Happy?

Let me admit at the outset that I write this essay without
adequate material. I have never known, I have never seen,
any rich people. Very often I have thought that I had
found them. But it turned out that it was not so. They
were not rich at all. They were quite poor. They were
hard up. They were pushed for money. They didn't know
where to turn for ten thousand dollars.

In all the cases that I have examined this same error
has crept in. I had often imagined, from the fact of
people keeping fifteen servants, that they were rich. I
had supposed that because a woman rode down town in a
limousine to buy a fifty-dollar hat, she must be well to
do. Not at all. All these people turn out on examination
to be not rich. They are cramped. They say it themselves.
Pinched, I think, is the word they use. When I see a
glittering group of eight people in a stage box at the
opera, I know that they are all pinched. The fact that
they ride home in a limousine has nothing to do with it.

A friend of mine who has ten thousand dollars a year told
me the other day with a sigh that he found it quite
impossible to keep up with the rich. On his income he
couldn't do it. A family that I know who have twenty
thousand a year have told me the same thing. They can't
keep up with the rich. There is no use trying. A man that
I respect very much who has an income of fifty thousand
dollars a year from his law practice has told me with
the greatest frankness that he finds it absolutely
impossible to keep up with the rich. He says it is better
to face the brutal fact of being poor. He says he can
only give me a plain meal, what he calls a home dinner
--it takes three men and two women to serve it--and he
begs me to put up with it.

As far as I remember, I have never met Mr. Carnegie. But
I know that if I did he would tell me that he found it
quite impossible to keep up with Mr. Rockefeller. No
doubt Mr. Rockefeller has the same feeling.

On the other hand there are, and there must be rich
people, somewhere. I run across traces of them all the
time. The janitor in the building where I work has told
me that he has a rich cousin in England who is in the
South-Western Railway and gets ten pounds a week. He says
the railway wouldn't know what to do without him. In the
same way the lady who washes at my house has a rich uncle.
He lives in Winnipeg and owns his own house, clear, and
has two girls at the high school.

But these are only re