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 modern civilization, in a new and big sense, we have to see now what there is, if possibly anything, that can be done for the rich.

We have come to have them now almost everywhere about us—­these great spiritual orphans, with their pathetic, blind, useless fortunes piled up around them; and Society has to support them, to keep them up morally, keep them doing as little damage as possible, and has to allow day by day besides for the strain and structural weakness they bring upon the girders of the world—­the faith of men in men, and the credit of God, which alone can hold a world together.