Men of Wealth

Interlogue One

COSIMO DE’ MEDICI

THE TEMPTATION to include in this volume whole chapters about three men was not easy to resist. They were Cosimo de’ Medici, Sir Thomas Gresham, and Jacques Coeur. The essentials in the stories of these men were quite the same. They were the chief pioneers in organizing the forms of the new capitalist system in Italy, England, and France, respectively. They seemed, however, interesting and romantic in their personal histories, but less significant than Jacob Fugger, and it was not possible to include more than one.

When we speak of the Medici we may choose one of three—Giovanni di Bicci, surnamed the Friend of the People, or Cosimo, his son, called Pater Patriae, or Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo, known as the Magnificent. Giovanni laid the foundation of the fortune. Cosimo, however, ablest of the three, accumulated that vast wealth that gave the Medici their power in Florence. Lorenzo advertised, paraded, luxuriated in that fortune and laid the foundation for its ruin. All of them were merchants, moneylenders, bankers, manufacturers. Cosimo, however, added to the techniques of these professions the role of politician and the devices of homicide. One does not use these brutal terms about such splendid persons. Yet if truth is to be served we must describe Cosimo and Lorenzo as bankers, merchants, manufacturers, statesmen, and murderers.

Giovanni actually established a large business with branches all over Italy, in the Levant, Constantinople, and other cities. He opposed the Albizzi, rulers of Florence, and was hailed by the people as their leader. The Medici remained continuously heads of what is called a republic for four generations—from 1434 to 1494—sixty years in which the republic ripened into a thorough tyranny.

Cosimo, shrewd, iron-willed, looking the esthete, gracious but cruel, refused office and ruled Florence as the invisible power functioning behind some nominated tool, as Dick Croker or Charlie Murphy did, save that they ruled a vast city and he a small one of 70,000 souls. He dressed in simple robes, sometimes like a poor guildsman, shrank from notice like Rockefeller, whom he resembled in some respects, whereas his grandson Lorenzo resembled J. Pierpont Morgan. He mingled the virtues of the chalice and the dagger. The problems of competition that have continued to torture industrial barons, he met with the singularly effective application of the knife. Persons of power who were in his way in the state or the market place were driven out of Florence; the less fortunate were murdered. An important source of his business growth was the finances of the popes. The Medici became papal bankers. The possession of these large funds served him as the possession of the funds of the emperor served the Mitsuis in Japan.

A devout Christian, Cosimo fraternized with the Franciscans whom he presented with a monastery, providing it with a cell to which he himself retired at intervals for meditation and prayer. When he was seventy-five he went to his last rest with the perfect tranquillity of the righteous man, not at all ruffled by the memory of his climb to wealth and power. His son Piero, surnamed the Gouty, succeeded him, and died after a futile career of five years. Into his shoes stepped Lorenzo, who proceeded to lavish upon Florence the wealth his grandfather had amassed.

Lorenzo made money, of course, for he possessed a great fortune, a great money-making machine, and enormous prestige. From Pope Paul II he got a monopoly of the alum recently discovered in the hills around Volterra, his Holiness justly protecting the monopoly by proclaiming excommunication against anyone who competed by importing alum from the Turks. Thus excommunication was added to assassination as a defense against competition. Lorenzo was a good Catholic, but a better moneylender. He loaned Pope Innocent VIII 100,000 ducats for a year, taking as surety two tenths of the stipends of all newly appointed priests, and possession of the Città di Castello until paid. The Pope made Lorenzo’s fourteen-year-old son a cardinal and gave to Lorenzo’s daughter his own illegitimate son in marriage.

An attempt upon Lorenzo’s life was made by two priests during Mass, instigated by Pope Sixtus IV and the Pazzi, bankers. Lorenzo’s vengeance was swift. Certain of the Pazzi were hanged, others butchered in the streets, some cast into the Arno. He became an unrestrained tyrant, filled Florence with spies, was himself excommunicated by the Pope. He showered gold and favors upon painters, sculptors, poets, philosophers, enriched Florence with their works, bought rare manuscripts, books, antiquities, covered himself with the praise-giving of these subsidized flatterers, and, dying, left his city upon the brink of ruin. His son Pietro ruled disastrously for two years and was driven out of Florence to make way for the theocratic Fascism of the monkish enemy of bankers, national and international, Savonarola.

