with mere words; and if
we look at our extravagance in this way, we may regard it as a
national trait, developed from our natural position and advantages.

Of course, it is easy to say that Americans are lavish because, as Dr.
Watts puts it, "it is their nature to" be, but the real reason for the
overgrown luxury of the last two or three decades is to be found in
the rapid increase of the vulgar rich, the very last class worthy of
our imitation. Are not the absurd blunders of the poor man who strikes
oil a common subject for witticisms and stories?

Profuse display will probably be the only social grace the newly rich
can dispense. So, then, if wealth increases more rapidly than
culture, it is sure, in the very nature of things, to be squandered
ostentatiously; for the men whose minds are in a stunted state, being
fit for nothing else, will throw their money away on cards or horses
or any other fashionable form of dissipation; and the women in the
same mental incompleteness, knowing nothing but how to dress and
dance, when they have wealth thrust upon them will be able to find no
better use for it than to dress and dance all the more conspicuously.

This senseless love of display, once inaugurated in a city set or in a
small town, is apt to take the lead: first, because all the snobs will
cater to it; second, because sensible people know that they cannot
start a reform movement without making themselves unpopular, and going
to a great deal of trouble and expense.

For, however extravagant the machinery of society is, it has the
enormous advantage of being there, and few people can afford to live
against it. For to do as every one else does, and to go with the
stream, is much easier than to set good examples that no one wants to
follow. Indeed it takes a tremendous exercise of pluck, thought,
trouble, time, and energy to reduce an establishment that has been an
extravagant one to a more economical footing.

The justification of private extravagant expenditure is found in the
necessity of a class who will have leisure to encourage the
intellectual tastes and ambitions of the nation. And this end might be
accomplished if only matters could be so arranged that a shower of
gold should descend on the right people in the right place at the
right time.

But wealth is no more to the worthy than the race is to the strong,
and so it often finds outlets for dispersion for which there is no
justification, and whose sole obje