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
1884[5] 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.