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If indomitable enterprise assured permanency of wealth then many of Vanderbilt's competitors would have become and remained multimillionaires. Vanderbilt, by no means possessed a monopoly of acquisitive enterprise; on every hand, and in every line, were men fully as active and unprincipled as he.
But without entering into a further philosophical disquisition, this fact must be noted: The amounts that Field gave for "philanthropy" were about identical with the sums out of which he defrauded Chicago in the one item of taxes alone. Probed into, it is seen that a great part of the sums that multimillionaires have given, represent but a tithe of the sums cheated by them in taxes.
But, judging his life by that of some other multimillionaires, he lived modestly. Of medium height and spare figure, he was of rather unobtrusive appearance. In his last years his hair and mustache were white. His eyes were gray and cold; his expression one of determination and blandly assertive selfishness.
The Havemeyers and other factory owners, whose descendants are now enrolled among the conspicuous multimillionaires, were still in the embryonic stages when Vanderbilt towered aloft in a class by himself with a fortune of $105,000,000.
That fulsome writer, with the usual inaccuracies and turgid exaggerations of "popular writers," omitted to say that although Field was long the controlling figure in the management of the Pullman works, yet other powerful American multimillionaires, such as the Vanderbilts, had also become large stockholders.
To-day the possessor of a single million is looked on with scorn and contempt by our multimillionaires. Ten millions, twenty millions, fifty millions aye, even a hundred millions are now accumulated by individuals. This money belongs to the masses, the laborers who have earned it by the sweat of their brows." "Hear! hear!" "That's right!" "Hooray!" cried the crowd.
"Rats!" ejaculated Tembarom. "What about multimillionaires?" He forgot that the age of Tummas was ten. It was impossible not to forget it. He was, in fact, ten hundred, if those of his generation had been aware of the truth. But there he sat, having spent only a decade of his most recent incarnation in a whitewashed cottage, deprived of the use of his legs.
The millionaire, who had been unknown before the war and was still an unusual and portentous figure in the early seventies, was presently succeeded by the multimillionaire, and above the multimillionaires towered yet a new race of economic Titans, the hundred millionaires, and already the coming of the billionaire was being discussed.
Mount Morris, at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other, would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have been like in its glory.
It was but natural that the graduates who banded together, usually at the instigation of trustees or directors and always with their blessing, to secure the conditional gifts proffered to universities and colleges by American multimillionaires, should quickly become sensitive to the fact that they had no power to direct the spending of the money which they had so efficiently and laboriously collected.
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