SIR THOMAS GRESHAM

The great businessman of England in the dawn of capitalism was Sir Thomas Gresham, financial adviser to three Tudor monarchs—Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth—founder of the Royal Exchange and reputed discoverer of Gresham’s Law, known to every crossroads store controversialist on money.

Son of a baronet who was a friend of Wolsey, born in 1519, when Fugger was at the peak of his career, merchant-adventurer by inheritance, studied at Cambridge—Thomas Gresham was the prototype of the modern Peel-Hanna-Chamberlain-Mellon school of merchant-banker-statesman. Starting with an education amid members of the mercers’ guild, who had but little, he spent twenty years as merchant and king’s factor in Antwerp, money metropolis of Europe, where he learned more about money, credit, exchange, and speculation than any of his English contemporaries.

He went to Antwerp as king’s agent in 1551 when Edward VI’s ministers were looking ruefully down that bottomless hole known as the national debt. It was an external debt—more kings have fallen by it than by guns. English kings borrowed from Flemish, German, and Italian bankers. More money flowed out in usurious interest than flowed in in loans. Edward VI had to find 40,000 pounds a year for interest to foreign bankers. “How can the king be rid of his debt?” asked the ministers. Gresham’s answer was an amazing one. “By paying them and incurring no new ones.” Seemingly it had occurred to no one. It was the hard way. Politicians have a preference for the easy way—the primrose path down which they lead people to the ever-lasting bonfire. Gresham persuaded the ministers of Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth to try the hard way. It led to riches for England.

By skillful manipulation on the Antwerp bourse he got control of pound exchange over a considerable period, making it favorable to London. He induced the government to economize and to remit to him weekly sums for extinguishing the debt.

He had observed in Antwerp and Amsterdam that the worn and inferior coins drove out the good ones. England’s slipshod coinage resulted in the continuous flight of the sound ones and of the precious metals. Gresham supposed he discovered this law. As late as 1857 H. D. Macleod, economist, supposed so, too. He gave it the name of Gresham’s Law. It is probably the best known of economic principles. But actually Gresham did not discover it. It had been observed by others before him—Copernicus for one. To Elizabeth he said: “And it please your majestie to restore this your realm into such estate as heretofore it hat bene, your highness hath none other ways, butt, when time and opportunyty serveth, to bringe your base money into fine, of xi ounces fine. And so gowlde.” This was done.

He perceived that foreign interest payments drained away England’s metal money. Why not borrow from Englishmen at home? There was the canon law against it. But off in Augsburg Jacob Fugger and his personal philosopher Peutinger had already argued the ecclesiastical and secular validity out of that old Aquinian fetish. And so Gresham got Elizabeth to end the ban on interest in England. She fixed the legal rate at ten per cent.

Buying abroad and selling too little also took away England’s precious metals. Gresham contrived to shift the base of England’s trade from Antwerp to the free port of Hamburg. From thence he built a large trade into Germany. The Hanseatic merchants had had almost a monopoly of that. Gresham took away their hold upon England’s export trade to Germany. Thus he weakened the Hanse merchants and drove the Steelyard out of London. Almost as important, he taught England a lesson. Wars are made, not merely with arms, but with economic weapons. But he did not neglect the value of weapons. In his role of adviser he taught Queen Bess that a navy was a thing of great value to England and proceeded to supply her with one in his role of merchant.

Lastly, Sir Thomas Gresham—knighted for his services—built out of his own funds the Royal Exchange to provide London merchants with a bourse such as he had seen in Antwerp. In 1571 the fine building was formally dedicated by the Queen, after dinner at Gresham’s home.

Serious, severe, sober in his dress, he lived well, but not ostentatiously as did Fugger and the Medici. He had a home in Bishopgate Street and several in the country. He endowed a college—Gresham College—an almshouse in Broadstreet, and distributed alms to five prisons and four hospitals each quarter. He attained to no such wealth as Fugger or Medici. Moreover, he came on the scene after them and when the devices of the new flowering capitalist and mercantilist world had been much advanced. But he must rank as one of the great commercial figures of that era.

