The only millionaires who should be allowed to have a controlling interest in public enterprises are millionaires who do not need to be different before and after making their money.  Everybody is coming to see this, sooner or later.  It is already getting very hard to raise money for any public enterprise in which mere millionaires or bewildered, unhappy rich men are known to have a controlling interest.  The most efficient and far-sighted men do not expect anything very decided or of marked character from such enterprises, and will no longer lend to them either their brains or their money.  Mere millionaires will soon have to conduct their public enterprises quite by themselves, and they will then soon fall of their own weight.  The moment men are put in control of public enterprises by the size of their brains instead of the size of their cheques, the whole complexion of what are known as our public enterprises will change, and churches, theatres, hospitals, settlements, art galleries, and all other great public causes, instead of boring everybody and teasing everybody, will be attracting everybody and attracting everybody’s money.  They will be full of character, courage, and vision.  Our present great, vague, helpless, plaintive public enterprises—­one third art, one third millionaire, one third deficit—­drag along financially because they are listless compromises, because they have no souls or vision, and are not interesting—­not even interesting to themselves.

Men with creative or imaginative quality, and courage, and insight into ordinary human nature, and far-sightedness of what can be expected of people, do not get on with the ordinary millionaire.  It cannot be denied that millionaires and artists get together in time; but the particular point that seems to be interesting to consider is how the millionaires and artists can be got together before the artists are dead, and before the millionaires stop growing and stop being creative and understanding creative men.

It might be well to consider the present situation in the concrete—­the theatre, for instance—­and see how the situation lies, and where one would have to begin, and how one would have to go to work to change it.

The present failure of the theatre to encourage what is best in modern art is due to the fact that the public is unimaginative and inartistic.

If a public is unimaginative and inartistic, the only way the best things that are offered can succeed with them is by having these best things held before them long and steadily enough for them slowly to compare them with other things, and see that they are better than the other things, and that they are what they want.

Unimaginative and inartistic people do not know what they want.  If things are tried long enough with them they do.  When they have been tried long enough with them they support them themselves.

The only way fine things can be tried long enough is with sufficient capital.