modest and
thoughtful, to stand back a little and watch other people. The
millionaires themselves, if they thought about it, would be the first to
advise us not to pay too much attention to them. They are used to large
things, and they know that the only way to do, in conducting great
enterprises, is to select and use men (whether millionaires or not) for
the particular efficiencies they have developed. If we are conducting
what is called a charity, we will not expect that a millionaire can do
good things unless he is a good man. He spoils them by picking out the
wrong people. And we will not expect him to do artistic things unless he
has lived his life and done his business in the spirit and the
temperament of the artist. He will not know which the artists are or
what the artists are like inside; and he will not like them and they
will not like him, nor will they be interested in him or interested in
working with him. Everything that artists or men of creative temperament
try to do with the common run of millionaires--all these huge, blind,
imponderable megatheriums, stamping along through life, ordering people
about--ends in the same way--in irksomeness, bewildered vision, fear,
compromise, and failure, as seen from the inside. Seen on the outside or
before the public, of course, the Institution will have the same old,
bland, familiar air of looking successful and of looking intelligent,
and yet of being uninteresting, and of not changing the world by a
hair's breadth.

The only millionaires who should be allowed to have a controlling
interest in public enterprises are millionaires who do not need to be
different before and after making their money. Everybody is coming to
see this, sooner or later. It is already getting very hard to raise
money for any public enterprise in which mere millionaires or
bewildered, unhappy rich men are known to have a controlling interest.
The most efficient and far-sighted men do not expect anything very
decided or of marked character from such enterprises, and will no longer
lend to them either their brains or their money. Mere millionaires will
soon have to conduct their public enterprises quite by themselves, and
they will then soon fall of their own weight. The moment men are put in
control of public enterprises by the size of their brains instead of the
size of their cheques, the whole complexion of what are known as our
public enterprises will change, and churches, theatres, hospi