“The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy, vigorous community.”
—Theodore Roosevelt.
Chapter Two
THE MADNESS OF EXTRAVAGANCE
I remember very well indeed that bitter period of transition when first the ideal, or lack of ideals, of the newer America began to corrode the old society. I remember with what intense bitterness and chagrin the early excesses of the earliest of the idle rich were condoned by the leaders of society in that day. At first the social world fought hard for its traditions, and the leaders of American Society of my father’s day were never reconciled to the changes that came about in the body social. In Boston and Philadelphia, to this day, society maintains its battle against the invader. Now, as then, society frowns upon the idle men. Only recently one of the leaders of Boston society quoted in the course of a conversation with me that powerful sentence from one of Mr. Roosevelt’s speeches:
“The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren woman, has no place in a sane, healthy, vigorous community.”
That, after all, is as much a tradition of true society as it is of the plains and the fields. I do not yield to any man or any class in America in my detestation of idleness in man or woman. And I believe that the traditions of real American society support me in this attitude.
In spite of ourselves, we drifted into a period in which idleness became the fashion. We did not know just why the thing was true; but we were forced to recognize its truth. Now, looking back rather than forward over the past quarter of a century, one may see quite clearly how it came about. And I purpose, in the course of this book, to write down, perhaps for the amusement of my own contemporaries, perhaps for the guidance of those who have not yet begun to think about these matters, the causes that gave us this plague of idleness.
First of all, however, I would merely set down in a phrase the immediate cause of it, and then proceed to sketch the phenomenon itself, that one may know the things which are right. It was the magic of gold; it was the poison of idle wealth. It came at first like a little spot upon the body of a man. Quickly it spread from limb to limb, and part to part, until, in the fulness of time, it was a leprosy, following the body of society almost from head to foot. It was the curse of gold, no more, no less—the same condition that laid in the dust the glory of Athens, that hurled to ruin the splendour of Rome, that brought upon Bourbon France the terror of the Revolution.