JACQUES COEUR

The great business leader has been called in order Magnate, King, Baron, and now Tycoon. The first title of adulation conferred upon him was prince. Hence Jacques Coeur was called the Merchant Prince of the Middle Ages. He was in but not of the Middle Ages. The smell of money was in the air in France. Men who had the feel of livres as some men have the feel of cards or dice were fingering livres and breeding them. They were not operating in accordance with the dying techniques of the Middle Ages but rather of the emerging capitalist world. Jacques Coeur was doing this in France, as Fugger was in Germany, Gresham in England, and the Medici in Italy. And, though there were no schools of business or professors of banking institutes, these gentlemen did very well. Most of them—Coeur, Fugger, Law, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan—were already rich before the average young business-college graduate has emerged with his M.A.

Coeur was pre-eminently a trader—a merchant-adventurer. He flourished upon the swiftly growing intercourse between nations, the wider variety of products upon the market, and the means of gratifying the taste for them by means of money.

He was born in Bourges about 1400, the son of a prosperous small merchant, got some education—enough to get the tonsure of the clerk when he was past twenty—married the daughter of the Provost of Bourges, and turns up in the money-coining business about the time the Maid of Orléans was winning her battles for Charles VII.

Coining money was the king’s prerogative in France, but he let it out upon a partnership basis to various argentiers in different sections. Ravent Ladenois had it for Bourges and a brace of cities. And Ladenois found for himself a partner in each such town to operate the mint. Young Jacques Coeur was Ladenois’ partner in Bourges. Ladenois and Coeur were arrested and thrown into jail on the charge of cheapening the king’s money—that is, short-weighting the coins, pocketing the difference as profit. Unhappy M. Ladenois whimpered that so great had been the exactions of the king out of the business that this was quite necessary for him to make a profit. Young Master Coeur said he did as he was told. Both were convicted, fined 1000 livres each, the plea of necessity weighing heavily with the judges.

Coeur became a merchant. He turned up next as a merchant-adventurer. Shipwrecked in his vessel on a trip to the Orient, captured by pirates, he escaped, drove forward in business, became rich, and finally landed on both feet in the very palace of the king as Lord Steward of the household. He continued to expand his business and, we are told, spread his agents to all the important ports of the world. He had three hundred factors, his business in Bourges housed in thirty buildings, with several business buildings in towns like Tours, Marseilles, Lyons. He built a famous palace—Jacques Coeur House—in Bourges, surpassing any royal home in France. It still stands, a castle in splendor and beauty worthy of a twentieth-century economic grandee, filled with tapestries, paintings, gold and silver plate, and other works of art.

He received a patent of ennoblement from Charles VII, lived at court the equal of the greatest, had his son made archbishop of Bourges, and built his estates all over France. He went to Rome, one of the leaders of a great embassy, carted thither in eleven of his own ships, commanded by himself, pausing at Finale to deliver arms to the French and then going in to the Vatican to open the eyes of the Romans to the splendor of the ambassadors and their entourage, cantering in rich costumes to the court of Pope Nicholas V. When the king renewed the Hundred Years’ War, Jacques Coeur advanced him 2,500,000 francs in metal money, though he had to borrow some of it.

Then, as ever, the love of the king for Jacques cooled. Almost out of a clear sky he was arrested in July 31, 1451, thrown into a dungeon of the palace, and charged with the poisoning of Agnes Sorel, the king’s mistress, and some ten other crimes. Chief of them was that he had “sent coats of arms to the Saracen by means of which the Sultan had gained a victory over the Christian armies.”

There was the odor of conspiracy in all this—charges coined to ruin Coeur. After all, there was a vast estate which was subject to confiscation by the crown. And there was probably some serious rift between Coeur and the king because of the quarrel between Charles and his exiled son, who would become Louis XI. And Coeur was suspected of being friendly to the Dauphin. The charge of poisoning was dropped. But Coeur was convicted on four of the remaining ten counts, including the arming of the Turks, despite his claim that he had a license from the Pope to ship the arms. Coeur sold the arms to the Sultan in order to get permission from him to bring out of Alexandria a large cargo of pepper.

His life was spared but his property was confiscated and sold at auction, the administration of the estate constituting probably the biggest receivership in the history of France to that time. Coeur ultimately escaped, went to Rome where he was received with honors by Nicholas V, who officially proclaimed his innocence. In 1456 he went with an expedition against the Mohammedans, was taken ill, died on the island of Chios, and was buried with honor in the chapel of the Cordelliers in 1464.

