The most obvious increase of this waste comes from the “speeding up” of living which has taken place in all classes in so marked a fashion within a generation. The whole standard of life has been sensibly raised, not so much in comfort as in ostentation. And the result is something similar to that in the insane competition of armaments which takes place amongst the terrified nations of the world. One year ten huge ironclads confront twenty. A decade after, fifteen huge ironclads of another type have replaced the first: to be confronted again with thirty of the new floating castles. So many millions have been thrown to the scrap heap. The proportion of power has remained unaffected. It is the same in the more determined private competition for supremacy in a social standard. Where one house sufficed, now two are demanded; where a dinner of a certain quality, now a dinner of a superior quality; where clothes or dresses or flowers, now more clothes, more dresses, more flowers. It is waste, not because fine clothes and rare flowers and pleasant food are in themselves undesirable, but because by a kind of parallel of the law of diminishing returns in agriculture, additional expenditure in such directions fails to result in correspondent additions of happiness. In many respects, indeed, the effect is not only negatively worthless, but even positively harmful. Modern civilisation in its most highly organised forms has elaborated a system to which the delicate fibre of body and mind is unable to respond. And the result is the appearance (whimsical enough to Carlyle’s spectators “beyond the region of the fixed stars”) of a society expending half its income in heaping up the material of disease, to which the other half of its income is being laboriously applied for remedy.
But the general effect (to the above-mentioned dispassionate spectators) is of an extravagance of wealth and waste which is only not insolent because it is for the most part unconscious, the sport of blind forces rather than the deliberate defiance of the limits of human endeavour. It is not insolence or—as it might have appeared in the olden days—a determination to rival the fabled immortals, which has charged all our high roads with wandering machines racing with incredible velocity and no apparent aim. Many (such as W. E. Henley) demand “Speed in the face of the Lord.” Others are inflamed with the desire for “driving abroad in furious guise,” as an escape from the ennui of a life which has lost its savour; as in the tortured and bored procession in old Rome, for the “easier and quicker” passing of the “impracticable hours.” But a large proportion of those who have employed motor cars in habitual violation of the speed limit, and in destruction of the amenities of the rural life of England, have done so either because their neighbours have employed motor cars, or because their neighbours have not employed motor cars; in an effort towards equality with the one, or superiority over the other. When every man of a certain income has purchased a motor car, when life has become “speeded up” to the motor-car level, that definite increase of expenditure will be accepted as normal. But life will be no happier and no richer for such an acceptance; it will merely have become more impossible for those who (for whatever reason) are unequal to the demands of such a standard. And the same is true of the multiplication of meals; of the rise in the price of rent in certain districts of London, for example, because every one wants to live there; of numberless exactions and extortions which have grown up in a society whose members are “like wealthy men who care not how they give.”
And mournfully enough this rather dull and drab extravagance of private living is accompanied by a severe scrutiny of any kind of public expenditure, and a resentful criticism of all efforts to stamp the memory of this age upon enduring brick and stone. The London County Council, housed in a few scattered hovels and warrens, proposed a year or two back to devote a few hundred thousand pounds to an “Hôtel de Ville,” situate on the banks of the river opposite Westminster. And the opponents of the particular party in power had no difficulty in stirring up the wealthier classes into the fiercest protest against this attempt to leave the future with a permanent memorial of twentieth-century London. The one dignified and conspicuous building of the Victorian age—the Palace at Westminster—remains to-day scamped, truncated, and unfinished, because the nation, in a cold fit of retrenchment, was alarmed at the amount which it had already lavished upon it. Dr. Dill has shown in the Roman Peace, during the age of the Antonines and after, the people of the Empire turning with enthusiasm to great communal building; and every city setting itself to such achievements as remain to-day the wonder of the world. There is something of brutality, indeed, as well as something of large achievement, in the inadequacy of ends to means: as in the gigantic Pont du Gard, marching in its grandeur over a deep valley in order to conduct a tiny rivulet of water to a second-rate provincial city; or the enormous stone arenas which in every ruined Roman town mark the place of the communal games. But the brutality is charged with strength; there is purpose in it, carried through with relentless tenacity; the purpose of the bending of Nature’s stubborn resistance to the designs of man. What kind of building will represent for the astonishment of future eyes the harvest of the super-wealth of the British Peace? The signs are not propitious. A Byzantine Cathedral at Westminster, a Gothic Cathedral at Liverpool, a few town halls and libraries of sober solidity, the white buildings which to-day line Whitehall, and fill the passing stranger with bewilderment at a race “that thus could build,” will be the chief legacies of this present generation. The thirteenth century gave us the Cathedrals; the sixteenth gave us the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and the noblest of English country houses. These tiny Englands, with populations, in the aggregate, less than that of London to-day, and wealth incomparably smaller, have left us possessions which we can admire but cannot equal. “The work which we collective children of God do,” complained Matthew Arnold, “our grand centre of life, our city for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publice egestas, privatim opulentia, unequalled in the world.” It was this contrast which gave point to a question which otherwise the plain man would put by as absurd: “If England were swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind, the England of the last twenty years or the England of Elizabeth?”
