CHAPTER III THE MAN OF BUSINESS

The English, all the world has heard, are a nation of shopkeepers. They are understood to keep shop and to glory in it. They have kept shop, with the other nations for customers, ever since international shopkeeping became a possibility. In the beginning, one is afraid, their notion of shopkeeping ran neither to fair trade nor honest dealing; but gradually there was built up a system of commercial equity, the main principle of which was the protection of one shopkeeper against another and the security of shopkeepers generally.

In course of time the English man of business arose. He had a silk hat and expansive manners. He lived in a suburb[Pg 21] and read the Times on his way to business in the morning. All day at his office he would cheat no man, and his word was as good as his bond. His office day was a day of quite ten hours, and during those ten hours he sweated like the proverbial nigger. At nights he retired to his suburb, and, with the wife and children whom he kept there, ate to repletion from the joint, washed it down with sherry and port supplied to him by merchants of the type of the late Mr. Ruskin's father; and, hey, presto! by eleven of the clock he was deep among the feathers. Twice on Sundays he went to church and held the plate. To Sunday's midday dinner he invited the vicar or a curate, and there was always beef and batter-pudding and improving talk, not to mention cabbage and an extra special "glass of wine, sir." Other recreations the English man of business had none, save and except perhaps an occasional Saturday-afternoon drive in a hired chaise with Mrs. Man-of-Business and the children, and a still more occasional visit[Pg 22] to the theatre. In the long run, by the practice of these virtues he amassed wealth. He put his money into good bottoms; he owed no man a penny; and as he never robbed anybody and always lived miles within his income, he had a conscience so easy that it seemed to sleep. Everybody respected him. He was in demand to take the chair at the meetings of young men's improvement societies, and to explain the secret of his success "free, gratis, and for nothing" to the callow young men thereat assembled. He would tell you unctuously that he attributed his success (1) to early rising, (2) to never wasting time [the split infinitive was his], (3) to always saving at least one third of his income, (4) to never going bond for anybody, and (5) to marrying Mrs. Man-of-Business—this last, of course, with a chortle. So he wagged along and helped to build up the commercial greatness and probity and honour of his country. And when he died he had a magnificent and costly funeral and was attended to his last long[Pg 23] home by his weeping relict and sorrowing sons and daughters. Next day there was an account of Mr. Man-of-Business's obsequies in the local papers, and his sons proceeded to carry on the concern.

That was forty years ago. To-day the English man of business is a bird of an entirely different and altogether more entrancing feather. Indeed, it is a question whether he has not ceased to be a man of business at all. One might perhaps sum him up best by saying that he has begun to have notions. Whereas he was once the bulwark of the Philistine class, he has now gone over, lock, stock, and barrel—particularly barrel—to the Barbarians. He lives in the manner, style, and odour of Barbarism; and the ruling ambition of his existence is to pass for a "county magnate", a man of birth and leisure, rather than for a man of business. So that he has entirely laid aside the characteristics which distinguished his early and middle Victorian prototype. Breadth, girth, weight, the substantial, the ponderous, are[Pg 24] not for him. He does not attribute his success to early rising; he does not boast that his word is his bond; he does not slap his sides when he laughs; he never went to business on a tram-car in his life; and as for his owing all he is to Mrs. Man-of-Business, it is to his association with that charming bechiffoned, bejewelled little lady that he owes all he owes. In other words, the new English man of business has made up his mind that, if life is to be made tolerable at all, it must be made tolerable through social ways. That is to say, if one's income runs to a couple of thousand a year out of a butter business, one must live in precisely the manner of persons whose incomes run to two thousand a year out of lands and hereditaments. "The glass of fashion and the mould of form" for a person who would live is Mayfair. Lords and dukes and the landed gentry have houses in Mayfair; their wives and female relatives flutter round in flashing equipages and brilliant toilettes; there is the theatre, the opera, and other people's houses in the[Pg 25] evening, the Park on Sundays, the river in the summer, Scotland in the autumn, and the Riviera for the winter and early spring. Lords and dukes and the landed gentry tread this pretty round, and find both pleasure and dignity in it. Why not the head of the old-established firm of Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co.? Why not, indeed? Old Margarine, founder of the house, never missed a day at the office for forty years. Young Margarine will tell you that, "after all, you know, it is rather amusing to drop into the office sometimes and see the fellows sit up." All the same, the business is a beastly bore, and there are moments when he wishes it at the deuce.

As for Mrs. Margarine, Mrs. Man-of-Business, the erstwhile portly mother of daughters and only begetter of her spouse's success, really, if you saw her in her boudoir, in her carriage, at Princes, at the opera, at Brighton, or at Monte Carlo, you would not recognise her. She is young and slim; her hair is of flax; she has rings on her fingers,[Pg 26] and probably bells on her toes; her diamonds are the envy of duchesses; "and as for Margarine, my dear, I never think either about it or him. My little boys are at Eton, and Dickie is going into the Guards." Sometimes even Mr. and Mrs. Man-of-Business manage to get presented. Then, as you may say, their cup runneth over; hand in hand they stand upon their Pisgah and stare at the Pacific as it were. There are no more worlds to conquer. They come down with a light upon their faces, and Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co. can be hanged. In point of fact, Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co. sooner or later becomes Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co., Limited. Margarine himself drops out, taking with him all the money he can get. When he comes to die, if you said "Margarine," he would do his best to insult you.

That is all. Of course, I have taken an extreme case, but apparently the desire of the latter-day English man of business is wholly in these directions. Be he in a great or small way, he is fain to step westward; he[Pg 27] is fain to live as the Barbarians and to be undistinguishable from them. And rather than be beaten he will enter into that kingdom piecemeal. Surpluses that would have gone to consolidation and extension in the old days now go to personal and feminine expenditure. Bond Street captures what the wise would have dumped into Threadneedle Street; and instead of resting our hope upon the business methods of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Budgett, our heart inclines to the excellent precepts of our millionaire friend "Yeth Indeed." Which is to say that the English man of business, like the English sportsman, is dying out of the land. Whether his loss will be deplored by countless thousands is another question. Anyway, he is going.