SCATTERING WEALTH "BROADCAST."

West Coast Times, Issue 87, 23 December 1865, Page 1 (Supplement)

SCATTERING WEALTH "BROADCAST."

(From the " Daily Telegraph," Aug. 5.) Copies of that wonderful document, the will of the late Mr Richard Thornton, were lately given in the joimials, but the true one has only just appeared. It dazzles the eyes to. read it: thousands, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands, and even millious of pound 3 sterling, ' are scattered up and down the parchment in bequests, trusts, legacies, annuities, gratuities, gifts, and reversions. Five-and- twenty ( hospitals, all in a row, are, each of them, £2000 the better for* the London merchant's recollection ~of r them; bUt^that goes a very little way indeed to diiriinisli the heap of gold which his last testament

deals with. We can see that it is in itself a business to cut up such a sum of money as two millions eight hundred, thousand pounds — the amount at which the personal estate was sworn. When Mrs Ellen Simpson has £100,000, and Mr W. Thornton West £300,000, and the clerks £20,000 each,- andrthe-ser-vants from £200 to £4000, and the Leathersellers' and Christ's Hospital and Hetherington's Charity are "mentioned" [to the tune of £20,000, and all the twenty-five hospitals are put down, and Mr E. N. Lee, of the Middle Temple, barrister-at-law, has got his £450,000, .and Mrs Ellen Pulford and the Misses Lee life interests in £500,000 — only a hole has been made in the vast treasure. There is enough remaining to set up Messrs Thomas and Richard Thornton West, nephews and executors, with princely fortunes for life. Two millions and eight hundred thousand pounds sterling ! what a pile for one pair of hands to sweep together ! — what a Tom Tiddler's ground for the Probate office ! — what delicious, transporting, ecstatic poetry in those simple words for the City ? " Gold," says the ' Dictionary, of Arts and Sciences,' "is a yellow malleable .metal, with a specific gravity of 19*2." Bah ! the philosophers know nothing. Gold is character, influence, importance, ease, luxiuy, happiness, religion, morality, love, life. That is what the City says of gold, as it peruses this specimen of legal prose writing, beside which the grandest page of Thucydides is a curlpaper, and the living thunders of Demosthenes twaddle. Two millions eight hundred thousand pounds sterling '.Will some of the fancy mathematicians tell us how far it would reach piled on end, or, casting it into solid blocks of shining 2'2-carat gold, how' much of Cornhill you could pave with it ? The commercial public wants to realise how one must feel who sets himself down to make his will, with two millions eight hundred thousand pounds sterling to carve. To the City, that, perhaps, is the saddest part of- the gorgeous affair : wills and testaments are ugly matters in connection with so much money. Life is what the radiant total suggests — life, royal, replete, magnificent, epicurean, gorgeous ; it such a tremendous treasure to leave behind for those dubious investments that " neither moth nor rust doth corrupt"— such a whacking camel's load to squeeze through the needle's eye ! Was he a King, then, or a Count of Monte Christo," revolutionising society -with rouleaux, who has died and enriched half a column full of people and institutions with the debris of this enormous accumulation ? Not a bit of it! everybody in the City knew plain Dick Thornton and Co. If you cared to see the richest man but one in England, you might do so, any day, by strolling along ■ the pavement at luncheon • time near the Exchange, or taking your chop with him at the eat-ing-house. But unless somebody pointed out the man, whose signature on a cheque as big as you draw it would not made the Bank of England wince, you could never have detected the master of million upon million. To roll together vast heaps of money demands genius of a certain sort; and there are no doubt bold and venturous episodes in the ledgers of Richard Thornton, to account for the beginning of his fortune. But these things are written in ledgers, not upon the form or visage, and he was just a City"' man and nothing else: He couldn't keep out of the City any more than, once set a-rolling, he could keep the great golden ball of his prosperity from growing bigger and bigger and bigger. The getters of money are seldom the "spenders ; life has room for one large passion only, and becomes the largest of passions to see the cents, come in upon the cents., and the hundred-thousands "swell into millions. That was Richard Thornton's life ; he used to own, with a quiet sort of luxury, that only one man in London could brush past him as he walked to office with a larger balance at his bankers ; and there, so far as we have the right to inquire, the enjoyment of his gold ceased. Nature is an' awful democrat ; she gives the rich man only one mouth, only three appetites a day, only just as much capacity for various qualifications as the poor man, and not a year nor a day more of existence. The old Greeks were wise after all, thongh they never lived in the City, to tell us the story of Midas, who turned everything that he touched into gold, and then came back to the gods and asked to be quit of the gift, because the olives he ate were gritty with gold dust, and the water he drank was " golden water." Richard Thornton's career was to amass two millions eight hundred pounds sterling, and then — bequeath it : not the summum bonum of lirman life, after all. But we shall not pin a moral against money as a codicil to this magnificent will and testament. A penniless fool once said, " Gold is a great curse ; " and all the world has repeated it after him, while doing its best and wor,st to get as much as possible. Gold is no " curse" — poor gold is only a medium of exchange, the symbol of barter, the promise of the community to pay twenty shillings' worth of work or produce to the man who can get hold of a sovereign. " How much ?" will, after all, never be the question at the "needle's eye." "How did j r ou get it?" and " What did you do with' it?", will be the queries to make the' load stick' in 'the celestial portals, if it "stick

at all. The pursuit of wealth is as much'a vital motive of human society as the circulation of the blood is that of the body. For gold— that is to say, for the social and material advantages it will bring, and, with a noble few, for the power of doing good which it will confer, the springs of human energy are wound up and set working. For gold the ships throng* all the seas, the caravans pierce and re-pierce the deserts, . the mills buzz, the trains scream and fly, the thousand enterprises that enrich life are conceived, the inventor ponders, ' the merchant schemes, the whole system of man's being is kept going. It it the most foolish as well as the vainest thing to assail the passion that is, like all other instincts, an arrangement of Providence to keep the world at work ; so the two millions eight hundred thousand pounds sterling shall betray us into no such copy-book morality. " Si possis recte" — let it only be honest money, and the more the better for ■everybody, especially the residuary legatees. ' That is all we say, as this great heap of gold loses its owner by the equal hand of death, and gets cut up, after the fashion of alt such heaps into little heaps, to get back again into the general circulation.