THE MILLIONAIRE'S DUEL.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9552, 27 July 1909, Page 6

THE MILLIONAIRE'S DUEL.

The latest progress report of the Sgreat money-shedding contest between Messrs Rockfeller and Carnegie was issued last week, when the cable announced that Mr Carnegie still leads, having given away £27,800,000 up to date, while the oil plutocrat has only got rid of £24, 003,000. Roughly, therefore, the position is that Mr Carnegie has a matter of thirty odd millions on his hands, while Mr Rockefeller carries a heavier load and is further hancHcapped by the fact that his investments are alive and reproductive, so that he scarcely knows from day to day the actual size of the pile he has to divesth himself of. The spectacle of these two multi-millionaires competing against each other in the reduction of their rolls of financial fat is extraordinary in itself, and equally so is it that at this time of day in the world's history they should have been able to accumulate so much gilded adiposity. Impartal consideration of their respective merits as money spinners would reveal the iron and steel boomster in a more favourable light than the oil pirate; for while Carnegie made his wealth uy >he:r sup ior shrewdness in a field that as open to all, and bought and sold fairly and squarely. Rockefeller's is the fruit of a monopolism as greedy and relentless in acquisition as it has been unscrupulous in its methods, a monster that broke and ruined regardlessiy as it reached out its claws to grasp more and yet more money. Yet both have a great deal more wealth than is good for society, even if only because it represents so much preposterously excessive power in two pairs of hands. Neither is it an altogether comfortable possession for ' them, apparently, seeing that unloading is a task of daily desperateness. The idea of becoming too rich popularly seems absurd, but here are the possessors of two of the biggest fortunes ever made, who have spent two-thirds of their lives making money and are putting in the remaining third trying to give it back again. Owing to the operation of a certain rough justice they find more or less difficulty in doing this. The gift of making a fortune is not invariably accompanied by that of wisely dispersing it. In that sphere at any rate. Nature usually restricts man to one talent, perhaps because she could not bestow the second without neutralising the first. A man who could give money away to advantage might indulge the knack until he had no wealth to work upon. Consequently Mr Rockefeller is sometimes observed begging a church to do him the favour of taking a million or two off his back and waiting while it is decided between disputations church people whether it is right of a religious body to accept ■"tainted money." Hence, too, Mr Carnegie is at such shifts to get from under his millions that he is promiscuously planting libraries where In most, cases they will become so much litter, and even goes so far in eccentricity as to endow a heroes fund, thereby ensuring that at least some of his wealth Bhall be fooled away. The heroes fund would be a fine thing if it were not necessarily a sham, for the true heroes of the world are not those who present themselves to officious committees for rewards, but those whose heroism consists in daily duty nobly and quietly done in the teeth of adversity. And as there need be fewer of these if there were fewer Carnegies and Rockefellers the pity is that more cannot be done for them as the dispersal of the millions goes on.