THE SECOND GENERATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9695, 20 January 1910, Page 4

THE SECOND GENERATION.

Ihere is a proverbial saying that American fatr.ilies pass "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," having, it may be. climbed to the giddy heights of affluence in the interval. The other day the cable informed us that the late Mr Pullman, the millionaire inventor of the car bearing his name, who started as a working cabinetmaker and died worth three millions sterling, had "cut off" his sons with an income of £6OO a year on the ground that they are incapable of realising the responsibilities of wealth. Not many American millionaires have shown the same courage in dealing with their children. It is a common saying in the States that the sons of millinraires are fools, and though brilliant cases to the contrary can ba cited, there seems to be some justification for the gibe. Many a writer has pictured the irony of the millionaire's career—the incessant toil to the sacrifice of all other interests to acquire a vast fortune for idle young men to dissipate. The popular belief has been partly subscribed to by Mr Roosevelt. In a Message to Congress that unconventional President referred to the "hard, cruel multi-millionaire, whose son is a fool and whose daughter is a foreign princess." Mr Carnegie has declared that wealth in America has never yet passed beyond the third generation, and seldom gets so far. There are, of course, m every country, plenty of idle rich young men with little or no sense of wealth's responsibilities, but American conditions seem peculiarly favourable to the development of the type. Nowhere else are fortunes so vast, nowhere is extravagance so naked and unabashed.