The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Reign of Gilt, by David Graham Phillips This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: The Reign of Gilt Author: David Graham Phillips Release Date: January 27, 2021 [eBook #64402] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REIGN OF GILT *** THE REIGN OF GILT THE REIGN OF GILT BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS New York JAMES POTT & CO. 1905 Copyright, 1905, by James Pott & Co. ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL, LONDON First Impression, September, 1905 TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I—PLUTOCRACY CHAPTER PAGE I WE ARE NOT ALL MONEY-CRAZED 1 II THE MANIA FOR GILT 20 III PLUTOCRACY AT HOME 32 IV YOUTH AMONG THE MONEY-MANIACS 50 V CASTE-COMPELLERS 72 VI PAUPER-MAKING 91 VII THE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE 105 VIII AND EUROPE LAUGHS 122 PART II—DEMOCRACY IX “WE, THE PEOPLE” 141 X THE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY 159 XI DEMOCRACY’S DYNAMO 183 XII A NATION OF DREAMERS 202 XIII NOT GENEROSITY, BUT JUSTICE 210 XIV THE INEVITABLE IDEAL 226 XV OUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD 239 XVI THE REAL AMERICAN WOMAN 253 XVII AS TO SUCCESS 274 XVIII THE MAN OF TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 288 PART I.—PLUTOCRACY CHAPTER I WE ARE NOT ALL MONEY-CRAZED The eminent Bishop of the Episcopalian diocese of New York has spent practically his whole life among people of wealth and fashion and their associates. He has made some brief excursions, but his social relations, his intimacies have been altogether with what Parton calls “the triumphant classes.” He knows the plutocracy; his diocese lies in its stronghold, includes many of its most conspicuous and aggressive leaders both in making and spending money. There can be no question of his qualification to speak authoritatively of it, of its mode of living and thinking. He has said: “Hear a group of young girls whose fresh youth one would think ought, in the matter of their most tender and sacred affection, to be as free from sordid instinct as from the taint of a godless cynicism. You will find that they have their price, and are not to be had without it any more than a Circassian slave in the market of Bagdad.” Again: “If the first comers to these shores were to come back to-day and see the houses, the dress and the manners of their descendants, they would think themselves in London in the time of Charles, or in Versailles in the time of the Louises.” When he went on to urge the rich “to illustrate in their habit of life simplicity of attire, inexpensiveness in the appointments and chasteness in the aspect, proportions, furniture and decorations of their dwellings,” he could have meant only that he finds the Americans whom he knows best for the most part ostentatious and extravagant in dress, prodigal and vulgar and ignorantly profuse in their dwellings. And when he charged them with having “the buying of legislatures as their highest distinction” and with “appropriating the achievements of the scholar, the inventor, the pioneer in commerce or the arts, without rewarding them for the products of their genius,” he framed an indictment not on belief but on knowledge which becomes tremendous in view of the conservative character of his mind and his training, the dignity and responsibility of his position and the unequalled opportunity that is his to know whereof he speaks. Lord Methuen, felled in a trifling engagement in the Boer war by one of those flesh wounds that are most painful but not serious, telegraphed home, “This is the bloodiest battle in history.” His point of view was rather too personal. And somewhat so must it have been with the Bishop when he concluded his survey of the encompassing plutocracy with this wild, despairing cry: “The whole people are corrupted and corrupting! Moloch is god and his shrine is in almost every household in the republic!” Fifth avenue and Wall street are not all of Manhattan Island: Manhattan Island is not all of New York City; New York City is not the only city in America; and outside the cities in every direction stretch vast areas of American soil not without its population. The plutocracy is a phase, not the whole. If the distinguished Bishop were as competent to speak of the American people as he is of the plutocracy, we might well feel that it is all over with the republic—that we Americans have bartered our birthright for a few handfuls of yellow earth and richly deserve our fate of social, political and industrial serfdom. But—— It is as exact a truth as any in chemistry or mechanics that Aristocracy is the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread ignorance, and Democracy the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread intelligence. An intelligent few may be, as in Russia to-day, crushed down by an unintelligent mass wielded by a tyrant or group of tyrants. An unintelligent mass may for a time get, as in modern England, some measure of liberty through the mutual jealousies of intelligent upper classes warring one with another for supremacy. But let intelligence be diffused, let the sluices be opened so that it flows through the social soil in every direction and the tendency toward Democracy becomes irresistible. Monarchs may plot. Venerable and long-venerated institutions of princely and priestly and property caste and privilege may thunder, “Thus far and no farther!” Schools and colleges may give an education of half-truths and prejudices. Philosophers may deplore and warn, may project subtle and alluring schemes for maintaining or rehabilitating the old tyrannies in a new form. New conditions may produce new and subtle tyrannies that seem stronger than the old. All in vain. As well might a concourse of parliaments and tongues resolve that the heat of the sun be reduced one-half. In face of any and all obstacles, in face even of the determination of a whole people, confused by false education, refusing to be free and rallying to the defense of some beloved tradition of caste, Democracy marches on hardly more hindered than an epidemic by the incantations of