Public penury, private ostentation—that, perhaps, is the heart of the complaint. A nation with the wealth of England can afford to spend, and spend royally. Only the end should be itself desirable, and the choice deliberate. The spectacle of a huge urban poverty confronts all this waste energy. That spectacle should not, indeed, forbid all luxuries and splendours: but it should condemn the less rewarding of them as things tawdry and mean. “Money! money!” cries the hero—a second-grade Government clerk—of a recent novel—“the good that can be done with it in the world! Only a little more: a little more!” It is the passionate cry of unnumbered thousands. Expenditure multiplies its return in human happiness as it is scattered amongst widening areas of population. And the only justification for the present unnatural heaping up of great possessions in the control of the very few would be some return in leisure, and the cultivation of the arts, and the more reputable magnificence of the luxurious life. We have called into existence a whole new industry in motor cars and quick travelling, and established populous cities to minister to our increasing demands for speed. We have converted half the Highlands into deer forests for our sport; and the amount annually spent on shooting, racing, golf—on apparatus, and train journeys and service—exceeds the total revenue of many a European principality. We fling away in ugly white hotels, in uninspired dramatic entertainments, and in elaborate banquets of which every one is weary, the price of many poor men’s yearly income. Yet we cannot build a new Cathedral. We cannot even preserve the Cathedrals bequeathed to us, and the finest of them are tumbling to pieces for lack of response to the demands for aid. We grumble freely at halfpenny increases in the rates for baths or libraries or pleasure-grounds. We assert—there are many of us who honestly believe it—that we cannot afford to set aside the necessary millions from our amazing revenues for the decent maintenance of our worn-out “veterans of industry.”
To the poor, any increase of income may mean a day’s excursion, a summer holiday for the children; often the bare necessities of food and clothes and shelter. To the classes just above the industrial populations, who with an expanding standard of comfort are most obviously fretting against the limitations of their income, it may mean the gift of some of life’s lesser goods which is now denied; music, the theatre, books, flowers. Its absence may mean also a deprivation of life’s greater goods: scamped sick-nursing, absence of leisure, abandonment of the hope of wife or child. All these deprivations may be endured by a nation—have been endured by nations—for the sake of definite ends: in wars at which existence is at stake, under the stress of national calamity, or as in the condition universal to Europe a few hundred years ago, when wealth and security were the heritage of the very few. But to-day that wealth is piling up into ever-increasing aggregation: is being scrutinized, as never before, by those who inquire with increasing insistence, where is the justice of these monstrous inequalities of fortune? Is the super-wealth of England expended in any adequate degree upon national service? Is the return to-day or to posterity a justification for this deflection of men and women’s labour into ministering to the demands of a pleasure-loving society? Is it erecting works of permanent value, as the wealth of Florence in the fifteenth century? Is it, as in the England of Elizabeth, breeding men?
