AMERICAN MILLIONAIRES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 253, 4 March 1911, Page 9

AMERICAN MILLIONAIRES.

THE FEELING OF -UNREST.

A special correspondent of the London Times says that in proportion as the American people grow richer they growmore discontented, and in re-visiting the country one cannot fail to be struck with the extraordinary and feverish unrest. The fundamental fact is that many people have grown rich too quickly. Speaking specially of the Western States, he savs:'

"In the decade from 1897 to 1907, and especially in the first few years of the new century, fortunes were made with great rapidity—in a few weeks, a few months, or in a year or two. They were the result of the extraordinary rise in all values, and were to a large e'xtent | the fruit of bold speculation, or at least of speculative methods in the conduct of legitimate business. It was no longer a case of laborious effort and slow upbuilding; and the men who thus became suddenly rich were of a type different from that of the successful men of the preceding generation. It was aa if chance drew a certain number of thousands of name* almost at random,out of a hat once in every six months for a period of some five years, and said: 'These men shall be millionaires next spring.' "The newly-rich who thus came into their estate*, without the long years of stern training in business economics; were conscious of no responsibilities, and not unnaturally they began spending and are spending, to-day, with a lavishness formerly undreamed of; and this it is, more than anything else, which has contributed to the general increase in extravagance and to the almost universal raising of the scale of living. But, what is even more important, the attitude of the public towards them ig different from their attitude towards the rich men of the older type. Without saying anything so absurd as that all these newly-rich arc unworthy of their fortunes, one cannot help seeing that the example set by many of them is unedii.riHg. Whereas in Great Britain the unlovely rich are comparatively few, they are here constantly in evidence' and there is no doubt that the people resent them, their manner and extravagances, intensely. "It would be idle to deny that the majority of the more serious-minded Americans regard the present trend of things with grave foreboding, and one may constantly hear predictions of the mevitableness of some great social cataclysm, which may take the form of a linaneinl panic worse than any which the country has known, or of a terrific class war. Much of this despondency is but the usual misgivings of an elder generation, common to all countries and all ages contemplating the new-fangled and flighty ways of the younger. There presumably never was a time when the world was not going to the dogs. It is certain, however, that the United States is now confronted with problems which arc new, and in the solution of which the experience of other nations (oven if the American people were ever inclined (o profit by the experience of others) will be of little use. Unrest and discontent in a people down-trodden and poverty-stricken would not be much of a novelty; hut here we have a people conspicuously restive and discontented while conspicuously well-to-do."