a “medicine man.” Inertia is characteristic of the great mass of human beings, whatever their stage of development. And if the combat against the instinctive, all but universal reluctance to change had no stronger weapons than the tongues and pens of “reformers,” men would still be huddled in caves, gnawing bones. It is by no effort of its own that a race or a nation moves. It is in obedience to conditions that cannot be resisted and that now gently and now rudely compel man to readjust himself or to perish. Democracy does not appreciably advance by the energy and enthusiasm of those who believe in it any more than it greatly lags because of the machinations of those who secretly or openly oppose it. Energy and enthusiasm may hasten its formal recognition, its formal embodiment in written laws. On the other hand, adroitness may obtain a lease of formal existence for the outgrown institutions. But in neither case is the great essential fact of the progress of Democracy [Pg 1] [Pg 2] [Pg 3] [Pg 4] [Pg 5] [Pg 6] altered. This progress depends upon the diffusion of intelligence; and intelligence is not a matter of individual choice or even of formal education. If the eyes and the ears are open, if the mental faculties are normal, then wherever intelligence is diffusing, there the mind must be drinking it in. A sponge thrown into the water must become saturated. When intelligence permeates the masses, then out of the action and reaction of the common and the conflicting interests of an ever-increasing multitude of intelligent men there must begin to issue a democratic compromise self-government. Thus Democracy is not a “cult” to rise and rage and perish. It is not a theory that may some day be discovered false. It is not a plant to be carefully watched and watered lest peradventure it die. It is a condition, an environment, an atmosphere. A force as irresistible as that which keeps the stars a-swinging is behind it. The story of history, rightly written, would be the story of the march of Democracy, now patiently wearing away obstacles, accelerated there, now sweeping along upon the surface, again flowing for centuries underground, but always in action, always the one continuous, inevitable force. There never has been any more danger of its defeat than there has been danger that the human brain would be smoothed of its thought-bearing convolutions and set in retreat through the stages of evolution back to protoplasm. Until this last half-century it was extremely difficult to study the operations of any great world-principle. But discovery and invention have now given us sight far more penetrating than that of the fabled giant who could see the grass grow. The difficulty now is to avoid seeing and knowing. And to shut out all but some relatively unimportant phenomenon— suddenly and suspiciously acquired wealth here, a corrupt and extravagant or degraded public administration there, a strike or a riot or a momentary moral convulsion yonder—and from it to predict the approach of chaos with tyranny upon its back, is as childish as the fantastic alarms of a tribe of savages during an eclipse or a thunder storm. That any in America should thus shut the eyes, say “It is night,” and grope and tremble, is more discreditable than a similar folly among Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans. Democracy has been our familiar from the very beginning, and self-government and the absence of rule are as old as our oldest settlements. Those miserable first settlers, with minds as small and mean as their cabins, had no conception either of freedom or self- government. The tyrannies theological and tyrannies political which they set up to make life as hateful as it was squalid show that they had brought their European ideas with them. But fate was against them. They were of about the same low social rank. They were poor—and poverty is as potent a leveller as death itself. They were isolated. They had to shift each man for himself. So, deprived of rulers and forced to be free, since none cared to bind them, they began to govern each man himself. And they took the material tools which the civilization then current in Europe forced into their hands and, to save themselves from starvation, they set about the conquest of the land, not for a State as they imagined, but for themselves and their children. Freedom is not the American’s because constitutions or statutes assert it. The constitutions, the statutes are merely written records of a truth no more dependent upon them than the proportions in which elements combine are dependent upon the text-books of chemistry. Besides, constitutions and laws avail only through their interpreters. And interpretation varies with the honesty or open-mindedness of official interpreters, with the spirit of the time, with the caprice of the moment even—a popular outburst, an impulse of bad courage in the public administrations, a greedy fear or desire in some powerful class. Legal enactments affect the surface of a society more or less and for periods of varying brevity; but the society itself is formed by conditions over which man has no greater control than he has over his heart-action. Those conditions constitute what the religious call “God in history” and the unreligious call fate or destiny or natural evolution. America will remain in the highway to freedom because printing presses are whirling, because railway trains are moving, because news is streaming along the telegraph wires, because schools and colleges and libraries are open—because intelligence is diffused and is ever more widely diffusing. Rights may be and constantly are assailed in isolated instances. But each instance remains and must remain isolated. None has become or can become a precedent. And there must be precedent or there can be no tyranny. Prejudice, even wilful prejudice, still thrives; truth and error have not yet been divorced from their unholy alliance which seduces honest men to the purposes of rascals; passion still rules the heart and the heart still rules the reason. But America must be free, however hard it may struggle against freedom; Intelligence is striking off the shackles. It