[259] Rubens was an ardent collector, and lost no chance of increasing his stores; in the appendix to Carpenter’s “Pictorial Notices of Vandyke” is printed the correspondence between himself and Sir D. Carleton, offering to exchange some of his own pictures for antiques in possession of the latter, who was ambassador from England to Holland, and who collected also for the Earl of Arundel.
WHETHER ALLOWABLE TO RUIN ONESELF?
The political economist replies that it is!
One of our old dramatic writers, who witnessed the singular extravagance of dress among the modellers of fashion, our nobility, condemns their “superfluous bravery,” echoing the popular cry—
| “There are a sort of men, whose coining heads Are mints of all new fashions, that have done More hurt to the kingdom, by superfluous bravery, Which the foolish gentry imitate, than a war Or a long famine. All the treasure by This foul excess is got into the merchants’, Embroiderers’, silkmen’s, jewellers’, tailors’ hands, And the third part of the land too! the nobility Engrossing titles only.” |
Our poet might have been startled at the reply of our political economist. If the nobility, in follies such as these, only preserved their “titles,” while their “lands” were dispersed among the industrious classes, the people were not sufferers. The silly victims ruining themselves by their excessive luxury, or their costly dress, as it appears some did, was an evil which, left to its own course, must check itself; if the rich did not spend, the poor would starve. Luxury is the cure of that unavoidable evil in society—great inequality of fortune! Political economists therefore tell us that any regulations would be ridiculous which, as Lord Bacon expresses it, should serve for “the repressing of waste and excess by sumptuary laws.” Adam Smith is not only indignant at “sumptuary laws,” but asserts, with a democratic insolence of style, that “it is the highest impertinence and presumption in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense by sumptuary laws. They are themselves always the greatest spendthrifts in the society; let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.” We must therefore infer that governments by extravagance may ruin a state, but that individuals enjoy the remarkable privilege of ruining themselves without injuring society! Adam Smith afterwards distinguishes two sorts of luxury: the one exhausting itself in “durable commodities, as in buildings, furniture, books, statues, pictures,” will increase “the opulence of a nation;” but of the other, wasting itself in dress and equipages, in frivolous ornaments, jewels, baubles, trinkets, &c., he acknowledges “no trace or vestige would remain; and the effects of ten or twenty years’ profusion would be as completely annihilated as if they had never existed.” There is, therefore, a greater and a lesser evil in this important subject of the opulent, unrestricted by any law, ruining his whole generation.
Where “the wealth of nations” is made the solitary standard of their prosperity, it becomes a fertile source of errors in the science of morals; and the happiness of the individual is then too frequently sacrificed to what is called the prosperity of the state. If an individual, in the pride of luxury and selfism, annihilates the fortunes of his whole generation, untouched by the laws as a criminal, he leaves behind him a race of the discontented and the seditious, who, having sunk in the scale of society, have to reascend from their degradation by industry and by humiliation; but for the work of industry their habits have made them inexpert; and to humiliation their very rank presents a perpetual obstacle.
Sumptuary laws, so often enacted and so often repealed, and always eluded, were the perpetual, but ineffectual, attempts of all governments to restrain what, perhaps, cannot be restrained—criminal folly! And to punish a man for having ruined himself would usually be to punish a most contrite penitent.