He is sure that he can improve the world by theorising about it. He loves monopolies; he loves millionaires; and he cannot bear to see them humiliated before the world. With a curiously simple faith he looks forward to the future. "The next great thing that is going to happen," says he, "is one inspired millionaire." One will be enough, he thinks, and he will make the rest unhappy. And when he comes, this inspired millionaire, he will do many things. He will redeem industry, and he will redeem wealth. In fact, he will be an artist, who will use his wealth in a creative spirit, and will liberate the creative spirit in others. Now all this sounds, as we read it, hopeful and interesting. But when we descend from rhetoric to reality, we find that there is very little substance in it. Mr Lee's ideal millionaire would do no more with his money than many other millionaires have done. He would encourage the humblest mechanic to use his brains, which he will use, if he have them, in spite of factory systems, in spite even of that far crueller tyranny, the Trade Union. He would persuade the working man to share the profits of his trade, which he has shared in England and America for many a long year. There is nothing more that can be done or will be done. And there is really not much of a grievance on the part of the mechanic. If he have the faculty of rising, no system will keep him down. If he have not the faculty, no chance, freely given by an amiable employer, will help him up. There is the beginning and end of it all. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, even though you be an American citizen, and all the talk in the world will not bring about the much vaunted and never seen equality of man. Of practical suggestions Mr Lee says little enough. He seems to think that it is useful to have "a superintendent with a first class mind," though he acknowledges that he might cost a first-class price. This hero, he believes, might accomplish much. He should be the representative and champion of everybody who works in the factory, of everybody who owns it, of the great public which buys its goods. The difficulty is to find him. If he possesses these transcendent qualities, why should he not be a millionaire himself? In fact, Mr Lee is "ready to admit that, if our inspired millionaire desired to acquire a superintendent with a first-class mind or a businessimagination like this, he would find it hard to attract him with an ordinary salary." He would indeed. And if he were found, the chief difficulty would remain unsolved. It is the Trade Union which is the real foe to the emancipation of the working man, and the inspired millionaire and the superintendent with a first-class mind would alike be powerless to deal with that. Mr Lee confesses SO much himself. "The real enemy of the labourer," he says, "is not the man in the automobile, at his bank. He might, and who works as hard as he often does, live for fifty years can, but the labourer next him and escape notice. Sometimes who works as little as pos- you may know him by a sible. . . . The real tragedy grave shabbiness of demeanof labour-the oppression of our. Or he may baffle you the poor-is the mob of weak by the exquisite plainness of men intimidating the strong." his attire. He may be arroThat is a grave truth lucidly gant or amiable, lavish or expressed. It is the working penurious. In brief, millionmen who bar the way of pro- aires are good and bad, like gress, who in the cause of a poor men. Some of them are useless equality determine that born, some are made. The best no one of their number shall of them, whose instincts are rise to prosperity if they can feudal, and who have in Enghelp it. The basis of all Trade land at any rate given themUnions is a negation of skill. selves to the service of their If a man outstrip his fellows country for many centuries, in industry and intelligence, he are acclaimed by unknowing is marked down as a blackleg, Radicals as the enemies of whose efforts must not be ade- mankind. The rest depend quately rewarded. Where the upon monopolies. Some of constant aim is to preserve a them, by inventing an object of dead level, to set the standard common usefulness and by the not by the ablest but by the wise distribution of this object, feeblest worker, the minimum profit the community while wage must be the maximum they enrich themselves. Others, also. In brief, the working by converting the necessities man is his own tyrant-a of life-such as oil, corn, and tyrant ten times crueller than ice-into infamous monopolies, the harshest employer. And purchase their wealth at the if the "inspired millionaire" cost of other men's hunger came along, he could do no- and thirst. It seems idle, thing to improve this sad therefore, to speak of millioncondition of things. The re- aires as though they belonged form of labour can proceed all of them to a distinct only from labour itself. genus. One fallacy seems to vitiate the whole of Mr Lee's argument. He has a simple faith that there exists a separate and authentic personage called a millionaire—a lofty being who differs from the general mass of humanity and shares certain traits with his own kind. This, of course, is absurd. A millionaire, after all, is merely a man with a large balance Each one must be judged by his works. His wealth, if it be ill-gotten, is a crime. No money-bags are heavy enough to confer distinction where there are no graces of mind and heart. The millionaires of America have made the world dull with their benefactions. The free libraries that they have hurled hither and thither at unwilling heads are insufficient for salva - tion. There is too often a understanding of England, suspicion that the gift, care- which is being spread abroad lessly lavished on a reluctant over the earth, is due to the people, is in reality hush-money splendid scheme of scholarships forced upon providence. Eng- which his brain conceived, and land, on the other hand, has which his wealth ensured. never lacked what Mr Lee Rhodes, in fact, is the best might call "inspired million- specimen of the millionaire that aires." The pleasantness of the modern world has seen, and our English life, the security of he is not likely to be surpassed the old and tired, our ancient within the measure of our excolleges and schools fragrant perience. But he has not with noble memories, these infected others, and he will not. benefits were purchased with Mr Lee's phantasy that one the millions of wise and wealthy inspiration is enough to convert men. But in these benefactors the whole body of millionaires there was no self-consciousness. is a phantasy and no They did not act as a class. The word "millionaire" was unknown among them. They were princes, or soldiers, or lawyers, who claimed the respect of their fellows for other gifts than the gift of money, and who were able to profit their country, because their wisdom showed the true path of benefi cence. And if you would estimate how much a millionaire, in the modern and American sense of the word, may