PLAGUE OF LUXURY.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 8, Issue 30, 12 April 1907, Page 6

PLAGUE OF LUXURY.

How It Has Fallen Upon the People !y with Prosperous Times; . With Couvealeßce* and the' Ooumtry'a Orowth ln "itlclbeav Even itbe . ia , . Live# High. The growth of luxurious living in America was very glow during the first 50 yearg of the republic. Indeed,' up to the breaking out of our civil war the inequalities of fortune were not so marked' ds to make those who lived sumptuously according to the standards of those days seem so far removed from the merely well-to-do as to be almost ,in another world. In the earlier dayV any sober and industrious man could prosper, even though he did not perform imerely manual labor. There was work for every one to do, and no one was more in demand than. Mr. Jack-, of-all-trades, who now walks superfluous in the -dusty high way,-with,no one to applaud his adaptability, none to need his ingenious services. Food was plenty, land was cheap, rents were low. Be honest and you will be happy, was not mere cant; it was the solemn and the grateful truth. Pretty nearly every one lived well, but pretty nearly all lived plainly. With better houses, with better. Water supplies, With imprdved:lamps.' for .illumination. arid then with '-the 'introduction of illuminating gas, and most, of .all with the greater'wealth which came at the end of the civil war, the growth of luxurious' living began taking tremendous strides. .Luxury with poor light after sunset, liikury with ieVv. of ! the means of personal cleanliness, does not mean hiucli to us nowadays. Why, a man in a Harlem flat at S6OO a year can command more of the kind'of luxury*just mentioned than say the dissolute Charles 11. ever dreamed of. But the wealth that comes with new' fortunes to new people was really what began the race which may be called the Millionaire Stakes for all ages, say* a writer in Ainslee’s Magazine, Before these stakes were opened there were a few fortunes in this country. Some. W'ere made in the tradeiwith the east, soitne were made in strictly domestic commerce:, some were founded in piracy, and other adventures by sea, but the greatest number and the most stable were those which came from the shrewd investments in land which w-as enhanced in value by the growth of cities. Even up to the time that the newly rich began to splurge the owners of the.fortunes just ilTentioned were pretty generally tolerably plain people, who lived very quietly and looked upon those who made unusual display as too vulgar to come inside the sacred pale which called itself society, In New York, this class of people at the tim,e : mentioned lived in the n neighborhood of' Washington Square; m Philadelphia, toward the foot of Walnut street, and in Boston, in that ever sacred Beacon street. They wore slow but sure. They had no doubt about their position, or the propnoty with which they maintained their dignity. They did what they pleased, but they did not please to be in the least fantastic, theatric, ostentations or conspicuous. And until the newly rich had arrived, with the manifest intention to stay permanenty, there weremone with either the ambition or the ability to dispute this supremacy, which was maintained not bv an aggressiveness, but by the passive power of inertia.