The Reign of Gilt
9781465655257
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The eminent Bishop of the Episcopalian diocese of New York has spent practically his whole life among people of wealth and fashion and their associates. He has made some brief excursions, but his social relations, his intimacies have been altogether with what Parton calls “the triumphant classes.” He knows the plutocracy; his diocese lies in its stronghold, includes many of its most conspicuous and aggressive leaders both in making and spending money. There can be no question of his qualification to speak authoritatively of it, of its mode of living and thinking. He has said: “Hear a group of young girls whose fresh youth one would think ought, in the matter of their most tender and sacred affection, to be as free from sordid instinct as from the taint of a godless cynicism. You will find that they have their price, and are not to be had without it any more than a Circassian slave in the market of Bagdad.” Again: “If the first comers to these shores were to come back to-day and see the houses, the dress and the manners of their descendants, they would think themselves in London in the time of Charles, or in Versailles in the time of the Louises.” When he went on to urge the rich “to illustrate in their habit of life simplicity of attire, inexpensiveness in the appointments and chasteness in the aspect, proportions, furniture and decorations of their dwellings,” he could have meant only that he finds the Americans whom he knows best for the most part ostentatious and extravagant in dress, prodigal and vulgar and ignorantly profuse in their dwellings. And when he charged them with having “the buying of legislatures as their highest distinction” and with “appropriating the achievements of the scholar, the inventor, the pioneer in commerce or the arts, without rewarding them for the products of their genius,” he framed an indictment not on belief but on knowledge which becomes tremendous in view of the conservative character of his mind and his training, the dignity and responsibility of his position and the unequalled opportunity that is his to know whereof he speaks. Lord Methuen, felled in a trifling engagement in the Boer war by one of those flesh wounds that are most painful but not serious, telegraphed home, “This is the bloodiest battle in history.” His point of view was rather too personal. And somewhat so must it have been with the Bishop when he concluded his survey of the encompassing plutocracy with this wild, despairing cry: “The whole people are corrupted and corrupting! Moloch is god and his shrine is in almost every household in the republic!” Fifth avenue and Wall street are not all of Manhattan Island: Manhattan Island is not all of New York City; New York City is not the only city in America; and outside the cities in every direction stretch vast areas of American soil not without its population. The plutocracy is a phase, not the whole. If the distinguished Bishop were as competent to speak of the American people as he is of the plutocracy, we might well feel that it is all over with the republic—that we Americans have bartered our birthright for a few handfuls of yellow earth and richly deserve our fate of social, political and industrial serfdom.
