Definition of the limit—Those whose means are above the limit—Income
translated into terms of subsistence—The case of the
rich man—His establishments—His servants—His luxuries—Extravagance—Vanity—Sport—Racing—Yachting—Condemnation
of excess.
A more precise definition must be given of
the limit of income referred to in the last
chapter as “a definite amount of money which
might be roughly described as a full competence.”
Every man requires, though he by no means
always gets a certain income to satisfy his own
needs and those of his family. In addition to
this he can profitably spend more so as to add to
his general utility by conveniences and comforts,
he can satisfy his artistic proclivities, his desire
for further knowledge, his taste for sport or
amusement, all to his own and the general
benefit without hurt or hindrance to anyone.
But after allowing the broadest scope for the
satisfaction of these legitimate wants there is a
definite point beyond which he cannot safely go.
That is to say, if he acquires, or if by inheritance
he finds himself burdened with money beyond
this limit it will inevitably react detrimentally
on himself and on others. And this for two
reasons: firstly because he is, as a normal human
being, incapable of dealing with so great a charge,
and secondly because the money, while in his
possession, is being drawn away from other
channels where there is special need for it.
So long as money encourages healthy effort a
man may be sure the limit has not been reached,
the moment money tends to relax effort the
limit has been passed. It must be described as
healthy effort, as, of course, money-making may
increase the undesirable efforts of the speculator,
the gambler, and the thief. But who is to decide
what is healthy effort? The man himself. No
one else can. And he knows to a nicety. Every
man or woman has a different standard, and the
level of the limit varies in each individual case
according to ideals, capacity, and temperament.
But it will not depend at all on what is one of the
strongest and often the most excusable inducements
for spending money, namely, environment,
or the conventions of the particular stratum of
society to which the man belongs. The limit
for one will not be the limit for another, and a
man can only become aware that this limit exists
at all by observing very closely what actually
is the effect that his money is having on his life
and character, instead of blindly accepting his
already excessive income or every increase of his
fortune as a natural and unquestionable blessing.
The main brunt of the attack must clearly fall
on those whose incomes are above the limit.
They are in numbers a small minority, but the
amount they possess is incredibly large. The
present income of 1,250,000 people, assessed
to income, reaches the vast sum of £850,000,000
a year. Taking the whole population of these
islands, it is roughly estimated that there are 1½
millions who can be classed as rich, 3½ millions
comfortably off, 38 millions as poor, of whom
some 12 to 13 millions are in constant need. The
existence of the 1½ millions is one of the chief
causes of the condition of the 38 millions. In
other words, excess above the limit causes want
below the limit. The 3½ millions “comfortably
off” are most of them occupied in trying to
become identified with the select 1½ millions.
If we could estimate the amounts in income
which these classes represent the figures would
be even more startling. The world has certainly
never seen larger fortunes than exist to-day, nor
has it seen more extensive and more inexcusable
poverty. The average rate of luxurious living
in the small minority is higher than it has ever
been, and the dangerous and degrading effect of
want on individuals and on the general community
has never been so widespread or so intense.
“The rich,” to use a simple term, are nearly all
actuated by the same motive. They accept what
they have and what they make as their own, to
be spent on themselves, according to their own
caprice, or on others, if they are so inclined, casting
an occasional sop to some charity or philanthropic
scheme as a salve to their consciences.
There are, it must be acknowledged, a few, a
very few who regard their riches as a trust and
endeavour to the best of their ability to divert
the greater part of it back into remunerative
channels without exceeding a reasonable sum
for their own personal wants. But as a class they
insist that efforts to alter our social system are
fruitless, disturbing and doomed to failure, the
division of the world into rich and poor being
a Providential decree, and if the rich can get
service from the poor without their grumbling,
that is the most desirable arrangement that can
be conceived. To this a reply may be given in
the words of Professor Marshall:
“Now at least we are setting ourselves seriously
to inquire whether it is necessary that there
should be any so-called ‘lower class’ at all:
that is whether there need be large numbers of
people doomed from their birth to hard work
in order to provide for others the requisites of a
refined and cultured life, while they themselves
are prevented by their poverty and toil from
having any share in that life.”
