In America it is the custom—very nearly the universal custom—for the parents to spend upon the luxuries and pleasures of the family life the whole income. The children are educated according to this standard of expenditure, and are accustomed to all its privileges. No thought is taken of the time when they must set up households for themselves—almost invariably upon a very different scale from the one to which they have been used. To the American parent this seems only a natural downfall. He remarks cheerfully that he himself began in a small way, and it will do the young people no harm to acquire a similar experience—forgetting that in most cases the children have been educated to a much higher standard of ease than that of his own early life. The parents do not consider it obligatory to leave anything to their children at death. They have used all they could accumulate during their own lifetime; let their children do the same. The results of the system are crystallized in the American saying: "There are but three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves." The man who acquires wealth spends what he makes. His children, brought up in luxury, struggle unsuccessfully against conditions to which they are unused, and the grand-children begin in their shirt sleeves to toil for the wealth dissipated by the two preceding generations.
Europeans frequently and curiously remark upon the American's prodigality of ready money. The small change which they part with so reluctantly the American flings about with a fine mediæval profusion. The manner of life of the average well-to-do person in this country permits of it. The average man who earns ten or twenty thousand a year invests none of it. He installs his family in a rented house in the city in winter. Several servants are kept; the children are sent to expensive schools. All the family dress well, eat rich food, and indulge in costly amusements. In summer they either travel abroad, live in a hotel at a watering place, or rent again. The man's whole income is at his disposal to spend every year. None of it is deducted to be safely stored in property. When his daughters marry he expects their husbands to be solely responsible for their future, and if they do not succeed in marrying wealth, why so much the worse for them. When his sons begin their career he looks to them to be self-supporting almost from the first, and not to undertake the responsibilities of a family until they are able to bear such a burden without aid from him. He cannot assist them without materially altering his own scale of living, which he is naturally loath to do. At his death the income generally ceases in large part, and his widow, and such children as may still be unplaced in life, are obliged to relinquish the rented houses and the way of life to which they have been used.
To a Frenchman such an existence would seem as uncertain and disturbing as is generally supposed to be that of a person who has built upon the crust of a volcano. He could not contemplate with equanimity the thought of chaos overtaking the ordered existence of his family upon his demise. Après nous le deluge seems to him the insouciance of a maniac, or of a monster of selfishness. Daily expenditure is regulated within a limit which permits of a constant investment of a margin. When his daughter marries he insures in her carefully guarded dower that she shall continue her existence on somewhat the same scale to which she has been accustomed, and, in case of premature widowhood or accident of fortune, she and her children shall not be called upon to face the desperate strait of absolute pennilessness. He may deny her in her girlhood many of the indulgences common to her American prototype, but he denies himself at the same time in saving to insure the security and comfort of her future. The French father would think it terrible that a tenderly nurtured daughter should be suddenly thrust into abject dependence upon a husband who may possibly abuse the power given him by that circumstance, nor would he be more satisfied to think that she should, during her first years of married life, while still young and encountering the strain of motherhood, be called upon to face narrow means and a perilously uncertain financial condition.
When the son arrives at maturity the economies to which he, in company with his parents, has submitted, bear fruit in substantial aid in beginning his career, and he is not obliged to put out of his mind all thought of marriage during his youth, since his parents, and those of the woman of his choice, have provided for this very contingency through all the years of his minority.
The French—with the logical inevitableness of their mode of thought—carry this view of life to its extreme limit, but throughout all Europe, including England, the responsibility of the parent is more broadly conceived than in this country, where the excuse for an infinity of cheap flimsiness is the cynical phrase, "It will last my time." Men build cheaply, and forbear to undertake work of which they cannot see the immediate result, because there is no sense of obligation to the coming generation. The democratic theory is that each man must fight for his own hand; no debt is owed to either ancestry or posterity. The mind is not shocked by sudden destruction of families, by the sharp descent in the social scale, or the flinging of women into the arena of the struggle for life. The parent is quite willing to share with the child the goods of existence as far as he can achieve them, but he is unwilling to deny either child or himself that the child may benefit alone, or after he is gone.
Conditions in America are constantly assimilating themselves more and more to those existing in the older countries, where the conflict for existence is close and intense, and where the prudent, the careful, and the far-sighted inevitably crowd out the weaker and more careless individuals and families. An almost unmistakable sign of "an old family" in America is conservatism in expenditure and modes of life. The newly rich, who set the pace of public luxury, are always amazed at the probates of the wills of these quiet citizens. They cannot believe that one who spent so little should have so much, not realizing that the simplicity of life made it possible to solidly invest a surplus. The heirs of this solid wealth have been bred to prudence and self-denial. Such a family survives, while in all probability the offspring of the other type may in two generations be hopelessly trodden into the mire.
There is in the breasts of many parents a half-resentful feeling that they should not be asked to sacrifice themselves to the new generation. They insist upon their own right to all that is to be got out of life, feeling that what they give to the children is never repaid. This selfish type forgets that in doing their duty they are but returning to their children what they themselves received from the past generation, and that the children will in turn pay to their descendants the inherited debt of honour with interest.
July 30.
A Question of Heredity.
I was lunching out to-day, and sat beside Mrs. C—— S——. She told me her daughter was so hoping that the new child would be a girl. Four boys seemed a superfluity of masculinity in one household.