the streets.

But would they?

One of the most hopeful things that I have been thinking of lately is
that the people--the ordinary people one meets in the streets--are
beginning quite generally to see through their millionaires, and to see
that their money almost never really cures them. Most very rich men,
indeed, are having their times now, of even seeing through themselves;
and it brings me up abruptly with a shock to think that the ordinary
people who pass in the streets would be deceived by these simple little
pictures Before and After. They have been deceived until lately, but are
they being deceived now? I would like to see the matter tested, and I
have thought it would be a good idea to take my small collection of
pictures of millionaires--two pictures of each, one Before and the other
After Taking--to a millionaire--of course some really reformed or cured
one--and ask him to pay the necessary expenses in the columns of the
_Times_, and of the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Daily Chronicle_,
and other representative London journals (all on the same morning), of
having the pictures published. We could then take what might be called a
social, human, economic inventory of London: ask people to send in their
honest opinions, on looking at the pictures, as to whether Money, Before
and After Taking, does or does not produce these remarkable cures in
millionaires. I very much doubt if Mr. Zangwill would be found to be
right in his estimate of our common people to-day.

I venture to believe that it is precisely because our common people are
seeing that millionaires are not changed Before and After Taking that
the majority of time millionaires we have to-day have come to be looked
upon as one of the charges--one of the great spiritual charges and
burdens modern Society has to carry.

Society has always had to do what it could for the poor, but in our