The case would not be quite so bad as it is
if it were only “the requisites of a refined and
cultured life” that they were made to provide.
But this point must be considered later.
In order to appreciate fully the responsibility
which the possession of riches entails, let us
translate an income into terms of actual sustenance
for human beings. By this means it is
possible to arrive at a more or less positive
measure. There is so much that is relative
in most human requirements that they cannot
serve as a standard or as a reliable quantity
to be used in calculating any equation. But the
requirements of a human being can be measured
in terms of actual sustenance, because they can be
estimated with something approaching precision.
Take a man with £20,000 a year, and say we
deduct even as much as £3000 for himself and
his family. With his remaining £17,000 he has
the power of furnishing 170 people with £100
a year apiece. It is not for a moment suggested
that he should do any such thing, as he would
be quite unable to select 170 worthy people, and
even if he could make the choice the 170 people,
on the reception of this private dole, would soon
become unworthy. This calculation is only
taken to serve as a measure of his power. What
might be the income or, more correctly speaking,
the means of existence of 170 lives, is vested in
one man, who is under the impression—and no
one attempts to dispute it—that he is capable of
disposing of this sum in a way that is generally
beneficial.
Now let us state the case fairly from the point
of view of the rich man, taking a reasonable and
more or less representative type. He may have
£10,000, £50,000, or £100,000 a year—that only
alters his activities in scope, not in quality. Let
us say he has two or three country houses and a
house in London. His “position” requires him
to keep up a certain establishment, and this
means the employment of some forty or fifty
servants, grooms, gardeners, chauffeurs, etc., who,
he readily tells you, will be thrown out of employment
should any of his money be taken from
him. If we take the case of a landlord, he will
also have tenants, bailiffs, farm labourers, and
gamekeepers dependent on him. He keeps the
home farm and lets out the other farms on his
estate to tenant farmers. Part of his land is
built over and brings him in substantial returns
in the shape of rent. His villages are in good
order and the cottages kept in proper repair.
Some thousands of acres or so he keeps for
shooting. He may have a deer forest on one of
his estates, and perhaps also a grouse moor or a
river. Whether he keeps a racing stable, a pack
of hounds, or a yacht depends on his particular
fancy. He will acknowledge that he spends a
certain amount on luxuries, but that “is good
for trade,” as great numbers of people have to
be employed in the manufacture of these luxuries.
He is kind to his poor relations, whom he
entertains and helps; and his subscription list to
hospitals, charities, and philanthropic works is a
large one. He enjoys himself in an unostentatious
but suitably expensive way, and his various
responsibilities allow him to lead a life consisting
of occasional rushes of activity and prolonged
intervals of leisure. He most probably finds he
can spare a certain amount of money for speculation,
with a view to adding more to the sum
total of his income. He looks forward to handing
down to his children sufficient means to
make each of them independent, and meanwhile
has his boys educated in the large public schools,
where they can associate with boys who are
similarly situated.
What possible harm can there be in all this?
So far from being parasitic, he counts himself as
a beneficent agent in the general industrial activity,
at the same time appearing as a credit to
his society and a notably refined product of the
class of which he is a member. Above all, he is
popular, and gains ostensibly the respect and
regard of his friends, his neighbours, and his
dependents. A favourable case has purposely
been made for him, because if we accuse him of
self-indulgence and greed, and describe him as a
gambler, spending his substance on objects which
are generally admitted to be pernicious and unworthy,
the case could not be defended at all.
The fundamental theory which makes this
man’s position untenable has already been explained—namely,
that after he has satisfied his
legitimate requirements all the surplus money
he keeps is being held back from serving urgent
needs; and, moreover, the method in which he
spends the surplus is directly or indirectly harmful
to himself and others.