can no more be stopped or stayed than the law of gravitation can be suspended. The European, or the American returning from a visit to Europe, is always disagreeably impressed by the evidences of haste, of imperfection in detail, by “the ragged ends sticking out.” But after a moment’s consideration of the reasons for this slovenliness wise criticism is disarmed. In the busiest hundred years the world has ever seen the Americans have had to shape out of a trackless wilderness a complete civilization containing as many as possible of the good ideas of the world’s past and having also all the latest improvements. There has been no time to “gather up loose ends.” The filling in of gaps, the replacing of makeshifts with permanent structures, the finishing and the polishing, have been perforce left to posterity. And, thanks to the passing and the present generations, posterity will have the leisure and the resources, and also the finer qualifications, necessary to that part of the task of civilization-building. The shortcomings of to-day, as nationally characteristic as our energy and our mental alertness, are most obvious, of course, in the public administration—disagreeable in the national administration, painful in the state administration, shocking in the municipal administration. Because of these spectacles of sloth, incompetence and corruption in public officials, it is charged by many persons of reputation as “publicists” that Democracy is a breeder of public corruption. The truth is just the reverse. Democracy drags public corruption out of its mole-tunnels where it undermines society, drags it into the full light of day, draws its deadly fangs that fasten in fundamental human rights, cuts its fatal claws that sink deep into the throat of freedom. One sees and hears more of public corruption in a Democracy than in a State. An [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] [Pg 10] [Pg 11] [Pg 12] organism that is expelling disease at its surface looks worse than one which is hiding and fostering disease in its vitals. Corruption is no offspring of Democracy. It is co-existent with human passions and weaknesses. Society is but a conglomerate of individuals; the whole, with all the strength of all the parts, has also all their weakness. In a State the public administration is the parlor; in a Democracy it is the servants’ hall. Public corruption in a State means that the head of the house is corrupt; public corruption in a Democracy means that the servants need attention. Our serious public corruption—national, State and municipal—is of a kind unknown to the people of two generations ago. About the middle of the last century science developed to the point at which it was able to give man weapons adequate to the thorough conquest of nature and of natural difficulties. The American people at once seized these most timely tools and began the rapid conquest of their vast, undeveloped heritage. Forty years ago this was a sturdy but dull and monotonous agricultural nation. It was hindered in intercourse with the rest of civilization by the wide ocean, across which passage was slow, painful, dangerous. It had a sparse, scattered population leading a severe and sodden rural or semi-rural life. There were no cities in the modern sense, practically no railroads, few and wretched wagon roads, few factories, no great distributing agencies, no telegraphs. Each section was shut off from, was ignorant and suspicious of, the others. Opportunities for advancement, for individual elevation, did not, as now, press upon even the incompetent and unworthy through very profusion, but were rare, uncertain and narrow. From the recent great industrial-social revolution has emerged the America of to-day—a land undreamed by our forefathers, uncomprehended by ourselves. In every essential of life—in education, in comfort, in refinement—there has been an immeasurable advance. And, most important of all, intelligence and that divine, truly democratic spirit of discontent, which has ever been the harbinger of enlightened progress, have penetrated to the remotest farmhouses, and fight a valiant and a winning battle with the sloth and despair of our city slums. Incidental to this evolution, inseparable from it, logically and naturally a part of it, there have been myriad opportunities for a temptation to corruption. And our corruption has complied with corruption’s universal law. It has been in direct proportion to opportunity. As long as only old and familiar forms had to be combated the people did not feel, as they do now, the inadequacy, the utter unfitness of their electoral machinery for the work of selecting and controlling their public administrators. This machinery, with some slight changes, is the same that was used in Athens and that was borrowed by the Greeks from the Egyptians. It is the crudest and clumsiest device possible for registering the public will. It works fairly well in small communities where the people are not busy, where everybody knows everybody else, where public administrators can be held to strict personal account by their neighbors, their masters. Until the two last centuries the world had little use for electoral machinery. And until the last fifty years, at most, there were no conditions that forcibly demanded the invention of a new electoral machine—one that would permit a people to register their will quickly, without circumlocutions, and at the same time without the haste that makes right action an accident. In addition to this fundamental disadvantage our people are also contending against an almost equally unfortunate limitation. The industrial revolution presses into private service not merely all of the best minds of the nation, but also most of the minds in which large measures of both capacity and character are combined. Even the mediocres who would best fill public office—which in a Democracy should be obedient and never initiatory—have been impressed by high pecuniary rewards into private service. But demand creates supply. Give us a little time and our supply will once more equal the demands upon it. We are manufacturing competent, intelligent men and women workers by the