THE ART AND INDUSTRY OF MAKE-UP

It is interesting to note, that in the very dawn of civilization, in ancient Egypt, when men were just beginning to learn the difficult business of living together, the art of make-up was much in use by the monarch and the ruling groups that surrounded him.

It is also worth noting that this, the oldest of the luxury industries, is the one that has persisted and grown so extensively that in our age it becomes at once a prop of our economic life and the chief weapon of our ruling figures for continuing their dominion over the minds of men.

The world is now and has always been ruled by men of wealth, and the most important instruments in the stratagems by which this is achieved are the rouge pot, the haberdasher, the builders and decorators, the dramatist and the showman, and, as we shall presently see, that oldest of functionaries—the shirt stuffer.

Plato’s sovereignty of the philosopher will never come until the philosopher puts aside the humility of the scholar and assumes the air of the conqueror, arranges the necessary pageantry, hires publicity men, and proceeds to sell himself to his fellows, in which very moment he will cease to be a philosopher.

This is the trick the ruler and the rich man knew when we discover the first traces of him in the ancient monuments and which, doubtless, he brought with him out of the jungle.

We are all bank notes, observes Thomas Carlyle, representing gold. But alas! he laments, many of us are forgeries. On this point, however, he consoles himself with the thought that, after all, men, in all times, especially in earnest times, have a talent for detecting quacks and, indeed, for detesting quacks.

The sour old Scotch philosopher, who believed in the authenticity of heroes and the necessity for them, had a theory to which this reliance on man’s perception in detecting quacks was essential. Woe to the times, he said, which, calling loudly for its great man, finds him not there.

Carlyle overstates the disaster. The times, in all ages, have had a way of inventing their great men. The machinery and means of producing men and women to our taste—and great ones, too—have always been ready to hand. We have always been equipped to make beautiful women, to hold back the wrinkles of age, to banish the silver threads from among the gold, to simulate youth and loveliness. But also we have been able to simulate intelligence and power, to make great scientists out of little pill mixers, to transmogrify bewildered little businessmen into great captains, and to inflate to the proportions of statesmen the meanest little spirits in our towns.

Somehow the hero worship that flourished in the ancient world still persists, despite education and newspapers and books. We have had a gargantuan spree of debunking, of stripping the wrappings and labels from our spurious miracle men, our pyramid builders, our treasure hunters and statesmen. We have seen a good many of the bank notes go to protest and—to mix the metaphor—to jail. But the equipment for turning out fresh forgeries seems to be inexhaustible.

These deceptions are achieved through that same more or less harmless theatricality by which men and women mitigate the errors of nature. No doubt originally devised to add to grace and charm, it has been cultivated extensively to give to cheapness and fraud the aspect of quality and authority and even greatness.

Civilization, as it moves slowly away from primitive barbarism, seeks to dress itself up for the part it would like to play.

This art of make-up probably was cultivated by remote tribes fifteen to twenty thousand years before it appeared on the banks of the Nile. And as it was one of the most important industries in the wealthiest of early nations—Egypt—so it continues to flourish as one of the most important of the great industries in the wealthiest of modern nations. It is doubtful if any single industry can match it in the number of persons employed and the sums expended in the vast business of dressing and beautifying the American man and woman.

Along the Nile and the Red Sea and across the Arabian Desert boats and camels transported the materials for ministering to Egyptian vanity, and this constituted the bulk of that country’s trade. Today in America it is said the American woman’s cosmetic bill is two billions a year. This is in addition to what she spends on clothes, furs, millinery, and jewelry. A thoughtful gentleman of my acquaintance who loves to toy with novel ideas has advanced the not wholly fantastic proposal that this nation, groping about frantically but futilely for a new industry to pull itself out of its depression, might accomplish this by merely extending the area of the oldest industry and inducing men to go in for beauty as women have done.

Oddly enough, man has never felt sure of himself in the nude. This in itself has made an end of the struggling cult of nudism. Men and women will never trust themselves to the opinions of their fellows, based on their unadorned bodies. People do not dress for modesty. Modesty, like many other excuses in our moral codes, serves a better reason.

