THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, MAY 18, 1908. SOCIAL LIFE IN NEW YORK.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9091, 18 May 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, MAY 18, 1908. SOCIAL LIFE IN NEW YORK.

"Mr Upton Sinclair's new novel, 'The Metropolis,' is a \ivid description of life among the multi-miilion-aires of New York," wiites Dr W. R. Nicoll in the "British Weekly." "How far it 33 true t6 the facts I am in no position to say. Mr Sinclair describes for us without preaching the social life of the very rich in New York. Nothing could be more awful than his delineation. The one human qaality that seems to survive \b a kind of careless gcod nature. There is no such thing as honour and truth. Everyone is a cheat, and known to be a cheat. The corruption extends to the judges, and it will be hard to tell who i 3 not infected by it. The worst consequences are to be seen in the second generation. Often a man who has risen from the ranks preserves something of his native simplicity and industry. But the sona of the rich, and in part

the daughters also, become degener- i ates. They seek their pleasures in the most debasing vices and the most grotesque frenks and antics. The sanctity of the marriage tie is laughed at, and a system of almost undisguised free love prevails. Where every man is a cheat and every woman is vile, the rest is not difficult to guess. One of the ghastliest features of the whole is that the corrupt rich occasionally take to churchgoing as a i.ew sensation, and pay for ornate services, and for preachers who are men of the world. Can all this be true? No, it can only be one side of tli3 truth, for a society without higher elements than any depicted by Mr Sinclair wculd perish in a debasement of animalism. But the Thaw trial and other things show that there is a formidable amount of fact in his pages. As for extravagance, it must be remembered that it takes great extravagance to spend on any terms such incomes as are enjoyed by the characters in this novel. There are passages in Mr Sinclair's book on which one may not touch. In justice to him it ought to be said that he handles those themes as lightly as possible. He cannot leave them out of his picture, but he says no more than is necessary. Happily," add 3Dr Nicoll, "thi3 is not the true America, the America in which the great tide of ethical feeling and conviction is overflowing the country, it is not the America of those who, like Roosevelt and Hughes and Tait and Bryan, steadily make their appeal to the moral sense of the pp.uple. But it is the section of America in which wealth has largely been concentra'ed, and one day America will ask questions about the source and the use of that wealth. It is an America without conscience, without pity, without God."