tens and the hundreds of thousands now-a-days—faster than private enterprise can absorb them, in such vast numbers that not the richest plutocracy could seduce and silence all or even a large proportion of them. Give us a little time, another thirty years or so—at most. Meanwhile let us not forget:— First—That while we ought to be, and are, concerned about the purity and efficiency of our public administrations, our vital interest is in the projects and acts of the industrial leaders who here ignore, there cajole or bully, the public administration, now use and now defy it. Second—That the new form of public corruption is an incident—melancholy, deplorable, dreadful, but still only a necessary incident—in that swift yet permanent betterment of man’s condition which practically began in the childhood of men still young. Third—That while purchasers of inequality and of privilege to extort may evade the laws of the statute books, they cannot evade that law of Democracy which compels them to assist in raising the consuming and producing capacities of the people, the standards of enlightenment, of comfort, of refinement, of civilized desire—of intelligence! The plutocrats themselves are, in the quaint irony of fate, by no means the least efficient of our manufacturers of democrats. It is not rational, it is distinctly irrational, to assert that moral or mental or physical betterment can tend to disaster, that the growth of intelligence may make men seek to tear down and tear up the fabric of civilization. It is true that the people—not here only, but throughout civilization and wherever civilization touches—are growing more restless, ever less content, ever more inquisitive, ever less reverential to tradition and authority. But are not these the very qualities which, working in the minds of the few in the past, led the human race up from the caves? Newspapers, libraries, schools do not make Huns and Vandals. On the contrary, they tame and eradicate that savagery which is the largest part of the estate we have inherited from our ancestors; on the contrary, they destroy the Huns and Vandals of inequality and privilege who would wrest from man his heritage under Intelligence and Democracy. [Pg 13] [Pg 14] [Pg 15] [Pg 16] [Pg 17] As for our own people, whose fate has been forecast in so many jeremiads, how would any man or body of men set about subjecting millions upon millions who are not merely educated but are also intelligent? The world has heretofore offered no opportunity for the trial of any such experiment in enslavement. The experiment if tried must be, indeed, original in conception and in execution. Is there hazard in the prophecy that no man now on earth will live to see it tried? Is there hazard even in the prophecy that it never will be tried? To assume that such an experiment could have any measure of success is to become involved in contradictions and absurdities. Make out the perils that beset our Democratic path as formidable as you please, and still it is less contradictory and absurd to assume that we shall triumph over them. How will we do it? It is not given to man to foresee even one minute of his own future. But, since triumph we must, rest assured that triumph we shall. If you wish to make a shrewd guess as to the how of it, watch the motions of that infant of yesterday, Science. Already Science has given to us all a thousand things that not the richest of our grandparents could afford, nor the most powerful command. Beyond question it will presently unlock the secrets of the composition of matter and show us how every object that now enters into private wealth or is rationally sought by human desire can be obtained so easily by a little effort on the part of any human being that a man would as soon think of devoting himself to bottling sunshine as to storing up what is now called wealth. Less than two human generations of scientific activity, and already what ominous groanings and crackings in the last remaining of the artificial barriers that have so long dammed up the riches of the earth as wealth to be withheld or doled out by the few. Science is the emancipator, the deliverer, the mighty equalizer and leveler—equalizing and leveling up. Not down, but up, always up. Not by making the rich poor, but by making the poor rich. Not by making the wise foolish, but by making the foolish wise. Not by enfeebling the powerful, but by making powerful the feeble. For signs of the world’s to-morrow, look not in the programs of political parties, not in the plottings of princes or plutocrats, but in the crucible of the chemist. We have reminded ourselves of the solid ground upon which rests our faith in ourselves as a democratic people with a democratic future. We can therefore proceed, with fairly tranquil minds, to view some of the “perils” to the republic. And of these the greatest, the one that includes them all, is the plutocracy, which fills so many of our thinkers with grim forebodings. Instead of lying awake o’ nights, worrying about it, let us go boldly and democratically forth in the broad day and gaze straight at it in all its grisly vulgarity. [Pg 18] [Pg 19] CHAPTER II THE MANIA FOR GILT You stand in front of a huge dam. Its wall rises bare and sheer. You say to yourself: “There can be little water behind it.” But even as you think this, the dam becomes a waterfall, and the waterfall swells into a Niagara. You go round where you see the other side; you find a lake fathoms deep and extending miles up the valley. Precisely such a phenomenon occurred in this country a few years ago. Behind a dam of long-established customs of simplicity and frugality, concentrated private wealth had been rising for a generation with amazing rapidity. Suddenly it overflowed in a waterfall of luxurious living; and to-day the waterfall has become a Niagara. The dam that has pent and narrowed the streams of national wealth is the concentration of property that has come about through the imperfect working of the law of combination which steam and electricity established. That imperfection has produced the multi-millionaire, the plutocrat, as the crowning inequality in a succession of