The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1872-11-23 00:00:00

ENGLISH "MILLIONAIRES."

The Spectator has published a list, compiled from the files
of the Illustrated London News, of almost every fortune-.
with the exception, it mentions, of the late Mr. Brassey— ex-
ceeding a quarter of a million personalty, which has been
transferred by death within the past ten years The Daily
News in a leader, thus comments upon the subject
The phenomena of wealth has received a curious il-
lustration from a Return which the Spectator has com-
piled. It is an account of every fortune exceeding
£250,000 personalty which has been transferred in Eng-
land by death during the last ten years. The list in-
cludes two fortunes of one million two hundred
thousand each, one of two millions eight hundred
thousand, one of three millions, and all manner of
amounts between half a million and one million. We
become no familiar with bequeet of eight or nine hun-
dred thousand pounds as we glance down this list that
half a million seems rather spoor thing for a man who
respects his relations toleave behind him. Of course,
these sums, such as they are, by no means represent the
actual wealth of the men who owned them. In some in-
stances the personalty must be only a trivial part of the
property of the individual. The eight hundred thousand
pounds,for example, bequeathed by the late Marquis of
Westminster, must be huts poor fragment of the stupen-
dous wealth which belonged to the late Head of the
House of Grosvenor. The four hundred thousand
pounds of the late Mr. Peabody must, in like manner,
we should suppose, only represent the petty cash de-
partment of a noble fortune. But if we take these sums
just as they are, and assume each to represent the whole
of a fortune, they are still sufficiently surprising and
even startling. They show at a glance, how immensely
the making of money has increased of late years, and
how conspicuous is the place which England holds in
this field of human energy. The most famous fortune
known to modern romance is probably that of the
Count of Monte Christ°. But the whole of the
treasure-trove with which that distinguished person
wrought such dazzling wonders fell very far short of
a million sterling; and there is such a thing in our
days as the payment of income tax on half a mil-
lion every year. Mr. Disraeli's "Young Duke," a
sort of Belgravian Monte Christ° of forty years
back, came in for a fortune which "always
among the wealthiest of Great Britain," had
been coverted by a long minority "into one oi
the richest in Europe," The young Duke's rent-
roll exhibited a sum total of two hundred thou-
sand pounds, and he had half a million in the
funds. But this would, indeed, fall far short of being
a first-class fortune in our days. The young Duke
would find, not merely among nobles but even among
shopkeepers, numbers of men much richer than him-
self. The great fortune about which so much work is
made in" Our Mutual Friend," and the acquisition of
which converts Mr. Boffin into one of the wonders of
London is only a hundred thousand pounds. There
are, in 'the Return to which we have Just alluded, at
least a dozen instances in which five such fortunes
could be deducted from the property and yet leave the
inheritor a man of vast possessions.
England is the country of great fortunes. Of course,
the theory which used to prevail so commonly among
us, and still does prevail to a certain extent, that all
foreigners (European foreigners) are comparatively
poor, is absurd in a great variety of cases. It was an
article of faith in England at one time that all German
Princes are beggars, and yet it is quite certain that
some even of the smallest of the German Princes were
enormously rich. When Catthrine of Braganza was
coming from Portugal to marry our Charles the Second,
there were many jokes in London about the Princess,
who on reaching Whitehall was for the first time to have
a whole chicken for her dinner. Yet it must have
been known well enough that the large fortune offered
with the Princess, and the extreme need of the English
King, were the principal inducements to the match on
the part of England. But it is, on the whole, quite
true that the Continental fortunes are both few and
small compared with ours. The strangest
.peculiarity
about the list on which we are commentingui the great
number of names it contains which may be described as
unknown to the general public. When we hear of a
Duke of Devonshire or a Marquis of Westminster, of
a Rothschild or & Baring, or even of a Crosley
of Halifax or a Brown of Liverpool, we expect
to hear of a great fortune, and the figures are
pot likely to surprise us. But here are the names

