THE DUTIES OF THE VERY RICH.
THE millionaires are giving us trouble already in South Africa, and they will give us more at home. It is not anything they do or leave undone, so much as their existence, which creates so much strife, by rousing questions in regard to which the conscience as well as the brain of the community is as yet unprepared. Nobody has yet settled within his own mind what a millionaire ought to do with his surplus wealth, or whether he owes any special, or as it were novel, obligation to his neighbours. Daring the last development of the class, that is, in the old Roman world, nobody seems to have been perplexed, and Lucullus, who had millions, might waste them on luxurious living, or Seneca, who bad three millions lent out at 12 per cent., might heap it up steadily, or Crasens, who had more probably than both, might employ the money in raising armies for civil war without anybody arguing that their wealth of itself affected their ethical position. Nowadays, however, wealth is power, even more than it was in Rome, and the community, which has become very jealous of power, and which at the same time anxiously seeks for ethical light, asks restlessly whether, with new wealth, new kinds of duty have not arisen. New York, for example, is discussing at this moment, in words which are often made light in order to conceal a certain seriousness, whether a ball which it is proposed to give is or is not a crime. The wife of a new millionaire, Mr. Bradley-Martin, proposes to ask eighteen hundred guests to appear on a given night in costume ; the rich have responded with eagerness, perceiving a chance at once of distraction and display ; and it is calculated that the entertainment—what with the feasting and the flowers and the dresses—will cost at least £50,000, an estimate which, if all tales be trite of milliners' bills, we should imagine to be unaccountably moderate. At this very time it is
asserted that in the tenement-houses of New York, a great population, crushed at once by Protection and by laws which, under an economic disguise, really establish a debased currency, cannot find sufficient work, and multitudes are actually living on food too insufficient for health, while in the similar houses of Chicago, where every social evil in the Union seems to reach its apogee, large numbers of citizens who would labour if they could are actually perishing of hunger. We hope and believe there is exaggeration in these last accounts; but it is known that poverty in the great cities of the States takes very dreadful forms, and without talking of actual starvation, the existence among large classes of the most acute and painful distress would be admitted on all hands by Americans themselves. It is asked, therefore, whether in each circumstances it can be right that such lavishness should go on, and the answers, as is usual in America, are of the most direct and fearless kind. The religious, and those who, without being religious, accept guidance from the pulpits, reply that it is not right, and that a scene like the costume-ball should be prevented, if not by legislative action, at least by a strong and menacing display of opinion ; while the non-religions affirm that the expendi- ture is right, that no one is bound to be sparing if he does not choose to be sparing, and that lavish expenditure, by circulating money, must in the end alleviate the condition of the poor. The conflict of words waxes a little hot, and it is not impossible, if the Anarchical elements of society in New York fully apprehend the discussion going on, that Mrs. Bradley-Martin's guests may be reduced to assemble under direct and visible protection from an armed police.
In order to clear the ground we will dismiss the argument about the beneficence of luxury first of all. Even if it is economically true, which may be doubted—for expenditure, to be fully beneficial, should be either necessary or reproductive, and even hoarding, which fills the reservoirs that pay labour, must be more useful than, say, the expenditure of hundreds upon smoking—the assertion is in great measure beside the point. Those who object do not, as we understand them, deny that a costume-ball may benefit the labourers of the world, but assert that another use of the money would benefit more the people known to be suffering, who, being New Yorkers, are in a special degree the neighbours or brethren, in the Christian sense, of every one who dwells in New York. It is the right of the special community which is pleaded, not that of universal mankind, and it is the propriety of one expenditure when compared with another, not expenditure itself which is condemned. The question being thus narrowed, the good of lavishness in itself cannot be pleaded, unless the lavishness benefits the community whose wants are described, and a costume-ball, half the coat of which or two-thirds will be paid to vine-growers in Champagne, dress-makers in Paris, tailors in England, and flower-growers in Florida, cannot be considered as beneficial, except in the most roundabout way, to dwellers in New York. If the wretched people in the tene- ment-houses were dying for want of febrifnges, the statement that the millionaires were founding cinchona farms in Peru could not be held by sensible men to dispose of the patients' claims upon their neighbours' surplus means.
