IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 February 1920, Page 7

IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.

MONEY-MOTOR-MOVIE MANIA. (By Frederick William Wile, in Daily Mail.) There are 20,000 more millionaires in the United States than before the war. About one-half of all the diamonds in the world, estimated to be worth £200,000,000, are owned in the same country. Importations of pearls jumped from £400,000 in 1912 to over £2,000,000 in 1917. Considerably more than 50 per cent, of the world's gold—some estimates place the amount as high as 75 per cent, —is held in American vaults.

In the State of Pennsylvania, there is a motor car to every twenty inhabitants. New York city contains 6,000,000 population and 100,000 private cars. The United States to-day is struggling with the adversities of the most fabulous prosperity in the history of nations. Money-mad is the-only accurate description of America to-day, unless it be alliteratively supplemented and termed "motor-mad" and "movie-mad" besides. The Republican reels with wealth. It contains only two classes of inhabitants—the rich and the less rich. There is not a man, woman or child who needs to be poor, for there is absurdly well-paid work for all. Labor of all kinds earns the fattest wages on record. The charwoman in New York or Chicago gets 14s 6d a day. Housewives in the cities often advertise in vain for general servants to whom they are eager to give £l4 to £lO a month. To cajole prospective "help" to reply, advertisements plaintively seek "ladies willing to assist in housework." Conditions in smaller towns are even worse, for servants succumb to the lure of the cities, with their ■bigger wages and brighter "movies." THE NEW POOR GROWING. It must not be assured that everybody in the' is in Easy Street. There is an immense and growing new poor class, just as there is in England. Incomes of £IOOO mean at least r>o per csnt. less than they did five years ago. Food, clothes, rent, pleasures, everything, cost from 25 per cent, to double what they used to. But the amazing fact to me, returned to America after an absence of four Years, was the omnipresent wherewithal to meet the new prio: of existence The situation in the United States seems to be that if you have anything to sell—literally anvtb ing—you can disposa of it at your own price, and jBo questions asked.

There is an orgy of buying and spend-" ing that infects all classes and affects all commodities. Merchants and manufacturers no longer "cater" to customers. Would-be buyers now com-.- to them, humbly asking to have orders filled. In many branches of trade it has ceased to be necessary to send out travellers. "Drummers" (commercial travellers) still on. the road are patrolling familiar routes merely to keep them intact for the day when abnormal conditions will vanish and sane times come again. "Mad, mad, mad!" exclaimed Mr. Frank. A. Vanderlip, the famous New York financier and economist, when I asked him in his offices on the 37th (or 47th, I forget which) floor of Ihe Equitable Building to diagnose life In Txe United .States to-day. "Last night," he explained, "I happened to be walking in Broadway through the after-theatre crowds which surge through fhe Great White Way between .13rd and 59th Streets. Having packed the picturepalaces and playhouses earlier in the evening, they were now looking for cafes and restaurants and cabarets and dancing halls Where they might spend still more money.

"The spectacle was America in composite at this hour—a concentrated, irresit.. jle determination to bum up m much money as possible as quickly as possible, and in as many diffeient ways as possible." Mr. Vanderlip spoke feelingly, for his war work consisted of a campaign to inculcate thrift in the American peopleIt was a hard job.

CONTRAST WITH LONDON. I asked a fellow-American who crossed with me in the Mauretania what strikes him as the outstanding difference between London and New York. He said: "London looks down at the heel." He thinks that people in the streets and tube-trains are shabby. He finds the shops, with .the exception of a few luxurious establishments in Bond street, sordid and tawdry. The omnibuses and taxi cabs impress him as being thirdrate, the buHdings neglected, almost everything unkempt—all of this as compared with glittering, gorgeous, flamboyant New Yorlc On the' United, States, too, the war has had effects, but of what a vastly different kind! Barring our army of heroic dead, 70,000 odd, and our host of wounded and maimed, another 250,000, the sole effect of the war on America was to make her embarrassingly rich. Now that khaki and navy blue are disappearing from the streets, it is almost impossible to detect anv visible signs that, as rar as the U.S.A. is concerned, there ever was a war. New York screams wealth at you, whichever way you turn- Fifthavenue, with its endless stream of luxurious motor-cars, and ravishing shops, and queenly dressed women and girls, shouts at.you day and night that never since time began was there so much money in one place, and prices at restaurants are grotesquely high, yet paid in a spirit of humility and gay resignation that baffles understanding.

I have remarked before that New York is not America, but it is America on a large scale so far as riches, prosperity, and extravagance are concerned. In Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland. Detroit, St. Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, even in "provincial" Washington, conditions are relatively the same. They are the same In the still smaller places, where there is a successful effort to emulate ihe moneyspending habits of New York. In these communities, too, everything is expensive; everybody has a car, and the warworn prosperity of the nation is in evidence in some direction or other.

THE DAY OF RECKONING. Well may thinkers like Mr. Vanderlip wonder where it is all going to end. Few Americans think the bubble will not burst. Those who have not been bereft of their reason by the nation's inordinate. and incomparable "boom" are conscious that a day of reckoning is coming. Wise ones are busy and systematically ordering, their affairs so as to fortified when it arrive?. Not all the mijmey in America is being spent, and wasted on ephemeral baubles, fn many (.ommunitics —East, West, and South'—there is a new civic spirit born of the country's superabundant well-being. Municipalities are preparing to construct "cities beautiful." "There is plenty of money now for the- carrying out of cherished projects foe \he country's welfare. '