Human beings wear clothes to shield their nakedness, to keep them warm, and to adorn themselves. But a woman can hide her nakedness in fifty cents’ worth of cotton cloth. She can keep herself warm in six dollars’ worth of wool. Nevertheless she spends fifty dollars for her coat and five thousand if she can afford it. This will serve as a measure of the relative importance of these three influences in feminine attire. People dress to conceal the defects of the body, to neutralize the onset of age, to hide the effects of gluttony and sloth.

The sums expended every year upon the mitigation of female defects and deformities is so great that were the sex as a whole to agree to suspend their make-up for a single year they would utterly wreck the economic machine of the world. Some wag with a flare for statistics has estimated that her ladyship dabs on her face 4000 tons of powder, 52,000 tons of cleansing cream, 7500 tons of nourishing cream, 25,000 tons of skin lotion, and 24,000 tons of rouge, all of which must be produced by workers, processed by factories, sold and dispensed and applied at beauty counters and salons, involving the expenditure of billions in production and distribution costs. Which leads to the observation that while vanity is vanity it is also big business and indispensable to the continued functioning of our economic world.

A German artist of the last generation made a devastating series of drawings representing groups of important people in their most admired and favored surroundings, posturing in their salons, strutting in their ballrooms, posing in all their pretension and hauteur, looking wise and profound, staring through lorgnettes, loaded with jewelry—but minus their clothes. The spectacle of withered old men and women, with hanging paunches and drooping breasts, wrinkled, flatulent, stooped, made an impression that would wring from the most irascible hater of mockery and deception in dress a cry for a return to those tons of creams and lotions and rouge and layers of lace and fur and silk and wool. Let us expose their sins, let us have at them with ink and jest and invective, but for God’s sake, let us not undress them!

Carlyle, in the opening chapter of his French Revolution, refers to Louis XV being pictured to the French as leading his victorious armies, winning battles, planning new campaigns and victories, and charging the enemy when in fact he was a gouty, scrofulous cripple being carted around with the army like so much baggage.

It is the way of the world with so many of its leaders. They are invented; fictitious beings created for us out of the masculine imagination of the shirt stuffer operating upon the pliant feminine imagination of the masses. It is one of the least pretty of our social mechanisms.

Go about Italy, and wherever there is a plaza to hold it you will see, mounted on a monstrous charger, a colossal warrior in bronze or marble, with uplifted sword and a countenance of majesty and power—the figure of Umberto Primo or Vittorio Emmanuele Secondo, thus advertising to the Italian mass mind the great leadership of these two mighty sovereigns who were, in fact, just two little fellows whose capacities could have been duplicated among the lesser bureau chiefs of any town in Italy.

But kings must be great men. They must be wise, courageous, full of nobility and power. As they seldom have these qualities in larger measure than is to be found in the members of the local chamber of commerce, the political promoter has collaborated with the military promoter for centuries to invest these small fellows with the missing royal attributes. They have drawn upon the age-old arts of pageantry, costume, feathers, flags, and music. The populace, prepared by the proper prologue, sees a bewildered and sometimes blundering fool encrusted in gold and other metals, crowned with a towering shako, upon a richly caparisoned horse capering between lines of saluting privates, and attended by the brass of the band and the cheers of the people—it sees not the little man at all but the fictitious figure who does not exist. Of course, a philosopher, a statesman, and a priest may be counted on to write learnedly that all this is essential to the stability of the society, as the king, after all, is merely a symbol, a spiritual nucleus essential to the well-being of the multitude of moronic protons who revolve around him.

The church knows this. The great cardinal, heavy with crimson robes and flowing trains, mitered in gold, surrounded by surplus monsignori against a background of marble and brass, stained-glass windows, and the dim glow of candlelight and incense, and with the incidental emotional tremors of the organ—the cardinal thus made up can pretend with success to powers no one would credit if he lived in a cottage or dressed in a smock of cheap wool.

