THE FUTURE OF THE VERY RICH.
- DE BLOW ITZ tells us this week that the smart "VI_ • set in Paris, or, rather, the fast set among the old aristocracy, intend, if they can, to expel the Rothschild family, the " Barons of finance," as they are called, from France, the method adopted being to persecute the younger members with incessant challenges. That is a cleverly devised method, for although the Rothschilds would probably fight like any other French gentlemen, and, indeed, in the affair of this week responded to the call almost too eagerly, a daily cartel does not add to the appetite of any man immersed in important affairs. Yet under the social system of France, if the caste is unscrupulous enough to resort to such means, it is impossible to avoid the daily battle except by one of three plans,—to appeal to the law, to leave the country, or to submit to be struck ; and to men like the Rothschilds all three must be equally objectionable. There is, indeed, a fourth plan, which we know to have been adopted in one case with success —viz., to refuse to fight except with pistols and across a handkerchief—but that is not a plan which every man approves, and might involve, even if successful, appearance before jurymen, who, if the challenged were rich and of the obnoxious faith, would reject all evidence of provocation. It is a curious as well as a shameful incident, and makes one wonder whether if by and by it will be altogether so pleasant to be exceptionally rich, as also does another incident recorded this week in a journal which is the property of a millionaire. In the Pall Mall Magazine for April, Mr. Benjamin H. Ridgely, whose name we do not recall in recent literature— but that may be our own unpardonable ignorance—tries to explain the habit common among rich Americans of living for years away from their native land. He writes for the most part humorously enough, and is inclined to believe that most Americans are driven abroad by their wives, who find life in Europe more tranquil and more dignified, but we seem to detect in one of his stories a certain seriousness. It is an account of a millionaire who was driven almost frantic by the American Press, which compelled him, his wife, and his daughters to live like so many curious insects under a sort of microscope. They could not "turn around " without see- ing some reference to themselves, not always, we imagine from the context, gently laudatory, in the daily papers. "I sat," says one victim, "one night three years ago in a box st the opera, and the next day there was not only a flippant and mortifying reference to our little opera-party in one of the newspapers, but portraits of my wife and daughters, and further suggestions that my daughters, owing to the fortune of their father, were worth the attention of a European nobleman who was then in the United States, and whose very name they were bold enough to mention. The publication was humiliating in the extreme, and I promptly expostulated with the editor, who was himself a gentleman and a member of good society. Yet he gave me to understand that he could not•. undertake to keep the names of people who showed themselves in public places out of the personal columns of his paper. There was no real scandal or libel in what was published on this occasion, or in various other refer- ences to my family that had been published before : they were simply an unwarrantable and abominable invasion of my privacy as a private citizen; and since there appeared to be no remedy for the imposition, my wife and I concluded that we would be freer and happier in Europe. Hence we closed up our home and came abroad. But for the shame of our personal journalism, which, as I say, makes individual freedom of life or movement out of the question, I would return home to-morrow." Daily libel—for it comes to that, daily flattery being a little insipid—must be nearly as hard to bear as a daily challenge, and we find ourselves wondering whether the very rich are or will be in the future among the very unhappy.
The answer to that question depends, of course, mainly upon idiosyncrasy, as there are men whom their ac- quaintance would soon give up challenging without reason, and men whom comment would no more move than it moves some politicians—others are more sensitive—but we can easily fancy that life will hereafter become a little diffi- cult for millionaires. They are already judged more cen- soriously than their neighbours, most of their acts being considered, as those of the old Nabobs were, vulgar in the extreme. They have distinctly less license for their idio- syncrasies than their neighbours, any marked peculiarity or habit being set down to a desire to be conspicuous. There is a tendency to grudge them political careers, an undercurrent of opinion classing them with "the capitalist gang" who are supposed to be using Governments to "exploit" the world and find 20 per cent. investments, and although they are besieged by the charitable till, as one of them told us, "I positively dare not give publicly," yet unless they found galleries or universities there is but scant praise accorded to their liberalities. One of the greatest of million- aires gave the other day £50,000 to an object Englishmen have very much at heart, and though the fact was recorded in the papers, it elicited none of the usual conventional thanks. He ought, muttered public opinion, to have given five times as much, and he was probably drowned next day in beseech- ing or malignant letters. The marriages of their daughters are remarked on unpleasantly, as if no man could love a pretty Miss Kelmansegg, and Chancellors of the Exchequer exult publicly in their deaths, as if the great reason of their existence was to inflate national Treasuries. Above all, really good people are beginning to refuse them common justice, declaring whenever they are injured that they possess so many " compensations " as to deserve no pity. As if money could compensate for the death of a wife, the lunacy of a son, or disfigurement in a railway accident.