inequalities. First, the man with a million or so; then the man with ten millions or so; then the man with fifty millions or so; now, the man with a hundred, with five hundred, with nearly a thousand millions. Every city has its plutocrats. In New York is the capital of plutocracy. As businesses combine, as wealth concentrates, the directors of business, the masters of wealth, segregate. Thus, New York is denuding the rest of the country of its plutocrats. Most of them live in New York now; the rest must soon come. The mighty cataract of extravagant ostentation is continent-wide—from Boston to San Francisco. In New York, the high-curving centre of the down-pouring, glittering stream, the spectacle almost passes belief. There is not the least danger of exaggeration in description; the danger is lest they who have not seen with their own eyes may refuse to believe that men and women can be born under the American flag wild enough to indulge in such prodigality and pretense and folly. A score of years ago there were in New York only a few private houses that could accurately be spoken of as palaces; to-day there are more than two hundred private houses that are indeed palaces in size, in cost, and in showiness; and hardly a week passes without announcement of several new ones of equal or surpassing splendor. Twenty years ago there were not in all so many as a score of palace-like hotels, apartment houses and business buildings; to-day there are more than five hundred of these wonderful structures of marble and granite over iron, each costing, with its equipment, decorations and furnishings, from two to six millions. And the whole city—business quarters and industrial, rich quarters and poor—is in a state of chaotic upheaval, so furiously are they tearing down the New York that was new twenty years ago, and replacing it with a New York, in every quarter and every street significant of the presence of colossal wealth, of stupendous private fortunes, of an unprecedented and unbelievable number of great incomes. Fifteen years ago the number of private equipages on New York’s streets was noticeably small, considering the city’s size and wealth, and their appointments for the most part extremely modest. To-day Fifth avenue and Central Park, from September to mid-June, are thronged with handsome private carriages, notably costly in all details of harness and upholstery, the servants in expensive, often gaudy liveries; and the multitude of women thus swept along in state, in beautiful dresses and hats and wraps, frequently display fortunes in furs and jewels. As for the shops, it seems indeed only yesterday that you found the costly luxuries in a few fashionable places, and there in small quantities and almost reverently handled by clerks and customers. To-day the shops where the tens of thousands buy are more luxurious than were most of the best shops ten years ago. And in the best shops you are dazzled and overwhelmed by the careless torrent of luxury—enormous quantities, enormous prices, throngs of customers. Twenty-five dollars for a pair of shoes, fifteen dollars for a pair of stockings, two hundred dollars for a hat, one thousand dollars for a hat-pin or parasol, fifteen hundred for a small gold bottle for a woman’s dressing-table, thirty or forty thousand for a tiara, a hundred thousand for a string of pearls—these are prices which salesmen will give you with the air of one who tells an oft-told tale. Why has an income of ten thousand a year become a mere competence in New York City to-day? Why do the families with ten times ten thousand regard themselves as far from rich? Why do enough New Yorkers to make a populous city regard it as privation if they cannot keep at least three servants, one of them a man-servant, and ride in cabs and have a country place in summer? The explanation is—the multi-millionaire. There are in New York City to-day upward of a thousand fortunes of two or more millions. About one-fourth of these are of more than ten millions. There are no less than forty-eight fortunes of more than forty millions, about twenty of these being more than seventy-five millions, and half a dozen of them between seventy-five millions and the mountainous aggregations of the Oil King—three-quarters of a billion, with an income beyond forty-five millions a year. There is no way of estimating the number of fortunes of from three-quarters of a million to two millions. The income of a million dollars, safely invested, is about forty thousand a year. Many New York men—several thousands—have from their profession or their business annual incomes, available for living expenses, of forty thousand or thereabouts, yet their holdings of property are small. But they belong in the millionaire class because they spend money like the millionaires and are of the most strenuous part of the plutocracy. It is the multi-millionaires who set and force the pace—the families with incomes of more than a quarter of a million a [Pg 20] [Pg 21] [Pg 22] [Pg 23] [Pg 24] [Pg 25] year. “A man with a hundred thousand a year,” said the late Pierre Lorillard, with humorous seriousness, “is in the unhappy position where he can see what a good time he could have if he only had the money.” And he added that easy circumstances meant “a thousand dollars a day—and expenses.” Properly and comfortably to live in the style which New York most envies and admires and encourages, a family should have an income of three-quarters of a million at least. But by economy and abstention from too great self-indulgence, and by Spartan resistance to many fascinating temptations, they may keep up the appearances of a very high degree of luxury on a quarter of a million a year. Of course, they cannot have very many or very grand houses; they must not think of racing stables; they would do well to keep out of yachts; they must expect to be frequently and far outshone in jewels and in entertainments; they must keep down their largess, their benevolences. But they can have a small house in town, one or two more in the country, can entertain creditably if they do not entertain too often, and can live—if they are prudent—free from the harassments of money cares. The