We call the money his as if by some miracle
he had made it. Often enough he has not helped
even by the smallest exertion to create it. The
wealth has been and is being daily and hourly
produced by the exertion of numberless people
who are either employed by him or employed in
furthering enterprises in which he has invested
his money. It will be said that his share as the
wise dispenser of capital, without which labour
and enterprise could not be set in motion, is an
all-important part of the general process of
business. But he invests not to promote enterprise,
but to get high dividends; and an elaborate
system has been set up in order to tempt him to
put his money into concerns that are by no
means always sound or of the smallest public
utility. Capital would exist and flow far more
freely without the large capitalist. He acts as a
dam to the stream; a certain amount escapes
back into the main channel, but much more is
checked and diverted into stagnant and putrefying
pools of his own creation. The free flow of
blood is life-giving; the clotting or coagulation
of blood produces disease.
Let us take the various points raised by his
case seriatim. Many acutely controversial problems
are opened, and it will be difficult to
detach the particular actions of the rich man
without generalising, to some extent, on the
problems themselves. It is no argument against
our main contention to say that people with
costly tastes have, while gratifying them, been
able to exercise powers of a high order, for,
obviously, it is in spite of their shortcomings in
this respect that they have succeeded, and not
because of them. If some men with means have
done valuable public service and performed admirable
work in many different spheres of life,
this they have done as men naturally gifted with
high accomplishments, not as rich men. Here
we are only concerned with their works and
deeds in their latter capacity.
It does not affect our argument whether our
typical example has been brought up to regard
this way of living as natural and necessary for a
man of what is called his “position” (that is to
say, the purely artificial place which a rich man
is able to take up in the community solely on
account of his riches), or whether he has made
the money for himself and is simply aping the
habits and customs of those who already possess
it. The distinction between the vieux riches and
the nouveaux riches is one they can fight out
between themselves. The former scoffs at the
latter while all the time he is setting him, and
consciously setting him, the example he is to
follow. It is not the gaining, but the spending
of the money that must occupy our attention
here.
Our friend’s houses are only a detail in the
upkeep of his position. They may be historic
castles, sham “ancestral halls,” modern “palatial
country residences,” or “fashionable mansions”
in town. Does it ever strike the owner as, let us
say, a curious arrangement that he should have
several houses of fifty to a hundred rooms apiece
while some millions of his fellow-men do not own
one room? Does he know that in England and
Wales alone 507,763 people occupy one-room
tenements, 48.4% of which are classified as overcrowded,
while 12,458,150 are occupying tenements
of two, three, or four rooms?4 In any
case, he would indignantly refuse to admit that
there was any remote connection between these
two sets of circumstances.
When we come to the staff necessary for the
maintenance of these large establishments we
touch a problem of employment which must be
examined more closely. It is not sufficient to
state baldly that these people are employed, and
that if the opening were not available for them
they would be unemployed. The immediate
result of their being discharged would no doubt
in some cases be unemployment. That is just
the mischief of uneconomic employment. If a
large number were simultaneously dismissed
there might be temporary unemployment on a
large scale, as it would amount to dislocation,
like the extinction of some dying industry. But
the eventual readjustment would subsequently
be by that much the stronger and better adapted
to the real requirements of the community. To
employ a man in useless and unremunerative
work can be regarded in some aspects as worse
than not employing him at all. It is not intended,
however—and, indeed, it would be
impossible—here to enter into a discussion on
the whole problem of unemployment, but there
is undoubtedly a very great economic waste that
largely contributes to the gravity of the problem,
arising from the fact that a large number of
people are being forced to devote their labour
and energy to work which is, so to speak, final
and sterile. It is precisely the same with regard
to the production of expensive luxuries. The
employment of a large retinue is only another
form of the possession and enjoyment of articles
of excessive luxury. The employers and possessors
have all disagreeable burdens and every
sordid worry lifted from them, their smallest
and their most extreme desires for pleasure met,
their special appetites satisfied, their peculiar
vanities titillated, and their artificial position
safeguarded and maintained, without their giving
more than a passing thought to the mass of people
required to carry on this work. Plenty of examples
might be quoted in contemporary as well
as past history to show that after generations of
the enjoyment of “the vile joys of tainting
luxury” men deteriorate, both physically and
mentally.
