You stand in front of a huge dam. Its wall rises bare and sheer. You say to yourself: “There can be little water behind it.” But even as you think this, the dam becomes a waterfall, and the waterfall swells into a Niagara. You go round where you see the other side; you find a lake fathoms deep and extending miles up the valley.
Precisely such a phenomenon occurred in this country a few years ago. Behind a dam of long-established customs of simplicity and frugality, concentrated private wealth had been rising for a generation with amazing rapidity. Suddenly it overflowed in a waterfall of luxurious living; and to-day the waterfall has become a Niagara.
The dam that has pent and narrowed the streams of national wealth is the concentration of property that has come about through the imperfect working of the law of combination which steam and electricity established. That imperfection has produced the multi-millionaire, the plutocrat, as the crowning inequality in a succession of inequalities. First, the man with a million or so; then the man with ten millions or so; then the man with fifty millions or so; now, the man with a hundred, with five hundred, with nearly a thousand millions. Every city has its plutocrats. In New York is the capital of plutocracy. As businesses combine, as wealth concentrates, the directors of business, the masters of wealth, segregate. Thus, New York is denuding the rest of the country of its plutocrats. Most of them live in New York now; the rest must soon come.
The mighty cataract of extravagant ostentation is continent-wide—from Boston to San Francisco. In New York, the high-curving centre of the down-pouring, glittering stream, the spectacle almost passes belief. There is not the least danger of exaggeration in description; the danger is lest they who have not seen with their own eyes may refuse to believe that men and women can be born under the American flag wild enough to indulge in such prodigality and pretense and folly.
A score of years ago there were in New York only a few private houses that could accurately be spoken of as palaces; to-day there are more than two hundred private houses that are indeed palaces in size, in cost, and in showiness; and hardly a week passes without announcement of several new ones of equal or surpassing splendor. Twenty years ago there were not in all so many as a score of palace-like hotels, apartment houses and business buildings; to-day there are more than five hundred of these wonderful structures of marble and granite over iron, each costing, with its equipment, decorations and furnishings, from two to six millions.
And the whole city—business quarters and industrial, rich quarters and poor—is in a state of chaotic upheaval, so furiously are they tearing down the New York that was new twenty years ago, and replacing it with a New York, in every quarter and every street significant of the presence of colossal wealth, of stupendous private fortunes, of an unprecedented and unbelievable number of great incomes.
Fifteen years ago the number of private equipages on New York’s streets was noticeably small, considering the city’s size and wealth, and their appointments for the most part extremely modest. To-day Fifth avenue and Central Park, from September to mid-June, are thronged with handsome private carriages, notably costly in all details of harness and upholstery, the servants in expensive, often gaudy liveries; and the multitude of women thus swept along in state, in beautiful dresses and hats and wraps, frequently display fortunes in furs and jewels.
As for the shops, it seems indeed only yesterday that you found the costly luxuries in a few fashionable places, and there in small quantities and almost reverently handled by clerks and customers. To-day the shops where the tens of thousands buy are more luxurious than were most of the best shops ten years ago. And in the best shops you are dazzled and overwhelmed by the careless torrent of luxury—enormous quantities, enormous prices, throngs of customers. Twenty-five dollars for a pair of shoes, fifteen dollars for a pair of stockings, two hundred dollars for a hat, one thousand dollars for a hat-pin or parasol, fifteen hundred for a small gold bottle for a woman’s dressing-table, thirty or forty thousand for a tiara, a hundred thousand for a string of pearls—these are prices which salesmen will give you with the air of one who tells an oft-told tale.
Why has an income of ten thousand a year become a mere competence in New York City to-day? Why do the families with ten times ten thousand regard themselves as far from rich? Why do enough New Yorkers to make a populous city regard it as privation if they cannot keep at least three servants, one of them a man-servant, and ride in cabs and have a country place in summer?
The explanation is—the multi-millionaire.