III DIVISION OF ECONOMICS AND HISTORY Director, JAMES THOMSON SHOTWELL Office, 407 West 117th Street, New York City Cable, Interpax, New York Economic and Social History of the World War JAMES THOMSON SHOTWELL, General Editor and ex-officio Member of the National Boards Editorial Board for Great Britain SIR WILLIAM Beveridge, K. C. B., Chairman THOMAS JONES, LL.D. J. M. KEYNES, C.B. FRANCIS W. HIRST FRIEDRICH FREIHERR VON WIESER, Chairman for Austria GUSTAV GRATZ, Editor for Hungary RICHARD RIEDL RICHARD SCHÜLLER CLEMENS FREIHERR VON PIRQUET Editorial Board for Italy LUIGI EINAUDI, Chairman PASQUALE JANNACCONE UMBERTO RICCI Editorial Board for the Baltic Countries HARALD WESTERGAARD, Chairman ELI HECKSCHER Editor for the Netherlands H. B. GREVEN Editor for Yugoslavia VELIMIR BAJKITCH ANDREW CARNEGIE1 The possession and expenditure of great wealth obscures the personality of the possessor. The worship of wealth, whether it be that kind of worship which finds its expression in mere longing for possession or in sycophancy, or whether it be that kind of worship which finds its expression in envy and bitterness, will dazzle the eyes and prevent people from seeing through to the man. It is very much as with the people of a strange and illunderstood race; the racial similarity obscures the individual characteristics and they will all look alike to us. A great many people of the United States and of the world have learned to think of Mr. Carnegie as a man who amassed a great fortune and had given away large sums of money. That is a very inadequate and inaccurate view. He did amass a great fortune and he did in one sense, a very limited sense, give away great sums of money; but he was predominantly of the constructive type. He was a great constructor, a builder, never passive. He disposed of his fortune exactly as he made it. He belonged to that great race of nation builders who have made the progress and development of America the wonder of the world; who have exhibited the capacity of free undominated individual genius for building up the highest example of the possibilities of freedom for nations. Mr. Carnegie, in amassing his fortune, always gave more than he gained. His money was not taken from others. His money was the by-product of great constructive ability which served others; which contributed to the great business enterprises that he conceived and built up and carried to success, and through those enterprises gave to the world great advance in comfort and the possibilities of broader and happier life. The steps by which mankind proceeds from naked savagery to civilized society are the steps that are taken by just such constructive geniuses. When Mr. Carnegie had amassed his fortune, the magnitude of which rested upon the introduction into America of the Bessemer method of making steel, with all the advance and the progress 1 An address delivered by Mr. Elihu Root at a Meeting in Memory of the Life and Work of Andrew Carnegie, held in New York, April 25, 1920. that that means; when Mr. Carnegie had amassed his fortune and had come to the point of retiring from money making enterprise, it was impossible for him to retire. His nature made it impossible that he should become passive and he turned his constructive genius and the great constructive energy that urged him on, by the necessities of his nature, toward the use of the money which he had amassed. He never, in the ordinary sense, gave away his fortune. He used this fortune, and what may seem to some casual observer the giving away, was the securing of agents for the use of his fortune to carry out his purposes. He brought to the work in the second period of his life, this greatest work of his life, some very marked characteristics. First was the urgency to do,-to continue to do something Another was the distinct understanding of the difference between using his money for the purpose that he had in his own mind and being a mark for others, to make an instrument of him for their purposes. He also had a very distinct understanding of the difficulty of making a good use of money. He knew how easy it was to waste it. He knew what a danger there was of doing harm by the use of it, and he applied to the problem of its use the same sagacity that he applied to the problem of making steel and marketing it. Long ago before he retired from business, he had stated his idea in an article in the North American Review, where he said: "The main consideration should be to help others by helping them to help themselves, to provide a part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so, to give those who desire to rise, the aid by which they may rise; to assist-but rarely or never to do all. Neither the individual, nor the race is improved by alms giving." So he never held the grab bag, and he brought to the consideration of the way in which he should use his money not only great sagacity but great pains and assiduity, and continuous labor. Another thing which played a great part in this second period of his life was the fact that he had a very definite conception as to what would contribute to human happiness. In that conception, the mere possession of money played no part. It did not enter his mind that he could in general make men happy by giving them money; but he had brought from his boyhood memories of the longings of the little Scotch weaver's boy. From close, intimate contact with the poor, from the daily round of dreary toil, he had brought a knowledge of the human heart, such as Lincoln brought to the problems of our country, during the stress of the Civil War, from his experience as a boy. Doubtless as he watched the stationary engine which was his task in Pittsburgh, as he stood at the machine of the telegrapher, as he went to his daily duties as Division Superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, he had his dreams. He had built his palaces in the clouds and from the heart of the boy, that never left him, he translated his longings into his theory of the possibilities of human happiness. He said something in his letter to the Trustees in establishing the Dunfermline Trust which told the story. He said to them that it gave him great pleasure "to bring into the monotonous lives of the toiling masses of Dunfermline more of sweetness and light." Then there is the last characteristic, which I will mention. He was the kindliest man I ever knew. Wealth had brought to him no hardening of the heart, nor made him forget the dreams of youth. Kindly, affectionate, charitable in his judgments, unrestrained in his sympathy, noble in his impulses, I wish all the people who think of him as a rich man giving away money he did not need, could know of the hundreds of kindly things that he did unknown to the world, the old friends remembered, the widows and children cared for, the tender memories of his youth and all who were associated with him. And so with this great constructive energy, with this discriminating Scotch sagacity, with this accurate conception of the possibilities of the use of money, with those definite views as to the sources of human happiness, and with this heart overflowing with kindness, he entered upon his second career, undertaking to use these hundreds of millions, and not to waste them. The first thing that he did was to turn to the associates of his early struggles and his early successes. He had done many charitable things, as men ordinarily do, while still engaged in business. But when he came to the dividing line between money getting and the money using epochs, he turned to Pittsburgh. And he first attempted there to apply his theories of the possibilities of giving happiness. He began with a library, the endowment of a great library, and he tells us what it was that led him to that. It was the memory of a library of four hundred volumes which Colonel Anderson of Allegheny, over across the river from Pitts |