As for the particular line of life which domestic
service offers under modern circumstances, it is
not too much to say that it is, as a rule, very
demoralising, more especially for the men. And
its demoralising tendency increases in proportion
to the size of the establishment. The single
general servant lives a life of hard work but
genuine service on four to eight shillings a week,
often living in friendly relations with master or
mistress, and really lifting from them the burden
of necessary domestic duties which they with
limited incomes and professional work of their
own cannot possibly find time to perform; and
this remains true in other small households. In
the large house the faithful old family servant,
who is more of a friend than a servitor, is rare
in these days of ostentation. The butler, on
wages of fifty to sixty shillings a week, which
together with board and lodging represents from
£250 to £300 a year, has a life of leisure, ease,
and excessive comfort, seldom having to exert
himself even up to his limited capacities. Male
house-servants are often chosen for their looks;
their work is very light physically, they are overfed,
and being under-educated, can hardly be
blamed for becoming demoralised. These able-bodied
men, whose muscles, if not their minds,
might be devoted to some really serviceable purpose,
are still increasing in numbers. Over
25,000 more male servants have got employment
in the last ten years, the total number now being
227,995. Even deducting the single indoor servant,
the single coachman or gardener, this means
a large increase of ornamental male attendants.
Female servants are becoming more difficult to
secure in the higher grades, because the class of
women from which they are drawn value their
liberty and are not so ready to sacrifice it for
food and comforts. In fact, they are showing
signs of impatience of control, and of preferring
the risky though exhilarating struggle of independence.
But still large retinues of men and
women exist solely employed in keeping up huge
houses to satisfy the vanity and minister to the
comfort of a comparatively few rich people. No
work of a more hopelessly barren, profitless, and,
indeed, degrading character could be found for
them. A system of tips deprives their smallest
acts of what might be an obliging and disinterested
intention. Arrangements are organised
with tradesmen to defraud the employers in
what is thought a perfectly legitimate way; the
actual waste of food is appalling, and by extras,
gratuities, perquisites, commissions, and pickings
a considerable amount is added to the wages of
the upper servants. In these large establishments
immorality exists more as a rule than as an exception,
but it can be kept secret, for these
communities of private servants—like everything
else connected with the lives of the rich—cannot
be made the subject of investigation.
If assistance to those who need it is the object
of domestic service, it is striking to note that on
the money basis, generally speaking, the wrong
people are served. Who in the community most
require and should specially have the help of
servants? The old and infirm, the weak and ill,
the very young and the hard-worked. Service
under such conditions raises itself to the level
of one of the highest occupations that can be
imagined. But this is not our system. A man or
woman may be ill, old or over-worked, without
being able to get the assistance of a single soul.
Another man or woman may be young and
healthy and have at his or her command a
retinue of thirty servants or more, solely because
they have money and servants are forced, by
economic pressure, to devote their lives to the
menial task of furbishing up the endless and
complicated appanage of wealth.
Now let us turn to the inanimate luxuries,
taking into account only indisputable luxuries—that
is to say, articles of high price which have
no special artistic value, to which much labour
has been devoted and which are not produced to
serve any legitimately useful purpose. Luxury
has been well defined as “that which creates
imaginary needs, exaggerates real wants, diverts
them from their true end, establishes a habit of
prodigality in Society, and offers through the
senses a satisfaction of self-love which puffs up
but does not nourish the heart and which presents
to others the picture of happiness they can
never attain.”
