It is not denied that the average millionaire, when he has made his money, does different-looking things, and gathers different-looking objects about him, and is seen in different-looking places.  And it is not denied that he changes in more important particulars than things.  He quite often changes people, the people he is seen with but he never or almost never changes himself.  He is not one man when he is putting money into his pocket and another when he is taking it out.

We keep hoping at first with each new mere millionaire that when he gets all the money he has wanted it will change him; but we find it almost never does.

Merely reversing the motion with a pocket does not make a man a new and beautiful creature, and one soon sees that the typical millionaire is governed by the same bargain principles, is bullied and domineered over by the same personal limitations, the same old something-for-nothing habits.  If he had the habit, while getting money out of people, of getting the better of them, he still insists on getting the better of people when he gives it to them or to their causes.  He takes it out of their souls.  There never has been a millionaire who runs his business on the old humdrum principle of merely making all the money he can who does not run his very philanthropies afterward on the same general principle of oppressing everybody, of outwitting everybody—­and of doing people good in a way that makes them wish they were dead.  Philanthropy as a philosophy, and even as an institution, is getting to be nearly futile to-day, for the reason that millionaires—­valid, authentic cases of millionaires who are really cured—­who are changed either in their motives or their methods with regard to what they do with money, except in rare cases, do not exist.

The New Theatre in New York, which was started as a kind of Polar Expedition to discover and rescue Dramatic Art in America, failed because two hundred and forty millionaires tried to help it.  If enough millionaires could have been staved off from that enterprise, or if it could have been taken in hand either by fewer or more select millionaires cooeperating with the public and with artists of all classes, New Theatre of New York would not have been obliged, as it has been since, to start all over again on a new basis.  The blunders in creative public work that men who get rich in the wrong way are always sure to make had to be made first.  They nearly always have to be made first.  There is hardly a single enterprise of higher social value in which the world is interested to-day which is not being gravely threatened in efficient service by letting in too many millionaires, and by paying too much attention to what they think.  If our people were generally alive to the terrific sameness and monotony of a millionaire’s life “before and after,” and if millionaires were looked over discriminatingly before being allowed to take part in great public enterprises like the cinema, for instance, the newspapers, the hospitals, the theatres, there is hardly any limit to the new things that public enterprises would begin to make happen in the world, and the new men that would begin to function in them.