Extravagance
The Anglo-Saxon race is inherently extravagant. The lord and leader of the civilized world, it clothes itself in purple and fine linen, and lives sumptuously every day, as a prerogative of its supremacy.
This trait is a very early one, and the barbaric extravagance of “The Field of the Cloth of Gold” only typified that passion of the race for splendid apparel and accessories which in our day has reached a point of general and prodigal pomp and ostentation.
No other highly civilized nations have this taste for personal parade and luxurious living to the same extent. The French, who enjoy a reputation for all that is pretty and elegant, are really parsimonious, and it is as natural for a Frenchman to hoard his money as it is for a dog to bury his bone, while a Dutchman or a German can 241 grow rich on a salary which keeps an American always scrambling on the verge of bankruptcy.
Some time ago Lord Derby said: “Englishmen are the most extravagant race in the world, or, at least, only surpassed by the Americans.” And the “surpassing” in this direction is so evident to any one familiar with the two countries that it requires no demonstration,—an American household, even in the middle classes, being a model school for throwing away the most money for the least possible returns.
American women have a reputation for lavish expenditure that is world-wide, but they are not more extravagant than American men. If one spends money on beautiful toilets and splendidly dreary entertainments, the other flings it away on the turf, on cards or billiards, or in masculine prodigalities still more objectionable. In most fashionable houses the husband and wife are equally extravagant, and the candle blazes away at both ends.
To foreigners, the most noticeable extravagance of Americans is in the matter of 242 flowers. Winter or summer, women of very modest means must have flowers for their girdle. They will pay fifty cents for a rose or two when half-dollars are by no means plentiful, and it is such a pretty womanly taste that no man has the heart to grumble at it; only, if the women themselves would add up the amount of money spent in this transitory luxury, say during three months, they would be astonished at their own thoughtlessness.
For of all pleasures flower-buying is the most evanescent; before the day is over the fading buds are cast into the refuse cart, and the money might just as well have been cast into the street.
As for the amount spent in floral displays at weddings, funerals, theatres, balls, and dinners, it must be presumed that people who thus waste hundreds of dollars on articles that are useless in a few hours have the hundreds of dollars to throw away, and that they enjoy the pastime of making floral ducks and drakes with their money. But if they do not enjoy it, then why do they not imitate the economy of Beau Brummel, who, 243 when compelled by his debts to make some sacrifice of luxuries, resolved to begin retrenchment by curtailing the rose water for his bath?