Bond Street catalogues abound with any quantity
of examples. Furs at one thousand guineas,
fifty-guinea dressing-bags, twenty-guinea hats,
thousand-guinea tiaras, fruit and vegetables out
of season, cigars at three shillings apiece, ruinously
expensive wines, and fantastic foods of all
descriptions. There is no need to exaggerate,
for all those articles can be bought for much
higher prices than those quoted. A great amount
of skilled labour of a high order goes to the production
of these luxuries, and a great amount of
labour of the lowest and most cruelly sweated
description is also enlisted for their production,
and incredible as it may seem, it is on the ground
that they give employment that these luxuries
are defended. It was calculated in 18845 that,
even giving a liberal extension of meaning to the
term “necessaries” and “comforts” of life,
over six millions of manual labourers, who with
their families constitute thirteen millions of the
population, were engaged in producing what, in
contradistinction to the above, must be classified
as luxuries.
A prominent statesman,6 expressing the views
of his class, said a few years ago: “The more
human wants are stimulated and multiplied, the
more widespread will be the inducement to hire.
Therefore all outcries and prejudices against the
progress of wealth and what is called luxury are
nothing but outcries of prejudice against the
very sources and fountains of all employment.”
On such an argument as this the defence of
luxuries generally rests. The essence of the
fallacy lies in the fact, which cannot be repeated
too often, that labour spent on such articles is
unremunerative and unproductive, because its
ultimate result is only to gratify various forms
of vanity and greed. To exemplify by a concrete
instance what is unremunerative and what
is remunerative, let us take a hundred-guinea
ball-gown and a pair of boots. It is not possible
to estimate the number of people employed in
producing the ball-gown. There is the silk,
satin, or whatever the principal material may
be; there are the trimmings of chiffon, hand-embroidery,
lace, braid, beads, sequins, ribbons,
etc., etc.; some hundreds of pairs of hands,
including factory-workers, dressmakers, sempstresses,
etc., will have touched some part of the
gown before it is delivered to the wearer. To
what end are all these specialised departments of
labour concentrated? The gown is worn a few
times in the one season; the wearer has the
satisfaction of feeling as well dressed as A. to F.,
and far better dressed than F. to Z. In fact,
the net result of all this expenditure of energy
is the generating of a rather foolish pride, the
encouragement of conceit on the one side and
envy on the other, and the hardening of a nature
into ways of worldliness and vanity.
As for the boots. Again, many more hands
than can be calculated have helped to produce
them, but they are directly and immediately
serviceable to the purchaser, to whose activity
the wearing of boots is an essential, and in general
they minister to the efficiency of human machines.
But if balls are not wrong, ball-gowns must be
worn. It is a question of degree; and here
again we get to the theory of the limit which in
this conjunction can be expressed thus: In relation
to human needs, in relation to human
powers of enjoyment, in relation to the beneficial
effects of pleasure, even in relation to the dictates
of fashion, there is a distinct limit not to
be expressed in figures up to which expenditure
(in this particular case on dress) is legitimate and
relatively productive, beyond which it becomes
progressively unremunerative and harmful. A
hundred guineas, by any conceivable method of
calculation, greatly exceeds this limit.
To assert that the purchase of luxuries is good
for trade is quite as ridiculous as to say that a
man can benefit the building and furnishing
trade by burning down his house once a year.
We do not want to create more artificial wants
before we have satisfied the crying human needs
which already exist. There is no loophole
through which a reasonable defence of the senseless
expenditure, which goes on in an increasing
measure, can be made. Luxurious living has
never been quite so blatant and unashamed as it
is to-day, and the effete epicureanism and decadent
effeminacy it produces stand out in
rather sharp contrast to more hopeful signs of
progress and moral and intellectual refinement
and vigour which, happily, are visible around us.
A lady writing in a review in the early ’seventies
describes life in the country house, with its
futile routine of heavy meals, sport, card-playing,
and vacuous inanities which take the place of
conversation, all very much as it is to-day. The
writer speaks with dismay of gowns costing sixty
guineas and of £1000 a year spent on clothes.
But these figures are almost negligible compared
with the sums spent nowadays. It is only
through occasional actions in the courts that
the outside public get an idea of what is actually
spent, and it is surprising that there are not more
disclosures, considering the mountainous debts
that are piled up in West End shops. But the
shopkeepers are very reluctant to lose a really
leading customer, and they know how to meet
the inconvenience of not being promptly paid.
