The Camel and the Needle's Eye

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby

In later years love and marriage, difficult enough problems for anyone, have additional snares and pitfalls for the children of the rich. It is true that the rich man can marry the penniless girl to whom he is devoted, and the rich girl can accept the man who is struggling for a living. But the far more frequent occurrence is for the rich girl to be captured by the man who wants her money, and for the rich man to be entrapped by the ambitious mother who wants his wealth for her daughter. Not even experience teaches. Instances could be given of women who have married for money, and though every page of their life has taught them the folly of this irreparable step, yet they refuse to learn.

They spend their later life in arranging marriages at all costs with rich men for their daughters, placing insurmountable obstacles in their way if they attempt marriages on moderate means, which must entail their dropping out from the ranks of the select. So it is that here again money, far from assisting, impedes and even stifles the natural preferences of human affections, and the average of unfortunate and disastrous unions is far higher among the rich than in any other class. Some people are apt to believe that the society scandals which afford so much material for newspaper reports and gossip give an unfair impression of the frequency of these disasters, which they maintain arise just as often in other classes of society, but are not as widely reported. This is not the case. In the middle and lower professional classes, where marriages have been contracted by parties free to exercise their natural choice and where lives are filled with work and occupation, scandals of this description are very rare. It is in the class where, as we have shown, the power to select is restricted and distorted, where life itself deteriorates into prolonged idleness and self-indulgence and the natural obligations of motherhood are disregarded and shirked, and it is also at the very bottom of the scale, where vice and degradation produced by want engender brutality, where, in fact, there is too much and where there is too little, in the scum and in the sediment, that married life becomes most frequently intolerable.

A critic may now begin to insist that it is all very well to condemn the large servile establishments, futile luxuries, defective education, and foolish marriages as the outcome of riches, but that, taking them as a whole, the class that have the assured possession of wealth are superior in the refinements of mind and body to the lower classes, and that as you go higher in the scale of society the proportion of mental and physical excellence gradually increases.

The very use of the words high and low shows how completely the money standard is accepted sociologically. If you have money you are high-class, if you have not money you are low-class. Though poverty may militate against refinement, have riches anything to do with it? The two principal effects that riches exercise on character are either to weaken it into effeteness or debase it into coarseness. Our aristocracy, for instance, so long as they were occupied with fighting or with the responsibilities of government—so long, in fact, as they had some business of their own—preserved a certain distinction, and by a careful process of selection and intermarriage, avoided any coarsening of their breed. This, for a time, may have endowed them with a certain high average of refinement of manner and tastes. But when by the changes in our system of government, and later by the rise of democracy, that is the great mass of the people awakening to a consciousness of their own existence, the aristocracy became more and more cut off from national services and had recourse to leisured lives of unemployment and pleasure, the characteristics of effeteness and what the French call fin de race began to show themselves. In many cases downright impoverishment overtook those who had squandered their incomes on unprofitable amusement and stupid dissipation, till at last they seem to have come to a determination to rehabilitate their position and reinforce their caste by means of commercial and American money.

The plutocracy gained ground immensely by the absorption in its ranks of ancient families and long genealogies, and the aristocracy became increasingly tainted with commonness, losing its distinction and substituting for it ostentation, vulgarity, and the appreciation of money for its own sake. They derived no advantage physiologically in the shape of health and vigour which any alliance with the poorer class might have given them.

So far from anything in all this indicating that money produces refinement, the exact opposite is proved. That a full competence enables a man to appreciate the refinements of life is, after all, what we are doing our best to show; but riches—that is to say, anything beyond the competence—can only act as a fatal impediment even to this.

Whatever refinement there may be in the upper classes is only a survival, an element that is not being preserved, but is rapidly waning. Their general disposition and influence is a source of anxiety to many who are watching the signs of the times with attention. A recent article in the National Review sounded a grave note of warning. “Inherited vitality of race,” said the writer, “which upper-class women still preserve until they dissipate it in keeping up with the procession, is frittered away by parental irresponsibility, often commencing before birth, and by the ever-increasing excitement, restlessness, and luxury of our generation.... Greed of money is unblushing, and perhaps most shameless amongst mothers and daughters.... Plutocracy and vanity are in possession.” Out of such poor stuff, he concludes, no man of character or ability can come forward in public life.

Another significant result of the kind of life of continual excitement, constant change, combined with sensuous ease, led by these people, is the noticeably declining birth-rate among those who are well off.

It is not worth while here to enter into a diatribe against the habits and customs, the fashions and fancies, of what is known as Smart Society, which is the general aggregate of people of affluence; or attempt to describe the various sets, the life struggle for those in one grade to lift themselves into what they think a higher and smarter grade; the necessary qualifications to enter this society; the wild and ceaseless hunger for excitement and amusement which prevents any time being allowed for reflection, reading, or even ordered thought; the cynical and inane quality of the intercourse; the endless gossip; the contempt for anything that is considered dowdy; the accepted low level of morality and network of irregular relationships; the snobbishness, the artificiality, the want of education; in fact, all the low standard of living down to which any set of human beings is bound to fall if the key-note of their existence is idleness and the foundation of their position is money. They are frightened of thought because it might plunge them into desperation, they are frightened of knowledge because it might dispel their dearest illusions, they are frightened of work because it might reveal their incompetence, they are frightened of progress because it may shatter their citadel.

One would have imagined that the so-called sporting instinct which we are so proud of nurturing in our public schools and the spirit of fair play would have made men ashamed to continue to lead lives solely and systematically devoted to extravagance and selfish enjoyment while so many of their fellow-men are condemned to the dismal existence of toil and squalor, even if they refused to admit that the one influenced the other. There are, of course, people in this society who endeavour, more or less successfully, to stand up against the drift of fashion and are conscious of the falseness of their privileged position, but they are exceptional. It appears to be impossible for the very great majority to get the delusion out of their heads that, by pensions and doles, and charities and patronage, and presents of game and subscriptions, and the employment of people in senseless occupations, they are doing all that can be expected of them to help “the lower orders.”