IN A MONEY DELUGE.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 August 1916, Page 9

IN A MONEY DELUGE.

THE NEW YORK WAR BOOM.

DRUNK WITH DOLLABS.

(By Sydney Brooks, jn the Daily Mail)

New York is one of the tragedies of tile war.

Yet even as I write the words they seem absurd. Where is the suggestion of tragedy? I look out over the city from the sixteenth floor of my hotel and everything seems as usual—the same crystalline brightness of the atmosphere, the same white whiffs of steam against the 'bluest of skies, the same glimmering panorama of speckless, towering edifices. Or I watch it at night, gemmed and twinkling with a billion lights—the same New York one has always known, with a movement, a joyolisness, an exhilaration quicker and sharper-edged than anything we ever had in London.

Where, then, is the tragedy? Why, precisely there; in this very fact and condition of sameness. New York, incredibly enriched by the war, is pursuing the old life, playing the old giddy social game as though nothing else in the world mattered or even existed. The gayest, the most crowded, the most altogether hectic season in its history is drawing to a close. The social place on Manhattan Island was always a hot one. This year it has been a gallop. New Y'ork was always a pleasure-loving city. But in the past few months it has eclipsed all its own frenzied records. It has known many booms, but never such a boom as the war has brought in. It has been deluged before with spates of money, but never with such a sustained and wholesale inundation as this. It has seen millionaires spring up by the score, but now it lias to number them bv the hundred'

GOOD SPENDERS. How little Americans really are for dollars is shown by the prodigality with which they spend them. They enjoy the pursuit: they are glad to have the symbol of victory in their hands and pockets; but they are the last people in the world to hoard what they have gained. Instead, they lling it around \rtth unrestrained gusto. One cannot imagine an American miser. In this cureless, spendthrift atmosphere, among these insatiable gamblers, he would either be reformed or snuffed out.

And of all the cities in the Union, Xcw York is the one with by far the most ample facilities for relieving Americans of their winnings. It exists very largely for that end, and long practice has made it almost as expert as Monte Carlo. But never before has it had anything like the opportunities of the past few months far indulging its art. All the Americans who need to live abroad and all who were accustomed to flee to Europe from the terrors of the American winter have this year flung themselves upon New York. The metropolis was never so choked with people who were itching to spend within its borders the money that in the years of peace plastered Paris and Egypt and the Mediterranean.

IN NEW YORK. And besides these repatriated sons and daughters of the Republic, cut off from their normal scenes of pleasure and obliged to fall back upon New York as at any rate better than nothing, there his been a vast influx of new millionaires, the direct product of the war. I do not know how much the Allied Governments have already spent or agreed to spend in the United States. But it can hardly be less than ' £500,000,000. I do not know what increase as the result of the war has been made in the market value of American securities, but it has certainly been prodigious; and there are scores of companies engaged in producing munitions whose shares are quoted to-day at anywhere from £3O to £BO higher than the figures of a year ago. And in addition the bank deposits show an increase of some £200,000,000, and thousands of men of moderate means have become wealthy, and wealthy men have become millionaires, and millionaires have become billionaires through their ownership of the indispensable raw materials of war.

There has never been anything like it. Even in the great days'of the steel boom of nearly fifteen years ago,, when every train that readied Manhattan Island seemed to deposit fresh carloads of western millionaires consumed with tlie one ambition to outshine and outspend the effete and conservative denizens of New York—even then the hotels and theatres were not so crowded, Fifth Avenue was -not such an impassable jamb of superlative cars,, the opera was less bediamoned, the restaurants saw fewer dinners that would have made Lucullus gasp and stare, luxury was less of a commonplace, and extras vugance rioted less obtrusively than today. New York then was merely intoxicated with money. To-day it reels and staggers and stinks with it.

On one fresh from the heroic temper, the earnestness and abnegations of England, the city, in its present dementfa of profligacy makes an appalling impression. And it appals him- not less when he reflects that a bare two years ago the aimless, tawdry life which he finds here in full swing was not essentially dissimilar from the life that he and his were leading on the other side of the Atlantic. Well, we in England have put all that behind us for a long while to come. New York also may be roused, and at no verv distant date to a nobler mood. But for the present its immersion in getting and spending shuts off from it Europe and the war as with an impenetrable curtain. t Tt is in vain that the papers here publish from all the belligerent nations brilliant and comprehensive, accounts of what is going on. Nobody has time to read them. Still less has anyone time to reflect upon them—anyone, I mean, in that dining, dancing, infinitely beparagraphed section of New York that calls itself society, and that misrepresents the metropolis in the eyes of America and the world.

THE DEEPER THINGS. ~^

But outside the whirl and froth of an existence that, seems a continuous orgy there are sober, sensitive, keen-thinking men and women to bo met by the hundreds, in whom the war and American policy in regard to it usurp all other thoughts and emotions. They are the people who support the innumerable war charities with which New York abounds. . Heart and soul they denounce and abominate the figure' their country has been made to cut during the past eighteen months. No Englishman would dare to say one-half the things that are said in New York about President Wilson's diplomacy; and nowhere, I suppose, in the world will one hear more passionate indictments of Germany and the Germans. v And now and then across the babel of pleasure will be heard the majestic vcice of a Choate or a Boot, or the full-blooded notes of a Roosevelt, or

the less resonant but not less earnest utterances of minor notables, who hav L seen with their own eyes the cataclysm that has overtaken Europe. They are worth listening to Their speeches breathe the authentic spirit of that virile, idealistic Americanism which is very far from being an exhausted force, which even in Now York is not dead, to which even New York will respond when the right man makes the right appeal. The same may not be far away when this splendid city will put away its tops and its junketings and prove itself as rich in the virtues as it certainly i 3 in the follies of a great metropolis.