LUXURY LN AMERICA. T HERE must be some pleasure in possessing
a very costly article simply for the costliness of it, or the millionaires of the world would not for the past two thousand years have accumulated such articles. The great Roman nobles, who sometimes possessed millions, and who could invest their wealth at 10 per cent., built themselves magnificent urban mansions as well as palatial "villas," and filled them with the costliest articles they could hear of,--statues from Greece, great " pieces" in gold and silver, " murrhine vases "—possibly porcelain—mosaics of elaborate design and workmanship, rich furs, silks worth their weight in gold, then far above its present value, and curios in the way of ornamental furniture. So did the barbarian chiefs who at last stole these things from the Roman palaces, and so did the nobles of the Middle Ages, who even carried their treasures about with them to war—witness the Burgundian plunder carried off by the Swiss —an ostentatious, and one would think inconvenient, practice, in which, however, they were imitated by the Turks. Oriental nobles heap together the costliest goods, often in places where they never see them, and there are other Princes in Asia besides the Shah who could, if they would, display "buckets of jewels," such as our Minister once saw in Teheran, and bedsteads and tables of solid gold or silver. The present writer has himself seen emeralds as large as pigeons' eggs which were hung on the horses of the last Emperor of Delhi, the Nizam of Hyderabad offered £350,000 for one diamond—the figures were sworn to at a trial—and it is believed on good evidence that the plunder of the " Secluded City" in Pekin would yield millions. The millionaires of to-day do just the same. They build unusually large houses ornamented with the costliest marbles, and they fill them with treasures of which some are artistic, but all are purchased at great prices. The rich Americans, many of whom are getting 7 per cent, for their money from undertakings which they themselves control, have actually altered the market - prices of all the more valuable jewels, adorn their wives and daughters with furs and silks almost as costly as those of the Roman ladies —not quite, for the expenses of transport from all places beyond the Roman " world " must have been enormous—and appear to seek occasions for sinking money in great pieces of gold and silver. At the recent wedding of Miss Virginia Fair with Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, jun., each of them representing a millionaire family of the first class, their relatives and friends appear to have vied with one another in gifts which Lucullus or Seneca would have considered splendid. Their total value is said to have exceeded £400,000. There were " rivers " of diamonds, "ropes" of pearls, bodices as much covered with jewels as that of the Empress Josephine's best dress, a pair of gold candelabra for ten lights each, a gold jewel-box, twenty-four dishes for sweets in gold, a coffee service in gold, tall golden candle- sticks, four loving-cups in solid gold, and silver articles past counting or description, one gift alone including twenty-four trays. Now, what is the real pleasure of possessing those articles in such profusion ? It cannot be merely their value ; for besides the expense of guarding them, which must be con- siderable, even if they are partly guarded by the thieves' knowledge that if they stole them a fortune would be spent in hunting them down, their mere possession involves the burial of great incomes. Mr. and Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, jun., for instance, sacrifice in keeping their wedding gifts alone more than £20,000 a year. Do the millionaires genuinely admire these things? The feeling for precious stones which survives all changes we can partly understand, perceiving clearly that some gems are as beautiful as the flowers whose colours they reproduce for ever ; but what is the beauty in a jewel-box of solid gold which steel or.ebony would not possess while the utility is of course far less, the object- of a box being protection for what is inside it, an object baffled when the box is itself a temptation to the dishonest. Works of art would surely excite more admiration in their possessors, and may be even more rare and just as costly. Is it simply the gratification of vanity, the pride of being richer than others? That is the usual explanation offered, particularly by the envious ; but some of these millionaires, the Vanderbilts for instance, have arrived at the fourth generation, and ought to have lost that vanity, if only through the long habit of possession. Or is the fancy--for it is a fancy—akin to that of the collectors, who whenever the world is at peace ransack it for articles which they do not particularly care about, but which interest them because there are no others like them ? We believe that feeling enters strongly into the display, that and a barbaric taste universal in Asia and common enough in Europe for splendour Tad splendour, the taste which made a Peruvian Viceroy shoe his mules with silver, and which makes a London factory-girl hire coloured ostrich feathers to adorn • her bonnet outside the factory gates. It is not a taste to be set down as immoral, because it is instinctive with all children, but one regrets a little to see that civilisation, and education, and philosophy, and all the mental advances we so much admire conduce' so very little towards its extinction. We breed out some of the savage impulses, but not the craving for beads. One would so much rather see something original in the disposition of this new generation of nobles, and watch self-will taking, other directions, better directions if possible, but at all events newer. To find Antony and the last American billionaire boasting of the same things, and those rather vulgar things, compels one to reflect en the slowness with which human nature changes, and the wonderfully close relation between the savage and the latest product of civilised prosperity.