quickest way to get at the reason for this curious state of affairs, that may seem to many a flamboyant jest rather than conservatively presented reality, is to look at the life of the typical New York multi-millionaire of the extravagant class. There are multi-millionaires, scores of them, who do not belong in this extravagant class; but there are not so many outside of it now as there were five years ago. Our up-to-date, luxury-hunting, luxury-teaching Mr. Multi-Millionaire has a fortune which is estimated at thirty millions, but is ten millions more or less in the widest fluctuations of the stock market. His income is about a million and a half a year, but he usually spends three-quarters of a million, and relies upon speculation to put him in funds for extraordinary expenditures, such as a new house, a large gift to education or charity, a large purchase of pictures or jewels. As human beings compare themselves only with those in better circumstances, he counts himself poor rather than rich— his fellow-citizens, the Oil King, and the Copper King, and the Sugar King, and the Steel King, and the Telegraph King, and the Tobacco King, and the Real Estate King are what he calls rich. He thinks himself unlucky rather than lucky; he avoids intimacy with men of smaller fortunes and no fortunes unless he has known them long, because he suspects that he is usually sought with a view to exploitation—and he is not far from right. He thinks he is opposed to ostentation, severely criticises his richer neighbors and loudly applauds frugality. He has a wife who is forty-five years old and passes for “about thirty.” They have a son who has been out of college four years, and after learning enough of business to supervise a fortune, has settled down to the life of a “gentleman”; a daughter, who came out last winter and who is being guarded by her mother, her companion, her aunt and her sophisticated self against the wiles of fortune-hunters wearing Cupid’s livery; a son who was at Groton, is now a sophomore at Harvard; a daughter nine years old. They have three fixed and six or seven temporary residences. First, there is the palace in Fifth avenue, where the family is united for a few weeks in each year. It is closed from the first of June until the first of October, and when the various members of the family make flying trips into New York they take a suite at the St. Regis or at Sherry’s. Second, there is “the cottage” at Newport, about the same size as the palace on Fifth avenue. Most of the family usually spend the latter part of the summer here. Third, there is the large new house on Long Island, twenty-five miles from New York, where several members of the family spend part of the spring and fall. Luxurious New Yorkers are becoming more and more susceptible to the changes of the season. They are emulating, though as yet at a distance, the smart set of Juvenal’s Rome, with its summer and winter finger rings. Our family have a small house at a fashionable place in North Carolina; the mother and eldest son go there for a part of February and March. They have a thousand acres and a comfortable house in the Adirondacks—the head of the family likes to shoot and fish. They have a place in the Berkshire Hills—but they do not go there now and they are thinking of selling it. The wife has an apartment in Paris. She must be sure of comfort when she goes over for her shopping. Every few years they take a big house in Mayfair for the season, and go on to Scotland for the shooting. Then there is the steam yacht, an ocean greyhound—last year it cost them sixty thousand dollars for maintenance, a few repairs and refittings. The grown son has persuaded his father to start a racing stable—a small one with fifteen or twenty thoroughbreds. His trainer costs him ten thousand dollars a year, and his jockey five thousand more, as a retaining fee. The father estimates the cost of this addition to the family expense at one hundred thousand dollars a year—he hopes this will include betting losses. The son has long had a string of polo ponies that costs, with all its embroideries, fifteen to twenty thousand a year. Ten years ago this family had only a small house in town—small by comparison—and the beautiful palace on the Ocean Drive at Newport. But they do not feel that they are now extravagant. Wherever they go they find people of their own set and a good many “rank outsiders” doing the same things they are doing; and they find many doing things they would think far beyond their means. For example, a man has just paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a string of pearls for his wife. Our multi- millionaire regards that as an extravagance. He thinks his own wife’s string, which cost one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, represents the limit of prudent expenditure for such a purpose. And those of their friends whom they regard as comparatively poor—the people with from fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year—are pushing them on by concentrating where they scatter. They meet different groups of these moderately rich people at different points in their annual round; and each group is living almost as well as, in some respects better than, they are at that particular point. True, So-and-So’s house in town is a trivial twenty-room affair on a side street, but his place in Newport (he concentrates upon it) is far finer than their Newport place. Smith is decently housed in town and at [Pg 26] [Pg 27] [Pg 28] [Pg 29] [Pg 30] [Pg 31] Newport, but lives in a tiny doll’s house in Curzon street during the London season. Jones is modest in America and England, but how he does blaze on the Riviera! There must be no standing still. There must be progress. The standards, all the standards—house, dress, equipage, number and livery of servants, jewels, works of art, sports, gifts—are rising, rising, rising. Each year, more and ever more must be spent, unless one is to fall behind, lose one’s rank, be mingled with the crowd that is ever pressing on and trying to catch up. In the neighborhood of these plutocrats and their parasites and imitators, struggling thus desperately in gaudiness, it