And, of course, presidents, politicians, businessmen with products to sell, bankers with securities to distribute understand this principle. All of the stratagems of make-up, of shirt stuffing, are employed to fill the imagination of the people with fictitious images of the men who must be sold to the public. Selling merchandise often depends first upon selling to the buyers the man who produces it. The priceless ingredient, proclaims one advertiser, is the reputation of the maker for integrity. Therefore, it is important to erect the manufacturer of things—drugs, foods, stocks, and ideas—into a being of purity and intelligence. Half the job of selling a bottle of ineffectual jalap for rheumatism is done if the great Mr. Bunkus, its maker, miracle man of the drug world, jalap king, great philanthropist, eloquent speaker at commercial banquets, doctor of law and of humane letters at Yale and Harvard, is behind the product. It is easy to sell the voters a bill of goods embracing the “abolition of poverty” or “the abundant life” if some “great” engineer or the great radio crooner is behind these respective emulsions. Throughout history we shall see that the great rulers, dictators, oil kings, steel kings, and money kings have employed the techniques of shirt stuffing to build themselves up to the proportions of heroes of one sort or another in the common mind. Once a man has made a million dollars, it is promptly assumed that because he knew how to make a million he knows also how to run a college, a church, a government. Presence on the board of the college, the vestry, or the cabinet of the government gave to the businessman a character that aided him in getting what he called “consumer acceptance” for his products. It has been easy to convince people affected with an abiding appetite for wealth that the man who has succeeded in accumulating it is capable of ruling them. Hence the rich man has tended to move into all the places of power—to dominate our education, to mold our theology, to form our culture, to modify our social thinking.

A definite technique has been perfected for creating any kind of character out of almost any man with enough money to hire the professional help. His name and picture are repeated over and over in the press until he becomes a member of our performing celebrities, his benefactions artfully and opportunely contrived and announced, with pictures, encomiums, editorials heralding his public spirit. Articles about him appear in the success magazines. Men are hired to write speeches for him to deliver at conventions, banquets, public gatherings, at colleges, and over the radio. He issues statements upon all sorts of subjects, has opinions about everything, all worked up and happily phrased for him by his hired shirt stuffers. It is an old stratagem. We have already seen Dr. Peutinger acting as apologist for Jacob Fugger. We shall see how other men of wealth have utilized the resources of religion, the press, the platform to build up their reputations for wisdom and patriotism as a prelude to exercising a dominating influence over the public mind. It is quite possible that the free society has no greater enemy than the shirt stuffer and that men will never be wholly free, in that higher and finer sense to which they aspire, until their minds shall be emancipated from the power of the rich to possess and control the instrumentalities by which opinion is made.

WRITERS AS MONEY-MAKERS

It would be an interesting speculation how far the history of the world has been obscured, twisted, and falsified as a result of the fact that writers, historians, poets, and even philosophers have depended upon the bounty of the rich and powerful. The very first writers, in order to eat, had to please the king or some powerful patron. Apparently the very earliest writings among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians were upon clay tablets by public officials to be read by the king, the priests, the court. The authors of the Pharaohs’ day were attached to the temple. The first Chinese writers depended upon official appointments for their livelihood.

The audience of all ancient writers and even of modern ones up to a few hundred years ago was limited, since few had the art of reading. Even the circulation of the old Greek works was small and would have been impossible without the favor of certain rich men. Some philosophers in ancient Athens were paid incredible sums as teachers, some of them—Protagoras, Gorgias, Zeno—getting as much as 10,000 drachmas to educate a student. But these gentlemen were Sophists who taught the sons of wealthy Athenians how to get along, how to use their faculties to the end of success. There were no such rewards for the realistic searcher after truth. The Greek playwrights, however, had an audience and hence, in the free society of Athens, could command comparatively substantial sums for their work, while they enjoyed a corresponding freedom, discussed public affairs, discoursed on public and private morals, and did not hesitate to lampoon the head of the state himself. This was not altogether true in Rome when the state began to provide the populace with plays. Terence and Plautus could get for their plays sums which were not available to the poets and commentators, but they were paid public money by the aediles who were charged with providing dramatic productions for the people.

Men like Horace and Virgil got little or no money rewards from their works. Both depended upon the bounty of Maecenas. And Maecenas took up the role of the magnificent patron of letters as a means of fortifying the regime of Augustus. Horace speaks of his publisher, Socii, but laments that while the publisher made profit from his poems, Horace made nothing. But it is highly improbable that any publisher made very much in a world where books had to be written by hand and few of the people could read. Martial, the epigrammist, said that the sale of his poems brought him nothing. But he cultivated the friendship of the Emperor Domitian and became tribune. Quintilian, the rhetorician, had an income for a while of 100,000 sesterces from the Emperor. And, of course, in that ruthless dictatorship, there was no more place for the independent thinker or artist than there is in the tyrannies of Mussolini and Hitler. Before the empire dissolved all independent literary production had come to an end. And after that, the church succeeded to the role of literary dictator.

