THE JONESES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 514, 24 April 1933, Page 2

THE JONESES

A MODERN HOMILY BETTER TO I/AG BEHIND THANiTRY TO KEEjP UP WITH THEM. A LITTUE INTROSPECTION. ; ii. ■ (Published by Arrangement with the Auckland Executive of the Farmers' Union.) "Prosperity! is very liable to bring pride among the other goods with which it endows an individual; it is then that- prosperity costs too dear." — Bacon. ' "All in life may not be vanity, as .somebody has said it is, yet most of us must admit that — in retroispect w.e did try terribly to 'keep up with the .Joneses'," says the Ottawa Journal. "The simple truth is that prosperity had become costly; that the wine of it went to ourt h'eads. If the Joneses made a strike in the market — which they often did — we felt it was up to us to make a bigger one,. that not to - do so would be a confession of in- | feriority, which we couldn't hear. It ] was ia day of bigness, with ballance | not counting ait all; and in order to achieve :size, or to get ahead or keep abreast in the prosperity race, we . reduced everything to competition. \ "If a neighhour got a hig car with \ new lines, then we thought We haid to get a bigger -one with newer lines. If Mrs. Jones bought a new rug or a new gown, then Mrs. Brown would be sure to mention it petulantly to Mr. Brown, whereupon .Mr. Brown, anxious to I show that he was as good a man as Jones, wrote a cheque for a coistlier rug la.nd for a more chdc and lovelier i gown. An Endless Chain. "The thing became an endless chain. It neached to. the hig things as well as to the little things; took in sport and games, followed us to ehurch on Sunday, began to intrude upon the amenities and the gnacious things of life. "Everyhody, or nearly everybody, began to measure ievery thing by the yardstick of competition, to try to do • everything hetter than their neighmours; to play better ig'olf and bridge and gloat over it, to give bigger and better partieis land flaunt the fact; to have the hest pictures and the oldest furniture and be priggish about them, and (in not a few cases) the oldest whisky. Like vanity, the thing fed upon itself. "As is always in the case of human fully, there was the ludicrous side, The proudly exhibited Persian rugs mig'ht have been made in Manchester, the 'pre-war' stuff but two yiears old, the new model but a tenth paid for, and the one-hundred-year-old furniture merely proof that it had taken the family a long time to develop a Saies man. But it didn't matter. "On and -on we went, or a lot of us, wallowing in the present delusion that we were making an impression, blowing more and more bubbles, getting more and more to the point where a lot of us were beginning to have igenealogical trees and to be thinking of family cre&ts. It was the istory of the Mayflower over again. "Proisperity had hegun to cost us dear. Neiver thinking of where we were going, or of how we had arrived at where we were at, we strutted about with our thumbs in onr vest, became conceited, talked patronisingly about thie older generations. They had been so islow. They had thought that work and thrift were the keys to prosperity, whereas we, so much smarter, had found out that all that was necessary was to buy canned cinnamon at 20 to sell it a month later at 150. Hadn't we done it? Hadn't we bought corn cure common at 8 o'clock one day and called up at lunch time the next day to find it had jumped 20 points ? The thing was like falling off a log. "So On We Galloped." "So cn we igalloped, pitying the old fogies of the past and ths pi*esent wh'o had talked about laws of diminishing returns and about other laws of supply and demand, buying new models and the latest in radios, and always keeping a sharp weather eye on that fellowt Jones. He just could not get ahead of us. "Then came the reckoning. We awakened one morning — how long ago it seems! — to find that our castles had collapsed, that our dreams and deluisions and vanities had crashed, leaving a lot of wreckage. The older generations and the younger 'fogies' had been right after all. There did exist such things as economic and natural laws, such' things ias supply and demand and diminishing returns, and the eternal truth of that injunction about toil given in the Garden of Eden. Such Things as Friendships. "It has taken us some time to adjust ourselves*. Taken time to get a proper realisation that there aria such things ih) life as isound values and a sense of proportion; such things as friendships and companionships and all of them are more wholesome things than a race to 'keep up with the Joneses.' Yet the adjustment is under way. We are hearing less these days about 'pep' and 'go-getteris-' and the costliest cars and oldest rugs, and a lot of us are content with a nightcap that isn't quite pre-war. It is simply that the Joneses are down and th'at tha rest of us are keeping down with them — and finding it good for our souls. "It may be well, indeed, that these two years past. will have been good for ns. After all, perhaps the most terrible error of our smart and giddypaced age was that we mistoqk knowledge for truth', cleverness for wisdom and selfishness for ambition, and that we forgot to distinguish between the 'childish things' which Saint Paul said should be put a&ide, and the great childlike things which abide, and to which we owe the strength and the •sanity of life. "If these days teach us nothing { more than this — teach us that envy is ia barren thing, with charity rich and fruitful — they will not have been in vain."