is all but impossible not at times to fear that prosperity, concentrated prosperity, has killed Democracy, has killed the republic. Foreigners look at New York and the galaxy of rich cities eagerly imitating it, and shrug their shoulders and sneer. Americans look, and try to keep their courage and their point of view. CHAPTER III PLUTOCRACY AT HOME Let us glance at our typical Mr. Multi-Millionaire’s town house. It is a palace of white marble, in Fifth avenue, near Fifty-ninth street—the view across the Park from the upper windows is superb. This palace was the inaugural of the family’s recent fashionable career. It is the struggle to live up to it that is making them famous in New York. The palace was to have cost our family a million, including the site. Up to the present time it has cost them two and a half millions, and that does not include the one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar set of tapestries for the dining- room which is on its way from Europe. The site cost half a million; the house three-quarters of a million; the rest went for furniture, and the house still looks bare to the family. “A wretched barn,” madame calls it. There are one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in paintings and statuary in the entrance-hall, fifty thousand dollars in paintings, statuary, and such matters in the rest of the house. Two hundred thousand dollars could easily be spent without overcrowding. The furniture, thinly scattered in the long and lofty salon, cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—it is amazing how fast the money disappears once one goes in for old furniture. As you look round these show rooms—the vast entrance-hall, the enormous dining-room, the great library, the salon which is used as ballroom, the comparatively small and exquisitely furnished reception-rooms—you are struck by the absence of individual taste. You are in a true palace—the dwelling-place, but in no sense the home, of people of great wealth, but of no marked æsthetic development. They have the money, and to a certain extent the faculty of appreciation. But others have supplied the active, the creative brains. You go up the grand stairway, and at the turn pause to look down at the magnificent rug which almost covers the floor of the entrance-hall, up at the splendid painting which adorns the ceiling. The owner—you know him well—tells you that each cost twenty-five thousand dollars. And then he takes you into the wife’s living-rooms. She is out of town. Madame lives in five great rooms—a sitting-room, a dressing-room, a bedroom, a room where her clothes in use— quantities of dresses, hats, wraps, boots, shoes, slippers, drawers full of the finest underclothing—are kept, and a bathroom. She is very crowded, she will tell you. For instance, where is her secretary to sit and work when she wishes to use her sitting-room for a private talk with her son or daughter, or some intimate friend? You look round these rooms and again you note the absence of individual taste. Madame is always on the wing; she has no time to impress herself on her immediate surroundings. But a very capable artist has been at work and has not neglected the opportunities which his freedom in the matter of money opened to him. He has created several marvelous color schemes through harmonious shadings in rugs, upholstery, the brocade coverings of the walls, the curtains, the woodwork and the ceilings. You are not surprised that a hundred thousand dollars went in making suitable surroundings for a lady of fashion and fortune. You know that there are several dozen suites more expensive than this within gun- shot, and scores almost as expensive within a radius of half a mile. If she were at home there would be on that dressing-table five or six thousand dollars in gold articles: brushes, combs, hand-mirrors—each gold and rock-crystal hand-mirror cost seven hundred and fifty dollars—bottles, button-hooks, and so forth, and so forth. If she were here, there would be in that safe at least fifty thousand dollars in jewelry—a small part of what she has, the rest being in the safe-deposit vaults. The two marvels of this suite of hers are the bed and bath-tub. The bed is on a raised platform in a sort of alcove. The canopy and curtains are of a wonderful shade of violet silk. The counter-pane and roll-cover are of costly lace. The head-board and foot-board are two splendid paintings—one of sleep, the other of awakening. You think nine thousand dollars was cheap for this bed, even without canopy, lace and other fineries. The bath-tub is cut from a solid block of white marble and is sunk in the marble floor of her huge bathroom. It is a small swimming-pool, and its plumbing is silver, plated with gold. On the floor of this room at the step down into the tub there is a great white bear-skin, and there is another in front of the beautiful little dressing-table. Three palms rise from the floor and tower—real trees—toward the lofty ceiling. Going on through the palace you discover that it is arranged in suites—somewhat like a very handsome and exclusive private hotel. And then you learn that here is not one establishment, but seven, each separate and distinct. Our multi- millionaire’s family have outgrown family life and are living upon the most aristocratic European plan. In a smaller, more plainly furnished suite of rooms than those occupied by his wife, lives the husband. In a third suite lives the grown son; in a fourth the grown daughter; in a fifth and sixth, these the smallest, live the young son and the young daughter. The seventh establishment consists of forty-two personal assistants and servants. Each member of the family has his or her own sitting-room and there receives callers from within or without the family— except that the daughter receives men callers in the smallest of the three reception-rooms on the ground floor. Each has his or her own personal attendants; each lives his or her separate social life. They rarely meet at breakfast—it is more comfortable to breakfast in one’s sitting-room; they rarely meet at luncheon—luncheon is the favorite time for going to one’s intimates; they rarely meet