In the modern world the same thing held true for many centuries. It was perhaps worse than in certain periods of the ancient world, for there were times and places where even the wealthy and powerful could not read, when this faculty was limited to a handful of people. It is a singular fact that the authors of such universally famed productions as the Edda, the Cid, the Nibelungenlied, and the legends of King Arthur remain unknown, while various monarchs have come down to us as writers. Charlemagne is a case in point—a Frankish German of no education, who probably could neither read nor write, yet who is supposed to have composed a German grammar, poems, and even a work in medieval Latin on the worship of images. He did gather scholars around him and encouraged literature. But it is probable that his own compositions were the work of some of those shrinking persons with a passion for anonymity so dear to the hearts of rulers.

As writers appeared on the scene they might well be represented as grasping their pen in one hand and the king’s bounty in the other. In France, Colomby, original academician, drew 15,600 francs as the king’s orator and Jean Louis de Balzac 10,000 francs as the king’s general eulogist. In Italy Petrarch counted his patrons among several of the ruling houses of Italy and was an especial ward of the Colonna family. Boccaccio, who learned something of his art from Petrarch, learned from him also how to cultivate the good will of the prince. He enjoyed the special favor of King Robert of Naples, and the Decameron was written for the King’s family, as the Heptameron was written for the delectation of Francis I, possibly by his sister Margaret, but more likely by some anonymous spinner of yarns about the castle.

The dependence of the writer upon the political treasury and the favor of the lord or merchant continued to a late day. And some of them did quite as well for themselves as Horace and Virgil did in Rome. Jean Chapelain, author of a dreary and forgotten poem called La Pucille, died at the age of seventy-nine, leaving a fortune of 1,450,000 francs, which he got in gifts from Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV; and Boileau, famous satirical poet, who died in 1711, left an estate of $236,000 which he owed to the munificence of the crown.

In time, profits from publishing did make their appearance, but they were meager. The writer still had to look for his security to reliance on the government or a patron. Milton received but sixty-three pounds for Paradise Lost, but he got a thousand pounds from Parliament for a political treatise. Gay, the author of The Beggar’s Opera, James Thomson, Scottish poet, author of The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, and Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts, like the more important Addison, Steele, and Swift, were the recipients of royal and noble favor. Gay got a job as secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth, tried his hand at the South Sea speculations, lost what he had, and became a dependent of the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury. Thomson, a very poor youth, began his career as the beneficiary of a noble Maecenas, got a sinecure at 300 pounds a year from the Lord Chancellor, and, when the Chancellor died, got another from the Prince of Wales at 100 pounds. Young, who started a school of graveyard verse, began life with a poem of disgusting flattery of George Granville upon his elevation to the peerage, and followed this with several others dedicated to one wealthy patron after another until he knocked off one to Walpole, celebrating his investiture with the Order of the Garter, and was rewarded with 200 pounds a year. He finally attained the heaven of army officers, ministers, and professors by marrying the daughter of an earl.

Addison, before he was thirty, got a pension of 300 pounds a year, and when the government wished to exploit the popular value of the victory at Blenheim, Addison obliged with his poem, The Campaign, which pleased his patrons so much that he got an appointment as Commissioner of Appeals. He held various offices and sinecures and, like Young, annexed as a wife a dowager countess. Thackeray said of this trio—Addison, Steele, and Swift—that “the profession had made Addison a minister, Steele a commissioner of stamps, and Swift almost a bishop.” The sharp-tongued Swift felt that his services with his pen had merited something better than an Irish deanery.

But it was precisely when these men were drawing their sustenance from their political and social sponsors that another writer was demonstrating that England had come upon an audience which was willing to pay for what it read and that a man might earn a living as an author without putting on any man’s collar. This was Alexander Pope. He had some small means of his own, but he made a decent living throughout his life from his own labors. Samuel Johnson says he received 5320 pounds for the translation of the Iliad, from which he bought and enlarged the country estate at Twickenham where he lived until his death. After this period writers became more and more dependent upon the public that bought their books rather than the noblemen, businessmen, and statesmen who hired their pens and bought their souls. Even poor Bobby Burns could get between five and six hundred pounds for an edition of his works.

