FINANCIAL JUSTIFICATION.
rpHE fear of moderate poverty—a fear which governed the 1. Victorian middle class—is largely gone. We have seen it close, and laugh at our own fears. We do not mean that we have all experienced it. A portion of the middle class have, as we all know, been very much enriched by the war, but a much larger portion have been impoverished. There is not now, however, a prosperous man who does not count among his close friends, if not among his near relations, people who before the war lived like the rich and must now live very like the poor. Seen either from the outside or the inside, the change is less tremendous than it used to be supposed. Those who have experienced it and those who have watched it agree that its terrors can be easily exaggerated. Riches do not carry with them the sense of security that they used to carry, nor sudden poverty the sense of despair. The financial outlook of rich and poor alike is not so much dark as foggy. Nothing can be dis. tinguished in regard to future events. The rich young man does not feel easy about future legislation, and the poor young man cannot forget that greater fools than he have made fortunes within his memory. He knows that the peculiar circumstances which blew the banknotes into their laps may never occur again, yet he cannot help hoping that he too may have luck. Anyhow, everything is uncertain but the present, and each is determined to enjoy what he has got, be it little or much, while he has got it. " Light come, light go," he feels, and the risk, or rather the risk of serious disaster, is not so .great as has been supposed.
When people determine to enjoy their money, and seem dis- inclined to acknowledge their " duty towards it," their old- fashioned friends imagine that they must be determined to make an ignoble use of it, to " chuck it away " wantonly or wickedly, in fact to use it to ruin themselves or others. This view is getting to be regarded as absurd. More than half the world, though they may fall occasionally into various extravagances and wickednesses, never of set purpose intend to put their
money to any bad use. They intend to use it to buy what they want, and that is not what the Victorians wanted:—namely, security. Every one of course wants security from hunger and thirst and cold and squalor ; but modern men and women do not desire, as the Victorians desired, to keep for their lives and leave to their children the same good seats in the theatre of life. They want good seats, if it is only for a bit ; but if after the first act they must give up their stalls and go to the gallery— well, they will find many friends and relations there already who seem to be greatly enjoying the play.
The mass of educated people have found a new courage where money is concerned. Suppose a man has a praiseworthy ambition to give his son what seems to him the best possible education; but ho cannot do it without spending capital without taking the risk of having to " live differently " altogether. A few years ago such a man would have sighed and said he was not " justified " in affording the boy the chance. Nowadays he would run the risk with a light heart. Suppose, again, that he has a chance of greatly improving his business if he is prepared to put so much money into it as to risk the necessity of living for the rest of his life according to a lower standard. The young man of to-day would be far more likely to take the chance than his father would have been. All this is not because the " devil-may-care " spirit is spreading, but because he is inwardly convinced that no precaution he can take to tie his property to him is infallible, and also that he and his children will not necessarily be much less happy because they have much less money. Probably his cousins, and half his friends, and the children with whom his own children were brought up live in the simplest manner possible, and appear to be just as happy, just as capable, and just as well looked upon socially as he is himself.
Domestic servants in deserting their masters have to a great extent enfranchised them. There are two ends to a bell-rope, and it is uncertain to which end liberty is attached. The middle and upper classes had until lately an absolute passion for attendance. They could not have broken themselves of the servant habit, but the servants broke them, and forced them to find other tests of social position than the ridiculous one of personal dependants.
The moralists have been telling us from time immemorial that we ought to set less store by money. They often forgot as they preached that men who are to take money less seriously, to care less about it, will be apt to be careless of it in more senses than one. Good men will not put it to wrong uses, will not, for one thing, struggle and cheat in order to stuff into their mouths or their homes a dozen men's share of a scarce com- modity ; but neither will they always observe decorum in its outlay. The sort of Victorians who talked of money as " a great trust " feared its loss more than they feared anything excepting death. You cannot expect men thus to dignify wealth if they are to be willing to lose it. Average men and women will not show a contempt for money in the manner that a saint might show it, but that the worship of it is far less devout than it was we cannot but feel sure. Of course it may be said that the really poor have literally been moving Heaven and earth to get better conditions, and those better conditions are repre- sented by better wages; but, after all, the poverty of which they are so tired is not the poverty of which we have been speaking at all. The " simple life " of the new poor is what they are asking for- a life of comfort without luxury or personal financial influence and without dependants. It is that life, not the life of the slums, which the English middle class have just discovered to have no real terrors even for those unaccustomed to it. If they can be sure of falling into that net, they will be willing to take leaps which in the past would have seemed impossible, and in venturing much they will often, we cannot help hoping, gain a great deal more.
There existed before the war in all classes a great deal of unnecessarily dull life. A number of indistinguishable people spent their excess energies in an effort not to lose social ground. Maintaining the highest material standard of life which their income permitted, they found themselves without free time, free money, or free ideas. They were enslaved and often crushed by their own conventions. Many events have con- curred to disintegrate these spell-bound circles, among them a great invasion of more adventurous folk rushing upwards and downwards from above and from below. Half of them are joyously climbing, half of them have " missed their spring," thereby gaining experience and not losing self-respect` These
last settle down to a life of plain living and very lively thinking. They do not acknowledge the meaningless conventions of their financial equals, ridicule fancied " impossibilities " and defy imaginary " musts," diffuse ideas, refuse to deify bourgeois traditions, and bring into sympathy classes who have hitherto . lived as strangers to each other. It is to these " failures " that the social reformers may owe a not negligible part of their success—if indeed they do succeed.
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