Should this disposition increase, life will be no bed of roses for the millionaires, and we have a suspicion that it will. It certainly will on the Continent, where envy is more of a motive power than with us; and it may in America, where public feeling seems compounded of the admiration we all feel for the very successful, and a strong sense that the possession of so much power of action by an individual is in some way or other " un-Republican." We see it already in a very acute form in France, for this attack on the Roths- ehilds is not wholly dictated by Anti-Semite feeling, and their houses are said to have been already threatened by Anarchists; and in Switzerland, where legal efforts have been made to reach the wealth of the very rich; and we suspect its existence in Germany, though the prodigious strength of the police keeps down its overt expression. It is beginning to show itself in Austria under cover of an Anti-Semite move- ment, and there is a trace of it here, not only as described above, but as influencing the projects of very able political
economists. There are ideas floating about as to a progressive scale Df Death-duties, and even a progressive Income tax, which bode no good to the great accumulators, and which, whether just or unjust, will be to them sources of great exasperation, while the sympathy bestowed on all other tax- payers—except the luckless minority which is taxed for keeping coachmen and gardeners—is refused to them with a roughness which, considering the English character, is quite amazing. Their occasional trouble, if their wealth is in realty, in raising money to pay a Death-duty is a subject of venomous ridicule, or of suggestions that if the munici- palities could only " get at them " as well as the State ratepayers would be a great deal happier.
Perhaps the process will not go far here, for Englishmen, being moneygetters, sympathise to a certain degree with those who have got money, and only momently forget the great principles of justice ; but we are nearly sure of this, that the very rich will one day find unusual seclusion very conducive to the serenity which is so nearly the equivalent of happi- ness. They seek it already in the seclusion of their yachts. Edgar Poe was a genius, and had the prevoyance which is so often one of the compensations of that pain-giving quality. He thought the millionaire of the future would bury himself in a secluded paradise, and, allowing for poetical exaggera- tion, we fancy he was right. That was the instinct of the old Barons, and these are the men who are to-day filling their place. There are Americans who are creating " paradises " now almost exactly in the way Edgar Poe suggested, and in Europe they will have still better opportunities, for they can change from climate to climate as the seasons dictate. A very few years and there will be order in the Eastern Empire. as there is already in the Western Empire, of Rome, and the most beautiful divisions of earth, the Greek islands, the Balkan Peninsula, Cyrenaica, and, above all, Asia Minor, will be as secure as the " audacious " but order-loving "race of Japhet" have already made their colder and rougher possessions. Then will be the opportunity of the multi-millionaire, who in a delicious climate will be able for six months in the year to live in a palace planted amidst a paradise, among dependants careless of newspapers, innocent of envy, and inclined to regard him who spends, or, above all, him who distributes, as closely related to the beneficent Providence which gives, yet denies, so much. When Eastern Europe is civilised in the sense in which India, has been civilised, the very rich man will have scope in his seeking for serenity, though perhaps from other causes than the present he will find it no closer to him than he does now. Mean- while, it is a curious feature of the time that the Rothschilds are being persecuted by French gentlemen for being so aggressively rich, and that a keen American Consul should be convinced, apparently on excellent evidence, that Americans of unusual wealth have been driven into permanent exile by the unbearable heat they suffer from living under a noels' microscope.
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