The argument that luxury is useful in itself may in a starving city, or a city in which some starve, be dismissed as inapplicable, the more readily because the true argument for the rich is a very different one. It is this, that freedom in spending is essential to prosperity of any kind. If the surplus of the rich is liable to be taken to relieve the wants of the poor, or for any other beneficial object, there will speedily be no surplus ; and as no one will work except for gain, all work will be limited to the amount necessary to earn bare necessaries, and civilisation, or at all events civilisation as expressed in great cities, will in a few years perish. The public fortune will not even suffice to keep up the drains, while all the amenities of urban life would of necessity be relinquished. Enterprise would cease, and the intellectual direction of labour ceasing, too, for want of adequate reward, it would soon be difficult for concentrated masses of men to procure even food. Indeed they would cease to work for it, for maintenance being secured by philanthropy to all, large classes would by degrees enjoy the one luxury open to them —namely idleness—a fact of which the workmen of the Canton of St. Gall have just had rough experience. They bad set up a system of universal and compulsory relief for the unemployed, based upon a system of compulsory insurance enforced and guaranteed by the Canton ; but they have within the last few days finally abandoned the plan. The Swiss are among the most industrious of mankind, but human nature is too strong even for them ; and so large a section of them, finding life as unemployed men quite pleasant, went out of employ, that the industrious found themselves to be labouring solely for the benefit of the idle, and in a transport of just indignation broke the new system up. If, however, free- dom of expenditure is essential to the very life and happiness of the community, it is impossible to draw a line beyond which it shall not extend. A brown stone house is no more a necessity than a necklet of diamonds, and the ordinary expenditure of a rich man may be made to appear as wasteful as any costume-ball. Mr. Arnold White, indeed, has just tried in Cassell's Magazine for this month to make it appear that it is so, and by the use of repeated but not very gross exaggerations has, we have no doubt, succeeded in producing the impression he desires among many thousands of minds. The only defect of his argument is that, from the point of 'Flew of the man with a pound a week, the expenditure of the -man with one thousand a year would appear, if it were detailed, jest as sinfully extravagant as the " waste " of the millionaire appears to the man of the middle class. 'What,' -says the hodman, 'does that wretch want with servants, and carpets, and pictures, and three kinds of things to eat in the crincipal meal of the day ? He is a waster; let him, therefore, be put away.'
The argument from civilisation seems unanswerable even .without the other argument, to our mind far stronger, that a man has an absolute moral right to the wealth which he creates ; and yet we will frankly acknowledge that it does not -bring to our consciences complete satisfaction. There must be somehow and somewhere a good reason why a lavish dis- play of surplus means in the midst of people actually dying of hunger is morally wrong, even if the owner of those means is a charitable man and gives much away ; but how to seize it exactly we confess we do not know. A mere increase in gifts does not meet the case, for to give the whole capital is, as we have said, to kill civilisation,—in economic language, to extinguish the wages fund; and a mammoth millionaire may give away 90 per cent. of his income and still appear to the poor a. man of wastefully luxurious life. Immoderateness of any kind is, no doubt, an offence against taste, but it is hard to prove that it is an offence against morals ; and besides, what is immoderateness ? Mr. Arnold White evidently thinks it immoderate for a man with £50,000 a year to spend 23,500 an the rent of his town house ; but does he know any man in the professional classes who spends less than that proportion of his income on rent, or any artisan who does not spend twice as much ? We wish we did, for the sake of the latter class, who find rent the most intolerable of their many burdens. The only solid reason we can discover for the condemnation of Mr. Bradley-Martin—solid reason, of course we mean, outside the teaching of Christianity—is that he breaks the grand limitation on the right of a man to use his own property,—viz., that he must not use it so as to demoralise or injure others. We suspect from the point of view of citizenship—and there is a morality of citizenship—Mr. Bradley-Martin's costume. ball, when given in a time of exceptional scarcity, does demoralise,—that is to say, it directly creates class hatred, envy, and malice against accumulators, who are useful people. Treason is often a moral offence as well as a political one, and there might exist circumstances under which exceptional lavishness on amusement or display would be treason to the community.. If Lord Sandhurst, for instance, in this present month feasted his guests in the largest square of the native quarter of Bombay, he would, we suggest, not only deserve recall, but be guilty of a moral offence, not absolved by the fact that his expenditure might benefit certain shopkeepers and their servants. He would, for the sake of his own gratification, have rendered the amity of the classes in a great city much less than it was before. The proposition is a difficult one to maintain, because of the number of necessary qualifications, for it might easily be pushed into an admission that true morality demands equality of condition, which is absurd ; but there must be something in it too. At least, if there is not, we see no check upon millionaire ostentation which can be made operative from except, indeed, Christian feeling, which is not perhaps among millionaires the strongest of working influences. Thor are as a rule more like the people of the Renaissance, who didi great things for mankind, if only in reviving art and learning,i but whose motive force was a Pagan rejoicing in their own' emancipation from control.
Previous page