It is of no use to moralise upon the evil effects of heavy luxury of the kind we have been describing. It is probably less than we are just now all tempted to imagine. The Socialist workman dislikes and envies the bourgeois just above him more than he envies or dislikes the millionaire, who, at all events, breaks the grey monotony of modern municipal life ; and as for the degradation of the ideal, though that occurs, the George IV. kind of man produces a recoil among thinkers, while his wealth acts as a fiery whip upon thousands who would else be clods. We dread the power which the millionaires will one day possess as the reverence for birth dies out, and the thirst for physical enjoyment becomes more of a dominant passion, and, the brain waking up under new cultivation, content with monotony becomes too difficult, much more than we dread the effect of their example. The usual moralising, too, though absolutely true, has lost its bite through over-much repetition, and we see abroad ominous signs that men may sicken of philanthropy, and say that it produces nothing save a new disposition to plunder in new ways. We prefer, therefore, to-day to speculate on the ulti- mate destination of all the finery of which this week the bulletins are full. It will last a long while, of course, for wealth is clothing itself in the magic armour of science, and unhampered by slavery, which in the Roman period always mined beneath it, will make a stouter fight than it did in the ancient world, or in France at the time of the Revolution ; and the world has never yet been ruled by its majority, but by the concentrated strength of limited castes bound together by a common interest, a common con- viction, or a common fear ; but if history teaches anything, it is that accumul„ A wealth is at last transferred, and dis- appears in the transfer. The treasures of Rome have not merely passed into other hands, they have passed away so completely that it is doubtful if a jewel exists or a gold cup of which it is even probable that it belonged to a Consular house, still less to a Prince whom the Romans plundered. Who will have it all, or destroy it all, when the existing order, which has rotten places in it, crumbles away? Will the barbarians from below explode the heap, as so many believe ? It is not im- possible, though, as we have said, wealth is putting on enchanted armour—insurrection against troops is even now impossible— and though the superficial crust has this protection, that all below who are admitted to share in it show a disposition to defend it. Or will Asia make its last rush, and, for a moment, overwhelm civilisation ? It is hardly conceivable, for locusts cannot cross the seas, numerous and irresistible as they are, and the Americas cannot practically be reached by land. Will the Jews get it all, as some of their dreamers fancy, and using it as a weapon, build up a new and widely different civilisation, intended to avenge the slavery of nearly two thousand years? Or will the dream of that strange dreamer, David Urquhart, prove true ? He thought that there was a centripetal force in capital which would gradually place the wealth of the world in the hands of one man, or one Trust, and ultimately provoke a savage civil war, in which all but -the human race itself .must perish. It is probable that we shall advance many steps in that direction, and that Mr. Rockefeller will in A.D. 2000 seem but a poor man, but thought, we think, has become the prerogative of too many to permit of an Arma- geddon between capitalists and their slaves. We should ourselves think it much more likely that a new phase of Christianity, the phase of abnegation, would seize upon man- kind, and produce everywhere a scene of destruction like that which in Scotland accompanied the change to Protestantism, civilisation thus sentencing itself, and recurring to the ancient village life, or even the life of the Thebaid but such move- ments are usually short and local. No one knows, and all that experience tells us is that in A.D. 3000 Mrs. Vanderbilt, jun.'s, jewels will have fallen to persons of whose reign neither she nor the wisest around her have so much as dreamed.
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