accomplish, look back upon the career of Cecil Rhodes. There was a man who regarded his millions with the eye of imagination, who gathered money as the instrument of a great purpose, who had the intelligence and prevision which are necessary to the attainment of life's aim. And so it is that his influence survives in his work. Though death has claimed him, his hand and his will still direct the progress of his country. The union of South Africa was imagined by him, and achieved by his methods. The better more. Unhappily, genius is the last thing in the world that is catching. And there will be a hundred ice-kings, or cornerers of wheat, who inflict the cruellest suffering upon innocent persons, before 8 fortunate world again greets the ironic smile of so brave a captain of men as Cecil Rhodes, the true heir and equal brother of the heroes who gave space and vigour to the triumphant age of Queen Elizabeth. We cannot hope much, then, from Mr Lee's one inspired millionaire. Even if he converted to his nebulous gospel all the millionaries that may be in Wall Street, the United States would not be much better off than to-day. The truth is that Mr Lee, being an American and a reformer, is a prodigious sentimentalist. He sees all things through the roseate glass of hope. His own country is transfigured in his eyes to something wondrous and strange. "We are strong," he says, in a perfervid passage," because we are the spokesmen of the prayers of a world. America is not a theory-a map or chart of what once might be. America is a vision that a great people have wroughtout of wars and revolutions they have wrought it—a vision of free voluntary men, rich and poor, in a new, fresh land, fulfilling themselves and fulfilling one another together." There is only one word which can express these high-sounding phrases, and that is guff. America is many things: it is a geographical expression; it is the dumping-ground of Europe; it is a conglomeration of men with no community of blood or soil; it is an unbridled democracy. It is not "a kind of splendid child nation," as Mr Lee says it is, touched with a strength which is not its own; and this mere flapping of the eagle's wings proves that Mr Lee's theories of future grandeur rest only upon the insecure basis of hope and pride. If the world be ever made better, it will be made better by ideas, not by dollars; by thrift, sincerity, and intelligence, not by the inspired application of many green-backs to the wounds of the people. It has been the greatness of England, and her great good fortune too, that she has sought prosperity not in the mere collection of coins, but in the establishment of new Colonies. The spirit of adventure has dominated her sons for many hundreds of years. Small empires have been established within the Empire, in which law and prosperity have gone hand in hand, and in which a worthier ideal has been cherished than to get rich quick. The recent death of George Clunies-Ross has reminded us of an enterprise which has been conducted with success and resolution for three generations. In the Indian Ocean, some 700 miles south-west of Sumatra, there lies a group of coral islands, known to geographers as the Cocos-Keeling Islands. Discovered four hundred years ago by William Keeling, they remained nothing more than a name on the map until 1825, when John Clunies-Ross, a descendant of a well-known Jacobite, made the Cocos Islands his home. The reasons for his choice were simple and characteristic. He could not live without the sound of the sea in his ears, and he refused to expose his children to the ignominy of being reared in "a country which had the taint of convicts." It was plain, therefore, that Australia was not for him, and thus he came to settle in the Cocos, which has been the home of his family ever since. At the outset Ross divided his sway with one of the strangest men that ever attempted to make a living out of a coral reef. Alexander Hare was his name, and he came to the Cocos with all the trappings of Oriental splendour. In brief, he set up a mimic court, and comforted his solitude with minstrels, courtiers, and a harem, which, "whether wise or no"-to use his own words "he was in the habit of considering necessary." That the practical Ross and the fantastic Hare should long agree was impossible, and after a reign of ten uncertain years Hare retired to die at Singapore, leaving behind no trace of his luxurious sovereignty. Ross, on the other hand, persisted in his adventure, and laid the foundations of a little Empire, which still survives, and is in no danger of extinotion. At first he determined to make a trading station of his atoll. He saw, says Mr Wood-Jones in his interesting work, 'Coral and Atolls," "that a man with a thorough knowledge of Eastern produce, and familiar with the dialects of Malaya, could buy with great cheapness when the crops were abundant, and could, after storing his cargo, sell it to homeward-bound merchantmen with great advantage to himself." For some years this scheme prospered, and then Ross saw a larger profit in the cultivation of the natural resources of his territory. In other words, he turned his attention to growing of the coco-palm, and described his island as an "oil factory," which, indeed, it has remained ever since in the hands of his descendants. It is a pleasant glimpse that we get of this old Scot, pursuing his business with zeal, studying philosophy after the manner of his kind and race, and confuting in two yet unpublished volumes what he regarded as the pestilent heresies of Malthus. Darwin saw him when he went out on the Beagle, and he was visited from time to time by Dutch mariners. But for the rest he lived, as he wished to live, in a sea-bound solitude, and when he died in 1854 he left to his son and successor a compact kingdom and a comfortable business. Ross the second - John George Clunies Ross, to give him his full name - inherited the tastes and abilities of his father. He, too, was a philosopher; he, too, was a ruler of men; he, too, set himself with the utmost energy to ensuring the prosperity of his little kingdom. Only once, in 1859, did he revisit England, and by his marriage with a Malay lady of Royal Solo blood and of remarkable character, he bound himself and his family by yet closer bonds to the soil annexed by his father. The one conspicuous event of his reign was a terrific cyclone, which in 1862 devastated the island, and it is characteristic of his calm and philosophic temper that he set himself to build up again what was left of the colony with unbroken spirit and energy unimpaired. He was succeeded in 1872 by the third Ross, whose recent death a bereaved colony deplores. George Clunies-Ross was in some respects the ablest and most resolute of them all. Educated in Guernsey and at Glasgow, he returned to the Cocos Islands when no more than twenty, quelled an insurrection by striking the ringleader to the earth with a cutlass, and had already won the hearts of the people before his father's death called him to the throne. He, too, allied |