Of course, if what a great vision for the people—­i.e., a public enterprise is for, is to make money, it would be different.  The mere millionaire might understand, and his understanding might help.  But if an institution is founded (like a great theatre) to be a superb and noble masterpiece of understanding and changing human nature; if it is founded to be a creative and dominating influence, to build up the ideals and fire the enthusiasm of a city, to lay the foundations of the daily thoughts and the daily motives of a great people, the mere millionaire finds, if he tries to manage it, that he is getting in beyond his depth.  A man who has made his money by exploiting and taking advantage of the public can only be expected, in conducting a Theatre, to be an authority on how to exploit a public and take advantage of it still more, and how to make it go to the play that merely looks like the play that it wants.

Millionaires as a class, unless they are men who have made their money in the artist’s or the inventor’s spirit, really ought to be expected by this time, except in the size of their cheques, to be 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.