Vulgar Displays

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 35, 31 August 1905, Page 2

Vulgar Displays

The possession of wealth often brings its disillusions. Even Hack Finn found thfis out for, himself. ' Being rich, 1 said he to Tom Sawyer, • ain't what it's cracked up bo be.' Without desiring to be as rich as Monte Cristo, most people would, nevertheless, cheerfully resign themselves to their fate if some fairy Rotoir* Godfellow were to drop a modest £10,000 into their lap. The real trouble does not, as Buras seemed to think, lie in the unequal distribution ol the motorcars, the velvet-pile carpets, and the fat banking accounts. Such things must to some extent ever be, despite the bard's complaint :— 1 It's hardly in a body's power To keep at times frae being sour, To see how things are shared ; How best o' chiefs are whyles in want, While coofs on countless thousands rant, And ken na how to wair't.' Mere Inequality of possession has never by itself alone created a social or political revolution. But great social upheavals have been caused by vulgar displays of wealth arod the flaunting of bulging money-bags in the faces of people who felt the pangs of hunger unappeased. The French Revolution was not originally a revolt against the monarchical principle. It was in its first inception the wild anger of people who were fed— or starved—on buckwheat bread, and clad in rags and lived in wiwdowles-s, chimneyless hovels, against the monstrous expenditure and the fantastic display of wealth and gaiety of the Court of Versailles.

The demon of this form of discontent, like many another demon, sometimes climbs in by the ears. But he commonly enters by the eyes. Of late years the upstart rich and others of the wealthy lower orders in English society have been making, right in the heart of London,' those displays of vulgar ostentation that may yet bring dire, accumulated vengeance on their order. And the incidents of Mafeking day— when, for a time, a mob held London at its mercy— serve to show how near ana real the danger may at any moment be. The latest of these afflicting aberrations of vulgar wealth and evil taste was a fantastic and (if we may use the expression) barbarously costly ' gondola ' dinner given to a few guests in the courtyard of a London hotel, which was turned for the occasion into the counterfeit presentment of one of the canals of Venice. Champagne dinners to dogs are another phase of the craze for display by the gilded oafs who (to use Chesterfield's words) squander, without credit or advantage to themselves, more than men of sense would spend with both. Great wealth may be made a great blessing to a man , but (as NeuehateJ says in ' End ymi on ').it becomes so only to him who knows what to do with it. But there are so many tHiat do not know what to do with the shekels that fortune or inheritance has placed in their hands. The jewelled lower classes that gorged in the London gondola, with a trained elephant as waiter, belong to the same social category as the upstart governor of Brazil who had his horse shod with gold, and the Tough Ballarat miners who warmed their limbs and lit their pipes with biasing banknotes, and took their morning tub in Moet and Chandon, and played games of ninepins with Wattles of champagne— the player that broke fewest paying for all. They are all ' birds of a feather.'

Some poet — we cannot at this moment give him a local habitation and a name— has said :— ' When from a thousand, one alone In plenty rolls along, While others starve and faint for bread, There must be something wrong.' In the very city where the knot of beetle-headed plutocrats were devising new and fantastic means of idle display, there are 127,623 paupers— a number that equals the total population of the cities proper of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin. No fewer than

77,000 of these are interned in those physical hells-of-the-damned of decent poverty, the workhouses. Ten years ago there were same 10,000 fewer of these hapless mortals' forced by the pressure of hunger into joining the dreary ranks ot the indoor paupers in institutions where tho dignity of mianhoofl is not recognised, and where the spirit of Bumble still rules with a tyranny that has known no great mitigation since the days of Oliver Twist. In the past twenty years London's expenditure upon its paupers has increased by twenty per cent. Last year it stood at £4,355,531— an increase of £1,630,736 since 1894. There was no pauperism in England in its Catholic days. That is one of the evil legacies of ' the blessed Reformation.' In the old Catholic days, property was deemed to be held in stewardship. The social principles introduced at the Reformation looked upon it as an absolute ownership. In the first sixty years that followed the introduction of the new religion, no fewer than twelve Acts of Parliament were passed dealing with the distress that (as Thorold Rogers says) ' can be traced distinctly back to the crimes of rulers and agents. 1 And in these Acts, for Hhe first time in Christian history, ' poverty and crime were treated as indistinguishable.' The evil that men do lives after them. Two such opposite phases of English social life as the barbarian luxury of the'Lucul-lus-feast of the gondola, and the savage poverty of the ' workus,' may be equally trafced to what Jessop calls 1 the general scramble of the Terror under Henry the Eighth, and of the anarchy in the days of Edward the Sixth ' — when the patrimony of the poor was ' plundered even to the very pots and pans ' for the ' private and proper lucre ' of the Sovereign and those of his complaisant favorites who had embraced the new creed.