A typical case may be given of an article of
clothing, the cost price of which was nine
guineas, being sold for £28 7s. There may be
delay in payment, but there appears to be compensation
in the profit.
When one hears of the woman who spent last
year £36 5s. on a hat, or another who gave £1250
for a sable cape, it is not the isolated action of
criminal folly that chiefly strikes one, but it is
that the hat and the cape act as indicators of the
sort of price such women are in the habit of
paying for their clothes, a large supply of
which are in the market ready to meet this
artificial demand. Moreover, the habit of extravagance,
especially as regards female clothing,
is catching and runs through all classes once the
example is set. It is a common enough and very
depressing sight to see absurdly elaborate clothes,
which are cheaper imitations of the latest fashions,
worn by women of the lower middle-class,
whose deplorable want of education is shown by
their inability even to pronounce their mother
tongue. They watch the rich, and gather from
what they see that fine feathers make fine birds,
and it is not on them that the blame should
rest.
Vanity exists and insists on being satisfied. It
is no good blinking the fact. Luxuries, in one
form or another, will continue to be produced.
But there is no reason why we should not stem
the current lest it swell to danger point. There
are many well-known historical examples of the
enervating and degenerating effect of luxury on
national life, and the modern tendency towards
an increased production of these indulgences
should be combated not only as a moral weakness,
but as an integral factor in the general
economic problem. When one considers what
real comfort of living, with all the necessary intellectual
and artistic equipage, opportunities for
amusement, and domestic convenience, can be
secured to-day at a comparatively moderate sum,
it makes the wild and profligate extravagance the
more inexcusable and the more futile.
Anyhow, let us abandon once and for all the
foolish and ignorant attitude of regarding this
display as a desirable form of industrial stimulus
which should be fostered and encouraged. Preaching
and writing against it has never been of the
smallest avail, but it has been necessary to deal
with it here as a very important, if not predominating,
element in the analysis of the rich
man’s conceptions of his duties.
In addition to luxuries of establishment,
clothes, and food there is a complicated ritual
of sport which in this country reaches an almost
incredible pitch. It has been estimated that
forty-five millions are permanently invested in
the apparatus of sport, and an income of over
forty millions spent annually upon it. We need
not discuss all the intricacies of the numerous
branches of sport, observing where its effect is
healthy and where harmful. No one will contend
that the most expensive forms of it are by
any manner of means the best. But the most
obvious harm to be noted in this connection is
the amount of land which is taken away from
agriculture for sporting purposes. Landlords often
keep up their shooting at a great loss, amounting
to something like five to ten pounds per bird
shot, all for the sake of having the shooting and
asking friends down for a few days in the year
to enjoy it. It is gravely regarded as an essential
part of the education of a young man in this
particular world to learn how to shoot. No
question, even with respect to his education or
possible professional career, is treated with more
seriousness than the moment he first handles a
gun, and family advice is sought as to how and
when encouragement can be given to the development
of this essential qualification which,
coupled with a knowledge of bridge, will make
him a desirable visitor in any country house.
At card-playing, which occupies a vast amount
of time in the lives of the rich, sums amounting
to hundreds are often lost or gained by one
person in one evening. But of the various sinks
which help to drain away their money, horse-racing
almost holds the first place. There are no
statistics to show how many people have been
ruined by it, or how many have been lured into a
life of gambling by their success in the betting
ring. But its popularity is certainly on the increase,
as we can see by looking at the number
of horses that have run under the rules of racing
in the last thirty years. In 1878 there were 2097;
in 1908 this figure had risen to 3706. The number
of larger race meetings advertised in advance
have more than doubled since 1881 (78 in 1881,
164 in 1909). Some sort of estimate of the
money spent on it, apart from betting, can be
gathered from the amounts won. In 1908 the
winning owners secured between them nearly a
quarter of a million pounds, the sums won by
the first thirty-six amounting to £246,001 15s.,
the largest total secured by one owner being
£26,246.7
The populace are invited to join in this pursuit,
though, of course, they must be railed off
to prevent too close contact with those who
come in coaches and motor-cars. The crowd is
vaguely supposed to be having a good time, and
any attack on horse-racing is met by hackneyed
arguments about “keeping up the national
sport” or “improving the breed of horses,” and
perhaps, again, the objection of unemployment
for jockeys and bookies might be dragged in.