at dinner—one or more are sure to be dining out or the mother is giving a dinner for married people. It is with eyes on this lofty height that the New York family, just emerging from obscure poverty, with five or six [Pg 32] [Pg 33] [Pg 34] [Pg 35] [Pg 36] [Pg 37] thousand a year, anxiously ask themselves: “Now, can we at last afford a man to go to the door and wait on the table?” For the man-servant is the beginning of fashion, and its height can be measured—as certainly as in any other way—by the number of men-servants and the splendor of their liveries. Of course, our family of pacemakers have an “adequate” supply of secretaries, tutors, governesses, valets, maids; and the housekeeper has her staff, the chef his, the butler his, the head coachman his, the captain of the yacht his. Then there are caretakers, gardeners and farmers, the racing-stable staff, various and numerous occasional employees. At the request of Mr. Multi-Millionaire, his private secretary recently drew up a list of all persons in the family’s service. It contained—with the yacht out of commission and the Newport place not yet opened—seventy-nine names. Mr. Multi-Millionaire, becoming interested in statistics, went on to have his secretary take a census of the horses and carriages owned by the family. Of horses there were sixty-four, excluding the seventeen thoroughbreds in the racing stable at Saratoga, but including the hunters and the polo ponies. The little girl had the fewest. Poor child! She had only a pair of ponies and a saddle horse, and she complained that her sister was always loaning the hack to some friend whom she wished to have riding with her. The grown son had the most—thirteen; he must hunt and he must coach and he must play polo, or try to. The father himself was almost as badly off as his little daughter—he had only four. Of vehicles there were at the town stables a landau, two large victorias and a small one, two broughams, a hansom; an omnibus, seating six; four automobiles, a tandem cart, a pony cart. At the several country places—a coach, a drag, a surrey, a victoria phaeton, two dos-à-dos, two T-carts, four runabouts, three buggies, two breaking carts, making a total of thirty-one. The secretary remarked that these vehicles, assembled and properly distanced, would, with their animals, form a procession about three-quarters of a mile long. He then tried to read Mr. Multi-Millionaire some statistics of harness, saddles, and so forth, but was forbidden. In further pursuit of this statistical mania, Mr. Multi-Millionaire discovered that his family and their friends—and the servants—had drunk under his various roofs during the past year nearly two thousand quarts of red wine, about one thousand quarts of champagne, one hundred and fifty quarts of white wine, one hundred and fifty quarts of whiskey, one thousand eight hundred quarts of mineral water, and an amazing amount of brandy, chartreuse, and so forth. The family’s total bills for drink, food, cigars, and cigarettes had been of such a size that they represented an expenditure of about three hundred and seventy dollars a day—about one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a year. His wife became very angry when he showed her these last figures. She told him that he was meddling in her business and that she didn’t purpose to spend her whole life in watching servants. Our multi-millionaire did not make his fortune; he inherited it. But he has been very shrewd in managing it, for all his extravagance. Though he is cautious about expenses in one way, he shows by the allowances he makes to the various members of his family that he believes in carrying out to the uttermost the idea that his family must live in state. His wife has a million in her own name, but he makes her an allowance of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain herself and their households. The grown son has had an allowance of twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and when he marries it will be trebled—perhaps quadrupled. This is large for persons of their modest fortune, but many fathers of smaller means are doing as much for their children, and our multi-millionaire will not see his children suffer. His grown daughter has an allowance of fifteen thousand dollars—more than she needs, as she has only to buy her clothes and pay her small expenses out of it. The boy in college has five thousand dollars a year; he is always in debt, but his mother helps him. The youngest child has ten dollars a week—her clothes are bought for her, and she can always get money from her father or mother when she wishes to make handsome presents. The most interesting person in the family is the mother. She is its moving force, one of the moving forces in the extravagant life of New York City to-day. You see her name and her pictures in the newspapers very often, always in connection with the news that she is doing something. She was the first in New York to have huge flunkeys in gaudy knee-breeches and silk stockings in waiting at her front door. She was the first to have as an entertainment for a few people after dinner several of the grand opera stars and the finest orchestra in the country. She is a woman with ideas— ideas for new and not noisy or gaudy, but attractive ostentations of luxury. She spends money recklessly, but she gets what she wants. She is one of the busiest women in town. And the main part of her business is one which engages New York women, and men, too, ever more and more—the fight for prolonging youth. You would never suspect that she is the mother of a son twenty-five years old. Indeed, you would not suspect from her looks or her conversation that she is a mother. She is making her fight for youth most successfully. Of course, she uses no artifices—the New York women who care greatly about looks have long since abandoned artificiality, except as a fad. Her hair is thick and dark and fine. It is her own, kept vigorous by constant treatment. Her skin is clear and smooth and healthily pale—it costs her and her beauty assistants hours of labor to keep it thus. Her figure is tall and slender and girlish—her masseuse could tell you how tha...