How my heart goes out in sympathy to you! how I do pity you, Commodore Vanderbilt! Most men have at least a few friends, whose devotion is a comfort and a solace to them, but you seem to be the idol of only a crawling swarm of small souls, who love to glorify your most flagrant unworthinesses in print; or praise your vast possessions worshippingly; or sing of your unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave them dignity; friends who applaud your superhuman stinginess with the same gusto that they do your most magnificent displays of commercial genius and daring, and likewise your most lawless violations of commercial honor—for these infatuated worshippers of dollars not their own seem to make no distinctions, but swing their hats and shout hallelujah every time you do anything, no matter what it is. I do pity you. I would pity any man with such friends as these. I should think you would hate the sight of a newspaper. I should think you would not dare to glance at one, for fear you would find in it one of these distressing eulogies of something you had been doing, which was either infinitely trivial or else a matter you ought to be ashamed of. Unacquainted with you as I am, my honest compassion for you still gives me a right to speak in this way. Now, have you ever thought calmly over your newspaper reputation? Have you ever dissected it, to see what it was made of? It would interest you. One day one of your subjects comes out with a column or two detailing your rise from penury to affluence, and praising you as if you were the last and noblest work of God, but unconsciously telling how exquisitely mean a man has to be in order to achieve what you have achieved. Then another subject tells how you drive in the Park, with your scornful head down, never deigning to look to the right or the left, and make glad the thousands who covet a glance of your eye, but driving straight ahead, heedlessly and recklessly, taking the road by force, with a bearing which plainly says, “Let these people get out of the way if they can; but if they can’t, and I run over them, and kill them, no matter, I’ll pay for them.” And then how the retailer of the pleasant anecdote does grovel in the dust and glorify you, Vanderbilt! Next, a subject of yours prints a long article to show how, in some shrewd, underhanded way, you have “come it” over the public with some Erie dodge or other, and added another million or so to your greasy greenbacks; and behold! he praises you, and never hints that immoral practices, in so prominent a place as you occupy, are a damning example to the rising commercial generation—more, a damning thing to the whole nation, while there are insects like your subjects to make virtues of them in print. Next, a subject tells a most laughable joke in Harpers of how a lady laid a wager of a pair of gloves that she could touch your heart with the needs of some noble public charity, which unselfish people were building up for the succoring of the helpless and the unfortunate, and so persuade you to spare a generous billow to it from your broad ocean of wealth, and how you listened to the story of want and suffering, and then—then what?—gave the lady a paltry dollar (the act in itself an insult to your sister or mine, coming from a stranger) and said, “Tell your opponent you have won the gloves.” And, having told his little anecdote, how your loving subject did shake his sides at the bare idea of your having generosity enough to be persuaded by any tender womanly pleader into giving a manly lift to any helpless creature under the sun! What precious friends you do have, Vanderbilt! And next, a subject tells how when you owned the California line of steamers you used to have your pursers make out false lists of passengers, and thus carry some hundreds more than the law allowed—in this way breaking the laws of your country and jeopardizing the lives of your passengers by overcrowding them during a long, sweltering voyage over tropical seas, and through a disease-poisoned atmosphere. And this shrewdness was duly glorified too. But I remember how those misused passengers used to revile you and curse you when they got to the Isthmus—and especially the women and young girls, who were forced to sleep on your steerage floors, side by side with strange men, who were the offscourings of creation, and even in the steerage beds with them, if the poor wretches told the truth; and I do assure you that nobody who lived in California at that time disbelieved them—O, praised and envied Vanderbilt! These women were nothing to you and me; but if they had been, we might have been shamed and angered at this treatment, mightn’t we? We cannot rightly judge of matters like these till we sit down and try to fancy these women related to us by ties of blood and affection, but then the rare joke of it melts away, and the indignant tides go surging through our veins, poor little Commodore!
There are other anecdotes told of you by your glorifying subjects, but let us pass them by; they only damage you. They only show how unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant. They only show how soulless it can make him—like that pretty anecdote that tells how a young lawyer charged you $500 for a service, and how you deemed the charge too high, and so went shrewdly to work and won his confidence, and persuaded him to borrow money and put it in Erie, when you knew the stock was going down, and so held him in the trap till he was a ruined man, and then you were revenged; and you gloated over it; and, as usual, your admiring friends told the story in print, and lauded you to the skies. No, let us drop the anecdotes. I don’t remember ever reading anything about you which you oughtn’t be ashamed of.
All I wish to urge upon you now is, that you crush out your native instincts and go and do something worthy of praise—go and do something you need not blush to see in print—do something that may rouse one solitary good impulse in the breasts of your horde of worshippers; prove one solitary good example to the thousands of young men who emulate your energy and your industry; shine as one solitary grain of pure gold upon the heaped rubbish of your life. Do this, I beseech you, else through your example we shall shortly have in our midst five hundred Vanderbilts, which God forbid! Go, now please go, and do one worthy act. Go, boldly, grandly, nobly, and give four dollars to some great public charity. It will break your heart, no doubt; but no matter, you have but a little while to live, and it is better to die suddenly and nobly than live a century longer the same Vanderbilt you are now. Do this, and I declare I will praise you too.