It does not appear, however, to be a good
method of improving the human breed. In
observing the crowd on a race-course, whether it
be the well-dressed portion or the ill-dressed,
the betters or the bookies, neither a deep knowledge
of humanity nor a very close power of
observation into physiognomy is required to note
the prevalence of a remarkably low type. But a
still more vivid impression of what the pleasures
of racing mean can be gained by going out on
the road in the evening towards the scene of a
large race meeting when the people are returning.
Brakes and carts in endless procession will
pass you loaded with men shouting in the excitement
of semi-drunkenness, or with heaps of
humanity sodden and silent in complete intoxication.
Outside every public-house on the roadside
traps await those who are squandering their
gains on further refreshment or soothing the
despair of losses in the temporary oblivion of
drink. The localities where there is an annual
race week suffer considerably, the inhabitants
become infected by the gambling and betting
mania, and during the actual days of the races
the place is infested by the lowest dregs of the
riff-raff who journey about from one race
meeting to another. This so-called sport produces
the lowest possible type; it degrades many
who take part in it with sinister rapidity, it encourages
fraud and deception, it is a canker of
rottenness in public life, and it receives the
highest sanction and patronage.
Many people are present at a race meeting
without being conscious that it is attended by
any evil consequences. They go to meet their
friends, perhaps putting an occasional sovereign
on a horse to give them some interest in the
racing. To them the crowd is a natural part of
the proceedings, the heavy bets of the ring an
amusement. To have been there is something to
boast of, and conveys the idea that they have associated
with smart people. Thoughtless, as in so
many of their other pursuits, they accept the
whole proceeding as a recognised sport and they
inquire no further. The philosophy of these
people is the prevailing philosophy: “Do not
examine below the surface, or you are bound to
find something disagreeable. Take things as they
come; skim the cream off the top; avoid that
which is unpleasant or difficult to explain; and
above all things, do what others do.”
Yachting, which also runs away with a great
deal of money, comes under a very different category.
It is a health-giving and often strenuous
occupation, and the seamen employed are, anyhow,
deriving incidentally some positive benefit
from the life they lead. Nevertheless, out of the
4655 private yachts registered in the current
year (an increase of over 3500 in the last forty
years),8 only a very small proportion are actually
navigated by owners who have any knowledge or
love of seamanship. The great majority are floating
houses of luxury (viz. a 700-ton steam yacht,
for which £25 a day is paid for coal when in use),
or racing yachts, mere toys used to minister to
the fanciful pleasures of the rich.
But in expressing the strongest disapproval of
these excessive luxuries, it is not for a moment
suggested that people should rush into the opposite
extreme—live in discomfort and adopt the
craze for “the simple life,” which is only an inverted
form of vanity and ostentation. There
are many of the lesser luxuries which give great
pleasure and sufficient honest gratification to
justify their existence. There may even be some
reluctance in condemning extravagance, because
the nature of the extravagant man is far preferable
to the economical and cautious disposition
which sometimes sinks into niggardly meanness.
Moreover, any attempt at excessive restrictions
and unnecessarily harsh discipline in the upbringing
of children invariably leads to a violent
reaction in the direction of profligacy and extravagance.
Let human nature be allowed free play in all
directions; but it is not taking up the attitude
of an ascetic or of a prig to condemn unhesitatingly
unnatural excesses, reckless licence, the
extremes of self-indulgence and greed, the exercise
of which by some few involves the neglect,
misery, and ruin of so many others.
Thieves when they steal use violence and are
pronounced enemies of society. These few
people, by a silent conspiracy in which we all
seem to acquiesce, are also stealing and are
equally enemies of society.