For some reason the playwright in France and England seems to have been as much at the mercy of the rich sponsor as the writer of poems and essays. Molière made money out of the stage, but he was playwright, actor, and producer. Shakespeare, too, made enough to leave a decent competency to his family at his death, but it was apparently as playwright, actor, and manager that he, like Molière, made his money. He did not seem interested at all in his plays as subjects for publication. He probably could have made little out of them.

But Ben Jonson, who was a mere writer for the stage, declared he had never made more than 200 pounds out of all his plays. In France both Corneille and Racine sought and got benefits from various patrons. Racine tried to make his plays pay. He met with a resistance that reveals a curious ethical attitude toward this whole subject at the time. He had got 40 francs a night from the theater for the use of his plays. But plays seldom went through many nights of performances. He demanded a thousand francs. Instantly there was a bitter protest from the stage. Madame Beaupré, an actress, complained that whereas with the smaller payment the theater could make money for all, now with Racine’s extortionate demand it could not. The whole town echoed her resentment. Racine, it murmured, was attempting to trade on his poetic talents. How the poet could live they apparently did not consider. Nor did they suppose that he had but two choices, either to trade upon his talents with the audiences or with the politicians and the nobility. What did they suppose he was merchandising and to whom and for what when he got 140,000 francs for following the king during the royal military campaigns, or when he got 14,000 francs as royal historiographer or when he was granted a pension of 6900 francs by Richelieu? What was Corneille trading upon when he dedicated Cinna to the unscrupulous financier Montrauon?

Yet this curious moral notion persisted. It can be explained upon no other ground than that the emoluments of the writer were meager, that by abandoning them in favor of the sweeter viands of the patron the author was losing nothing, and that the ethical pretension that his gifts must not be prostituted by the outright sale of his product supplied him with a convenient defensive rationalization of his pension.

Even Voltaire, whose earnings might well have been large, and who was rich, did not acquire his riches from his works. He gave away the rights of his plays. He presented some of his works to his publishers, asking merely some author’s copies beautifully bound. He presented his secretary with 12,000 francs, the proceeds of an edition of his works. His wealth he got through business adventures not unlike those carried on by our own Hetty Green. He loaned money to princes and to cities and bought national bonds. He speculated in lotteries, in grain, in foreign securities. He invested in contracts for army supplies, and is reputed to have had at one time an income of 350,000 francs a year.

It was Jean Jacques Rousseau who in France did what Alexander Pope had done in England. He disdained the generous offers of the wealthy. Instead he drove the best bargains he could for his works. Like many another author since, he wrote much inferior but popular material in order to obtain the means of devoting time to his more serious work. He got $2300 for the libretto of an opera which he turned out in a few weeks, which was something more than he got for Émile upon which he expended twenty years of thought and writing.

From this time forward the art of reading came into the possession of an ever-increasing number of people. And, with the new guarantees of freedom or at least the widening tolerances, the writer was able to find a larger market for his wares—a market that could afford to pay for them. The time came when all sorts of writers, emancipated from the clutch of the rich patron, could earn a good living, while some of them became as rich as some of the former Maecenases. Walter Scott got $20,000 for The Lady of the Lake, and Lord Byron collected $13,000 for three cantos of Childe Harold. From his novels Scott earned a princely income of around $75,000 a year. Victor Hugo was paid 40,000 francs ($8000) for each of ten volumes of Les Misérables. Disraeli got $60,000 each for Endymion and Lothair, and George Eliot got $40,000 for Middlemarch. Alphonse Daudet collected $200,000 for a single novel, Sappho. And Charles Dickens was perhaps the largest earner of all.

The great sums collected by successful novelists and playwrights in our own day are too well known to be repeated here. If they earn these sums it is because almost universal literacy, rapidly spreading secondary and higher education, and an ever-increasing population furnish them with an enormous market, while their ability to collect their incomes from the whole public rather than a handful of powerful patrons is the guarantee of the highest form of freedom of expression.