The Maccabaean

IT is incomprehensible," once remarked the Director of the Comedie Francaise, M. Perrin. "why people make such painful efforts to write plays, when it is so easy to write no plays!" This meaningful observation was forcibly recalled to my mind when I witnessed a preformance of "The Footlights."

The most interesting thing about this play is the name of its author, Baron Henri de Rothschild. The bearer of this name isa man of extraordinary versatility. He is devoted to medical research, and became a doctor at the great Paris hospital after a very severe examination. He is a general practitioner, and has founded a free clinic for children’s diseases. He has studied much, and has painstakingly devoted himself to the thankless task of experimentation with milk: its food-value, its adul- teration and its bacill. He published the results in a great scientiie work which nobody can read. He has established a milk depot with numerous branches, which provides the poorer inhabitants of. Paris with pure and unadulterated milk. He was one of the first to introduce the automobile sport in Paris and often participated in it himself. He has also an avocation, a really obvious one: namely, he is an art collector. But all of this does not suffice him. He admits that his yearly income amounts to twenty million francs and no one suspects the Rothschilds: of bragging; indeed, they are rather modest in this respect and his one care is not to drown in this rising golden flood. °

American multi-millionaires, also, have this same care. But they have already found its antidote. Rockefeller has donated several hundreds of millions to a university and its scientific institutes. He did

not even make a condition that this school bear his name. He did not become is president, nor did he so much as demand an honorary doctor’s or professor’s degree. When several millions are paid for such a document, it surely does not lose its customary value. He, however, contents himself with being merely the money- giver to the university. That is all. J. Pierpont Morgan has built a museum of marble and gilt bronze and mosaics, and has filled it with the rarest of art treasures, also with imitation art-treasures. After his death, all this will become the property of the city of New York. Carnegie establishes tens of libraries in America and in England. It is interesting to note that these undertakings are quite impersonal: the per- senality of the founder disappears.

European multi-millionaires, however, are ambitious. This is an interesting psychological trait in their make-up which fairly coaxes for treatment.. But first the word “ambitious” must be defined. Ambition is the desire for renown; an organic striving which, when it is exaggerated, becomes a craze for self-aggrandizement. To state it cancretely; The ambitious man craves publie notice; he wants his name on everyone’s lips; he seeks to be admired, honored. He desires to be placed on a pinnacle, to be acknowledgedas standing over äll others, to be the center of attraction, flattered, regarded as a finer, rarer, better mold than ordinary men. And besides these elementary and immediate sops to his vanity, the practical man expects also the material. things which usually follows in the train of the Airst: Riches, luxury, display and all the good things obtainable for money.

Now I ask: If the man be one who, from his birth and through his birth, has