No honest inquirer could give a dogmatic reply. The present extravagance of England is associated with a strange mediocrity, a strange sterility of characters of supreme power in Church and State. It is accompanied, as all ages of security and luxury are accompanied, by a waning of the power of inspiration, a multiplying of the power of criticism. The more comfortable and opulent society becomes, the more cynicism proclaims the futility of it all, and the mind turns in despair from a vision of vanities. It gives little leadership to the classes below it: no visible and intelligent feudal concentration which, taught in the traditions of Government and inheriting strength and responsibility, can reveal an aristocratic order adequate to the immense political and economic necessities of the people. Never, especially during the reaction of the past twenty years, were fairer opportunities offered to the children of wealthy families for the elaboration of a new aristocratic Government of a new England; and never were those opportunities more completely flung away. Its chosen leaders can offer nothing but a dialectic, a perpetual criticism of other men’s schemes, clever, futile, barren as the east wind. The political creed which it embraces—the Protectionist system which is going to consolidate the Empire and make every wife’s husband richer—is almost entirely dependent for its propagation upon aliens from outside; politicians, economists, journalists, bred in an austerer life amongst the professional classes, and now employed by a society which seems without capacity to breed leaders of its own. It can compete for the pictures of great masters, but it leaves the men of genius of its own day to starve. It continues, now as always, garnishing the sepulchres of the prophets which its predecessors have stoned. It maintains large country houses which offer a lavish hospitality; but it sees rural England crumbling into ruin just outside their boundaries, and has either no power or no inclination to arrest so tragic a decay. It fills vast hotels scattered round the coasts of England and ever multiplying in the capital, which exhibit a combination of maximum expenditure and display with a minimum return in enjoyment. It has annexed whole regions abroad, Biarritz and the Riviera coast, Austrian and German watering-places, whither it journeys for the recovery of its lost health, and for distractions which will forbid the pain of thinking. It plunges into gambles for fresh wealth, finding the demands of its standards continually pressing against its resources; seeking now in South Africa, now in West Australia, now in other Imperial expansions, the reward which accompanies the conversion of the one pound into the ten. At best it is an existence with some boredom in it; even when accompanied by actual intellectual labour: the management of an estate and its agents, directorships, or the overlooking of public and private philanthropies. At worst, more perhaps in America than in England, where the standard has not so much been overthrown as never securely established, it becomes a nightmare and a delirium.
Delirium would seem to be the fate of all societies which become content in secured wealth and gradually forget the conditions of labour and service upon which alone that security can be maintained. “They describe,” says Bagehot of the French memoirs, “a life unsuitable to such a being as man in such a world as the present one: in which there are no high aims, no severe duties, where some precept of morals seems not so much to be sometimes broken as to be generally suspended and forgotten—such a life, in short, as God has never suffered men to lead on the earth long, which He has always crushed out by calamity or revolution.” Those who are familiar with the methods of dissipation of much of the new wealth of America—methods creeping across the Atlantic—are familiar also with a life “unsuitable to such a being as man.” This society is only distinguished from that which was consumed in the French Revolution, by absence of the wit and grace and polished human intercourse which in part redeemed so selfish and profitless a company. The pictures given from time to time possess a note of exaggeration. They flare a fierce white light upon a certain group of rich people, with no toleration of shadows or half tones. The thing stands ugly, in its pitiless glare, a vision not good to look upon. Yet the essential facts remain. The picture is only not a caricature, because the life it describes is itself a caricature. The forces which have moulded it have driven it inevitably along certain paths: resistance is useless. For in America enormous wealth—not only beyond “the dreams of avarice,” but in such aggregations of millions as make it inconceivable even to its possessors—has descended upon a tiny group of persons who have exploited the resources of a continent. The first generation accumulated these great possessions, in a fierce hand-to-hand conflict in which strength and cunning triumphed, and polish and pleasantness of manner and kindliness counted for nothing at all. To the second generation is given the spending of it. There are few traditions of social service. There are no feudal or communal responsibilities of social obligation. Charity is resented by the recipient and tiresome to the giver. The founding of Universities becomes too commonplace to attract. Settlements are voted drab and unsatisfying. Religion has become a plaything. All other avenues being thus closed, there remain but a self-indulgence which in itself breeds satiety, and a competition of luxurious display, which, in its more advanced stages, passes into an actual insanity. The second generation here is often weaker than its fathers. The fierce will-power which ensured financial success in the most terrific financial struggle that the world has ever seen, has exhausted the capacities of the family lineage. It has been raised on the principle of “doing as one likes.” It pursues its existence through an unreal, fantastic world, in a luxurious expenditure as fantastic as a veritable “Dance of Death.”
Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Frank Norris, Mrs. Wharton, and other American novelists have presented pictures of the luxurious waste and extravagance of a plutocracy which have been scornfully repudiated by its members. Yet almost every individual incident or place in “the Metropolis”—“Castle Havens,” Newport, the queer palaces of New York, the crude scattering of fortunes easily won in scratching the earth or wrecking a railway—could be paralleled in the actual society of America. Many could even be paralleled in England, where millionaire company promoters, on their hectic path between poverty through prosperity to prison or suicide, will purchase so many miles of good English land, build round it a great wall ten feet high, construct billiard rooms under a lake, remove a hill which offends the view. “He was kind to the poor,” they wrote on the grave of one of them, who had devastated the middle classes with the promise of high interest for investment, guaranteed on his prospectuses by the names of Proconsuls and Ambassadors of world-wide fame. The disease may not have attained its full consummation in this country; that is in part because of a standard which, though crumbling, still struggles to survive; in part because the wealth accumulation is less sudden and overwhelming: in part also because we are satisfied with less bizarre manifestations of the always unsatisfied demand for pleasure. Yet we have parallels, even in this country to “Castle Havens.” “It had cost three or four millions of dollars, and within the twelve-foot wall which surrounded its grounds lived two world-weary people who dreaded nothing so much as to be left alone.” The house had many gables, in the Queen Anne style: from the midst of them shot a Norman tower decorated with Christmas tree wreaths in white stucco: overlapping this was the dome of a Turkish mosque rising out of this something like a dove-cot: out of that, the slender white steeple of a Methodist country church: on top a statue of Diana. “Has there ever been any insanity in the Havens family?” is the natural query of the visitor, as he gazed at this astonishing erection.
All round are the “second generation”: young men, of whom it was said that “if only they had had a little more brains, they would have been half-witted”: women “who boast of never appearing twice in the same gown”; one dreadful personage in Boston who wears each costume once, and then has it solemnly cremated by her butler: women who artificially make themselves barren, because of the inconvenience incidental to motherhood, and lavish their affections upon cats and dogs. “It was the instinct of decoration, perverted by the money-lust.” The men are busy making money in order that their idle women may attain supremacy in this mad race for display. The “second generation” are so bored that ever more fantastic amusements are sought to stimulate jaded interest. The one thing they all dread is “to be left alone.” “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras. One heard of monkey dinners and pyjama dinners at Newport, of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York.” “One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose: one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen dollars a yard: one had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another had started a class for the weekly study of Plato.” People’s health broke down quickly in face of this furious pursuit of pleasure; then they ate nothing but spinach, or lived on grass, or chewed a mouthful of soup thirty-two times before swallowing it. “There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’ ‘new thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science.’” The young men were filled with the same delusion as the older women. “Some were killing themselves and other people in automobile races at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.” “There was another young millionaire who sat and patiently taught Sunday School, in the presence of a host of reporters: there was another who set up a chain of newspapers all over the country, and made war against his class.” Behind this second generation there was even the vision of a third, growing up in the heart of such a nightmare: a third generation in which there would no longer remain even the memories of the early struggles of the pioneers of great fortunes to connect them with reality.
That reality it is impossible for such a society ever to apprehend. Newspaper criticisms leave them entirely unmoved. The more unblushing the record of scandals and viciousness and foolish, distorted luxury in any “fashionable” paper, the more secure its circulation amongst the very people who are assailed. They are indifferent to the onslaughts upon their lives by persons “outside.” They know that these people are not, as a matter of fact, condemning their lives. They are only expressing their discontent at not being “inside.” The pauper wants fresh meat instead of canned. The business man wants his thousand a year to become two thousand a year. The anarchist who demands revolution can be bought with a secure guarantee of a steady income. In Mr. Hueffer’s entertaining novel of New York, a rich man’s son, scandalised at the method by which his father obtained his super-wealth, attempts restitution to the victims. They one and all indignantly repudiate his “charity.” One and all they ask to “come in” on the ground floor in any future flotations and manipulations which he may be designing. They reject the return of the proceeds of piracy. All they desire is a partnership in future piratical raids against a person or persons unknown.