Poor Vanderbilt! How I do pity you; and this is honest. You are an old man, and ought to have some rest, and yet you have to struggle and struggle, and deny yourself, and rob yourself of restful sleep and peace of mind, because you need money so badly. I always feel for a man who is so poverty ridden as you. Don’t misunderstand me, Vanderbilt. I know you own seventy millions; but then you know and I know that it isn’t what a man has that constitutes wealth. No—it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn’t rich. Seventy times seventy millions can’t make him rich as long as his poor heart is breaking for more. I am just about rich enough to buy the least valuable horse in your stable, perhaps, but I cannot sincerely and honestly take an oath that I need any more now. And so I am rich. But you! you have got seventy millions, and you need five hundred millions, and are really suffering for it. Your poverty is something appalling. I tell you truly that I do not believe I could live twenty-four hours with the awful weight of four hundred and thirty millions of abject want crushing down upon me. I should die under it. My soul is so wrought upon by your hapless pauperism, that if you came by me now I would freely put ten cents in your tin cup, if you carry one, and say, “God pity you, poor unfortunate!”
Now, I pray you take kindly all that I have said, Vanderbilt, for I assure you I have meant it kindly, and it is said in an honester spirit than you are accustomed to find in what is said to you or about you. And do go, now, and do something that isn’t shameful. Do go and do something worthy of a man possessed of seventy millions—a man whose most trifling act is remembered and imitated all over the country by younger men than you. Do not be deceived into the notion that everything you do and say is wonderful, simply because those asses who publish you so much make it appear so. Do not deceive yourself. Very often an idea of yours is possessed of no innate magnificence, but is simply shining with the reflected splendor of your seventy millions. Now, think of it. I have tried to imitate you and become famous; all the young men do it; but, bless you, my performances attracted no attention. I gave a crippled beggar girl a two-cent piece and humorously told her to go to the Fifth Avenue Hotel and board a week; but nobody published it. If you had done that it would have been regarded as one of the funniest things that ever happened; because you can say the flattest things that ever I heard of, Vanderbilt, and have them magnified into wit and wisdom in the papers. And the other day, in Chicago, I talked of buying the entire Union Pacific Railroad, clear to the Rocky Mountains, and running it on my own hook. It was as splendid an idea and as bold an enterprise as ever entered that overpraised brain of yours, but did it excite any newspaper applause? No. If you had conceived it, though, the newspaper world would have gone wild over it. No, sir; other men think and talk as brilliantly as you do, but they don’t do it in the glare of seventy millions; so pray do not be deceived by the laudation you receive; more of it belongs to your millions than to you. I say this to warn you against becoming vainglorious on a false basis, and an unsound one—for if your millions were to pass from you you might be surprised and grieved to notice what flat and uncelebrated things you were capable of saying and doing forever afterwards.
You observe that I don’t say anything about your soul, Vanderbilt. It is because I have evidence that you haven’t any. It would be impossible to convince me that a man of your matchless financial ability would overlook so dazzling an “operation,” if you had a soul to save, as the purchasing of millions of years of Paradise, and rest, and peace, and pleasure, for so trifling a sum as ten years blamelessly lived on earth—for you probably haven’t longer than that to live now, you know, you are very old. Well, I don’t know, after all, possibly you have got a soul. But I know you, Vanderbilt—I know you well. You will try to get the purchase cheaper. You will want those millions of years of rest and pleasure, and you will try to make the trade and get the superb stock; but you will wait till you are on your death-bed, and then offer an hour and forty minutes for it. I know you so well, Vanderbilt! Still worse men than you do this. The people we hang always send for a priest at the last moment.
I assure you, Vanderbilt, that I mean what I am saying for your good—not to make you mad. Why, the way you are going on, you are no better than those Astors. No, I won’t say that; for it is better to be a mean live man than a stick—even a gold-headed stick. And now my lesson is done. It is bound to refresh you and make you feel good; for you must necessarily get sick of puling flattery and sycophancy sometimes, and sigh for a paragraph of honest criticism and abuse for a change. And in parting, I say that, surely, standing as you do upon the pinnacle of moneyed magnificence in America, you must certainly feel a vague desire in you sometimes to do some splendid deed in the interest of commercial probity, or of human charity, or of manly honor and dignity, that shall flash into instant celebrity over the whole nation, and be rehearsed to ambitious boys by their mothers a century after you are dead. I say you must feel so sometimes, for it is only natural, and therefore I urge you to congeal that thought into an act. Go and surprise the whole country by doing something right. Cease to do and say unworthy things, and excessively little things, for those reptile friends of yours to magnify in the papers. Snub them thus, or else throttle them.
Yours truly, MARK TWAIN.
March 1869