THE CANT ABOUT RICHES.
THE Bishop of Chichester has recently defended the rich against attack. " They are the target," be wrote, " at which every one who is not rich thinks he has a right to shoot his arrows. All rich people are not smart,' just as certainly
all ' smart' people are not rich, though they try to live as if they were. Divorce Courts are not kept open by the vices of the rich, and the analysis of statistics proves that the breaking of the Seventh Commandment is not a sin that belongs exclu- sively, or mainly, to the rich." It is not a grateful task for a minister of Him who said that a camel could go through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man could enter the Kingdom of God, to defend the rich man. Let us say no more than that the defence is liable to be misunderstood ; but the Bishop of Chichester accepts the risk of misunderstanding for what seems to us to be a good enough reason. Notice that he does not say that the rich are more virtuous than other people, or even that they are virtuous at all. All he says in substance is that they are not vicious in proportion to their wealth ; that wealth is not the measure of vice, or necessarily a sign of vice. This, in our opinion, was well worth saying. We live in an age of ready-made judgments ; and the speed at which a few scattered dicta on some cognate subjects may come fortuitously together, and develop into a cant as detrimental to the character of those who use it as it is unfair to those against whom it is used, is positively alarming. To-day the popular preacher, the theatre, and the Socialist at his open-air meeting all employ a certain cant about the rich. This cant is a new form of Pharisaism. Far be it from us to try to make out a case for the rich man as being better than age-long experience has proved him to be ; we are ready to believe that he is even worse. Are we not all miserable sinners ? What we join the Bishop of Chichester in protest- ing against is the smug assumption that the rich are the " awful example " of the community, and that by the practice of holding up one's bands over them in righteous horror one acquires a kind of merit, or even protects oneself against sin, as though by an incantation. The Bishop of Chichester appears to do no more, then, than remind a canting generation that the same Book which condemns the rich and promises salvation to the poor also denounces Pharisaism, and tells those who would cast stones that they must first be sure that they are guiltless themselves. He sees a principle taken out of its context and applied with unthinking and rather self- righteous looseness, and he puts it back in its context; he demands a restored sense of proportion. That is all.
History, even in recent times, shows as a matter of hard fact that wealth in Great Britain is not flagrantly misused. Bacon, in slyly warning his readers against those who pretend to despise riches, remarks that no people make worse use of riches when they acquire them. And that inexorable test would be no more merciful if it were applied to-day. Those who condemn the rich would beyond question do more harm with wealth to themselves and others than is done now by a rich class, of whom the greater part have inherited certain responsibilities, inseparable from their fortune, or have developed a self-restraint in the very process which laboriously built up their capital. We are thinking, of course, of types of rich men, not of the exceptions. There are some who have grown rich by a few coups ; but their very notoriety proves their singular good luck when it does not point to their want of scruple. Qui festinat ad divitias non, erit insons. An Englishman who inherits wealth which is more than a couple of generations old generally takes over with it so many obligations to public service which are tied up inextricably with the property that he cannot well rid himself of them without a public avowal of sloth and turpitude that would be comparable with the act of a soldier who ran away from danger in full view of his comrades. We have heard of rich men who did run away ; but does any one argue that their shirking was characteristic ? We have put the case in this way because, although we see no reason to claim any peculiar virtue for the rich, on the other hand we must refuse to deny them whatever credit may be due to them for quietly falling in with their circumstances. Dr. Johnson remarked that great ladies are more virtuous than maidservants, and, of course, he admitted that it would be a shame indeed if they were not. Just as great ladies have far less excuse for being wicked than maidservants have, so have the rich, as a class, been educated into better habits than the poor. Yet the canters of to-day would have us believe, not that the rich are worse than the poor in proportion to their temptations, but that they are actually worse. One is reminded of the Jacobins, whose own outrages escaped their own notice. Everything they did seemed like righteousness because it was done under the aegis of an inspiring motto. The stranger who arrives in the midst of such conditions, with a mind not predisposed to any particular judgment, can alone see how serious the declension from truth and common-sense has become. Thus it was an American, Gouverneur Morris, United States Minister in Paris during the French Revolution, who wrote that he had come to the conclusion that there were just as many scoundrels outside coaches as there were inside.
The Bishop of Chichester touches a truth capable of expansion when he says that all " smart" people are not rich. We read some time ago the statement of a well-known Englishwoman that one great change she noticed in society after a long experience was the growing pretensions of people who were not rich. The young bride whose household was supported on five hundred pounds a year thought it perfectly natural to wear jewels which might have been suitable as the indication of a considerable fortune, and which a generation before would not have been displayed by any one in her circum- stances. Again, we do think that the standard of luxury among well-to-do, but not noticeably rich, people has been forced up inexcusably in recent years. If it were not so, we imagine that the expensive temples of gastronomy which are growing in number, and which more and more entice people to dine away from their homes, would not be able to keep their doors open. So long, however, as the British tradition of public service remains, our richest people will be saved from the worst incite- ments to folly and selfishness which beset the man who inherits money without rooted responsibility. Americans are as good as we are by nature, but English practice makes grotesque expenditure less easy here than it is with them. The rich young American who has been brought up to regard politics as a dirty trade is rather like Carlyle's " Emperor in furnished lodgings." He has power without the restraining environment of power. One need only examine the list of wills published every year to see, moreover, how many persons there are in England who have enjoyed large fortunes, and yet have never used them to emerge from a self-respecting obscurity into a vulgar notoriety such as is always purchasable. Our reflections must not be taken as an invitation to the rich to be worse than they are, but only as an exhortation to all against cant. As Mr. Honeywood promised, after his cure by disillusionment, that he would reserve his pity in future for real distress and his friendship for real merit, so it would be advisable for every one now to condemn the wickedness of a whole class only after very careful examination.
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