I wish people would speak oftener of a man’s motives, what he lives for, as his motive powers.  They generally speak of motives in a man as if they were a mere kind of dead chart or spiritual geography in him, or clock-hand on him or map of his soul.  The motives and desires in a man are the motors or engines in him, the central power house in a man, the thing in him that makes him go.

All a man has to do to live suddenly and unexpectedly a big life is to have suddenly a big motive.

Anybody who has ever tried, for five minutes, a big motive, ever tried working a little happiness for other people into what he is doing for himself, for instance, if he stopped to think about it and how it worked and how happy it made him himself, would never do anything in any other way all his life.  It is the big motives that are efficient.

PART TWO

NEWS AND MONEY

I think it was Sir William Lever who remarked (but I have heard in the last two years so many pearls dropped from the lips of millionaires that I am not quite sure) that the way to tell a millionaire, when one saw one, was by his lack of ready money.  He added that perhaps a surer way of knowing a millionaire, when one saw one, was by his lack of ideas.

My own experience is that neither of these ways works as well as it used to.  I very often meet a man now—­a real live millionaire, no one would think it of.

One of them—­one of the last ones—­telegraphed me from down in the country one morning, swung up to London on a quick train, cooped me up with him at a little corner table in his hotel, and gave me more ideas in two hours than I had had in a week.

I came away very curious about him—­whoever he was.

Not many days afterward I found myself motoring up a long, slow hill, full of wind and heather, and there in a stately park with all his treetops around him, and his own blue sky, in a big, beautiful, serene room, I saw him again.

He began at once, “Do you think Christ would have approved of my house?”

His five grown sons were sitting around him but he spoke vividly and directly and like a child, and as if he had just brushed sixty years away, and could, any time.

I said I did not think it fair to Christ, two thousand years off, to ask what he would have thought of a house like his, now.  The only fair thing to do would be to ask what Christ would think if He were living here to-day.

“Well, suppose He had motored over here with you this afternoon from ——­ Manor, and spent last night with you there, and talked with you and with ——­ and had seen the pictures, and the great music room and wandered through the gardens, and suppose that then He had come through on his way up, all those two miles of slums down in ——­ seen all those poor, driven, crowded people, and had finally come up here with you to this big, still, restful place two thousand people could live in, and which I keep all to myself.  You don’t really mean to say, do you, that He would approve of my living in a house like this?”