being
... ,

.......
..._._.___
nobody

01 WWI= 4 ceitside their own fink of
friends and business connections, perhis4n, km ever
heard; and when they die they leave their million or
million and • half behindthem. Clapham and Brixton
contribute their millionaires as well as Belgravia.
Lincoln'ain-fields appears to have had quiet and un-
assuming tenants who might have set up Mr. Dombey
again when his great house went down., and never have
noticed the loss. In the number of large fortunes no
country will compare with England. There are
in the United States some millionaires of com-
merce, who may be classed as high as any in the
world. Perhaps the names of Stewart, of Vanderbilt,
and of Astor, represent houses LW wealthy as any to be
found in England. Mr. A. T. Stewart, the great "dry
goods merchant of New York, is sa•cl by his c runtry -
men to be the wealthiest man of business in the world.
But the millionaires of the New World are com-
paratively few thus far. The very fact that they be-
come so conspicious for their wealth is in itself the
clearest proof that there are not a great many of them.
It is possible that America may hereafter become the
land of the most numerous fortines ; but as yet the has
not had time to do so.
It is probable that for some time to come the
accumulation of greatfortunes in England will continue
to increase rather than diminish. The increase has
been regular and rapid for the whole of this century.
The yearly gains which would have marked out a man
as opulent fifty or even thirty years ago, seem mere
mediocrity now. One can hardly venture to ray what
amount of fortune and expenditure it would take to
create any marked sensation in London today. For
good or ill there may be noted • steady increase
in the demands upon income, and consequently upon
exertion, made by the social habits of all, or nearly
I all, the classes of our population. This is not merely
an illusion, like the dream of the Golden Age, or
the time when we had such fine summers. It can be
shown by the clearest comparison, by reference to the
descriptions of contemporaries, by the evidence of his-
tory, of fiction, of painting, and of dry statistics, that
the people of almost every clam in our great cities
have immensely overleaped in their habits She
social needs of their grandfathers. Nor is this merely
because things are so much more costly now ; for many
of the comforts and luxuries of life can be had more
cheaply by us than they could have been by our fore-
fathers. The fact is that the making of money
has bexnne more easy, more tempting, and more
common, and that the habit of luxurious expenditure
has grown with it. This, however, is anything but
an unmixed evil. If people are more lavish and
luxurious than their ancestors, so also are they
more careful and nice in all that pertains to cleanli-
ness, fresh air, and health. The stern simplicity of
former years was apt to be associated with a good deal
of impure air, not to say broadly with a good deal of
dirt. We all go DOW into transports of finger and
alarm if any defect or inefficiency is discovered in the
working of sanitary arrangements, the elementary
necessity of which had not entered into the imagina-
tion of our progenitors. A waiting-maii of our day is
in many respects better lodged than a queen of a century
back; and a scientific philosopher of that time would
endure without grumbling, or even thinking about the
matter, defects in the appliances of comfort and
health against which a cobbler in a garret would now
protest. The distribution of wealth is not perhaps as
yet very broad and rapid. The reproach that the ex-
treme of riches and the extreme of poverty touch each
other so commonly, still clings to our society. But
there is too much of a tendency even yet in the minds
of people, when they hear of a large fortune, to think
of it as wealth which the owner has kept stored up in a
chest, and on which he only drew for his own personal
and selfish necessities. They are apt to forget that the
money has been all the while in rapid and fluent cir-
culation, feeding the demands of industry and com-
merce. and keeping alive the activity of the nation. The
colossal fortunes which the Spectator's list records, may
indicate a too absorbing pursuit of wealth for its own
sake, and the conversion into an end of what should be
only a meatus; and the growth of a great plutocratic
class is a social phenomenon of ambiguous aspect.
These are points for the moralist and the politician to
weigh. But on purely economic grounds, unless we
can seriously persuade ourselves that in commerce one
man becomes rich only by impoverishing another,
there can be no reason to regard the increase of large
fortunes made in this way with jealousy or alarm.