There is a crime which has run in wild unbridled career around the globe, from the most ancient recorded time, beginning in barbaric tyranny and robbery of the toiler, advancing with the power and wealth of nations, and flourishing unchecked in modern civilization, sapping the strength of nations, paralyzing the conscience of humanity, impoverishing the spirit and power of benevolence, stimulating with alcoholic energy the mad rush for wealth and power, and making abortive the greater part of what saints, heroes, and martyrs might achieve for human redemption. But alas! such has been its insinuating and blinding power, that it has never been opposed by legislation, and never arrested by the Church, which assumes to obey the sinless martyr of Jerusalem, and to war against all sins, yet has never made war upon this giant sin, but has fondled and caressed it so kindly that the pious and conscientious, believing it no sin or crime, have lost all conception of its enormity, and may never realize it until an enlightened people shall pour their hot indignation upon the crime and the unconscious criminals.
This crime which the world’s dazzled intellect and torpid conscience has so long tolerated without resistance, and which antiquity admired in its despotic rulers, splendid in proportion to the people’s misery, is that misleading form of intense and heartless selfishness, which grasps the elements of life and happiness, the wealth of a nation, to squander and destroy it in that OSTENTATION which has no other purpose than to uplift the man of wealth and humiliate his humbler brother. That purpose is a crime; a crime incompatible with genuine Christianity; a crime which was once checked by the religious fervor of Wesley, but checked only for a time. Its criminality is not so much in the heartless motive as in its wanton destruction of happiness and life to achieve a selfish purpose.
This feature of social ostentation, its absolute cruelty, has not attracted the investigation of moralists and pietists. On the contrary, the crime is cherished in the higher ranks of the clergy, and an eminent divine in Cincinnati occupying an absurdly expensive church, actually preached a sermon in vindication of LUXURY—defending it on the audacious assumption that it was right because some men had very expensive tastes and it was proper that such tastes should be gratified. A private interview with John Wesley would have been very edifying to that clergyman, as the more remote example of the founder of Christianity had been forgotten.
That squandering wealth in ostentation and luxury is a crime becomes very apparent by a close examination of the act. There would be no harm in building a $700,000 stable for his horses, like a Syracuse millionaire, or in placing a $50,000 service on the dinner table, like a New York Astor, if money were as free as air and water; but every dollar represents an average day’s labor, for there are more toilers who receive less than a dollar than there are who receive more.[9] Hence the $700,000 stable represents the labor of a thousand men for two years and four months. It also represents seven hundred lives; for a thousand dollars would meet the cost of the first ten years of a child, and the cost of the second ten years would be fully repaid by his labor. The fancy stable, therefore, represents the physical basis of seven hundred lives, and affirms that the owner values it more highly, or is willing that seven hundred should die, that his vanity may be gratified.
This is not an imaginative estimate. A thousand dollars would save not one but many lives in the Irish famine. It would save more than a score of lives in New York, if diligently used among those who are approaching the Potter’s Field, which annually receives eight thousand of the dead of New York. It would establish, if invested at seven per cent., an institution that would permanently sustain educating to a virtuous manhood, two hundred and fifty of the waifs gathered in from the pollution of the streets, sending forth fifty redeemed ones every year. When $700,000 is squandered, such is the amount of human life destroyed, by destroying that for want of which the benevolent are unable to stay the march of disease, of crime, and of death.
The thought of snatching food from the starving, or turning out half-clad men and women to perish in the wintry snow, excites our horror, but which is the greater criminal, he who for avarice thus destroys one family, or he who in riotous ostentation destroys the means that would save a hundred lives? Does the fact that they are not in his presence, or may be a mile or two away, change the nature or results of his act? And does his accidental possession of the basis of life authorize him to destroy it?
It is not unreasonable to say that every thousand dollars wantonly wasted, represents the destruction of the one human life that it would have saved, and while this slaughter of the innocents proceeds, society is cursed with the presence of over 100,000 criminals, paupers, tramps, and vagrants in the State of New York, who might have been reared into respectable citizenship with a small fragment of the wealth that is squandered in the hurtful ostentation that panders to a vicious taste. While poor women in New York are fighting hunger at arm’s length, or looking through ash barrels and offal buckets, their wealthy sisters think nothing of spending ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on their toilet, or wearing a $130,000 necklace, or half a million in diamonds in a Washington court circle,—all of which I hope to see in time condemned by a purer taste as tawdry and offensive vulgarity, even if it were not done in the presence of misery as it is. “Twenty-four hours in the slums” (says Julia H. Percy, in the New York World)—“just a night and a day—yet into them were crowded such revelations of misery, and depravity, and degradation as having once been gazed upon, life can never be the same afterwards.” Such is life in New York. What it is in “Darkest England,” as portrayed by General Booth, is too wretched and loathsome to be reproduced here. But we must not fail to understand that five sixths of the people of the millionaire’s metropolis, New York, live in the tenement-house region, a breeding centre of intemperance, pestilence, crime, and future mobs, where wretched life is crushed to deeper wretchedness by the avaricious exaction of unfeeling landlords[10] worse than those against whom the Irish rebel. Is not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on the consumptive’s cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal the startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that its population has no natural growth, but had 853 more deaths than births.
The desire for ostentation as one of the great aims of life is inwoven into the whole fabric of society to the exclusion of nobler motives, for ostentation is death to benevolence. How many bankruptcies, how many defalcations, and frauds, how many absconding criminals, how many struggles ending in broken-down constitutions, how many social wrecks and embittered lives are due to its seductive influence, because the Church and the moral sentiment of society have not taken a stand against it, and education has never checked it, for it runs riot at the universities patronized by the wealthy.
New York has been said to spend five millions annually on flowers, which is far more a matter of ostentation than of taste, for as a rule “whatever is most costly is most fashionable.” Nor is the cost the only evil, for the costly dinners and parties of the ostentatious are not only characterized by an absence of serious and elevated sentiment, but by intellectual poverty and frivolous chatter. To waste $5,000 for an evening’s lavish display of flowers to a thoughtless and crowded throng, almost within hearing of the never-ending moan of misfortune in a city in which police stations shelter 150,000 of the utterly destitute every year, is a picturesque way of ignoring that brotherhood of humanity, which is gently and inoffensively referred to on Sunday.