Definition of the limit—Those whose means are above the limit—Income translated into terms of subsistence—The case of the rich man—His establishments—His servants—His luxuries—Extravagance—Vanity—Sport—Racing—Yachting—Condemnation of excess.

A more precise definition must be given of the limit of income referred to in the last chapter as “a definite amount of money which might be roughly described as a full competence.”

Every man requires, though he by no means always gets a certain income to satisfy his own needs and those of his family. In addition to this he can profitably spend more so as to add to his general utility by conveniences and comforts, he can satisfy his artistic proclivities, his desire for further knowledge, his taste for sport or amusement, all to his own and the general benefit without hurt or hindrance to anyone. But after allowing the broadest scope for the satisfaction of these legitimate wants there is a definite point beyond which he cannot safely go. That is to say, if he acquires, or if by inheritance he finds himself burdened with money beyond this limit it will inevitably react detrimentally on himself and on others. And this for two reasons: firstly because he is, as a normal human being, incapable of dealing with so great a charge, and secondly because the money, while in his possession, is being drawn away from other channels where there is special need for it.

So long as money encourages healthy effort a man may be sure the limit has not been reached, the moment money tends to relax effort the limit has been passed. It must be described as healthy effort, as, of course, money-making may increase the undesirable efforts of the speculator, the gambler, and the thief. But who is to decide what is healthy effort? The man himself. No one else can. And he knows to a nicety. Every man or woman has a different standard, and the level of the limit varies in each individual case according to ideals, capacity, and temperament. But it will not depend at all on what is one of the strongest and often the most excusable inducements for spending money, namely, environment, or the conventions of the particular stratum of society to which the man belongs. The limit for one will not be the limit for another, and a man can only become aware that this limit exists at all by observing very closely what actually is the effect that his money is having on his life and character, instead of blindly accepting his already excessive income or every increase of his fortune as a natural and unquestionable blessing.

The main brunt of the attack must clearly fall on those whose incomes are above the limit. They are in numbers a small minority, but the amount they possess is incredibly large. The present income of 1,250,000 people, assessed to income, reaches the vast sum of £850,000,000 a year. Taking the whole population of these islands, it is roughly estimated that there are 1½ millions who can be classed as rich, 3½ millions comfortably off, 38 millions as poor, of whom some 12 to 13 millions are in constant need. The existence of the 1½ millions is one of the chief causes of the condition of the 38 millions. In other words, excess above the limit causes want below the limit. The 3½ millions “comfortably off” are most of them occupied in trying to become identified with the select 1½ millions. If we could estimate the amounts in income which these classes represent the figures would be even more startling. The world has certainly never seen larger fortunes than exist to-day, nor has it seen more extensive and more inexcusable poverty. The average rate of luxurious living in the small minority is higher than it has ever been, and the dangerous and degrading effect of want on individuals and on the general community has never been so widespread or so intense. “The rich,” to use a simple term, are nearly all actuated by the same motive. They accept what they have and what they make as their own, to be spent on themselves, according to their own caprice, or on others, if they are so inclined, casting an occasional sop to some charity or philanthropic scheme as a salve to their consciences. There are, it must be acknowledged, a few, a very few who regard their riches as a trust and endeavour to the best of their ability to divert the greater part of it back into remunerative channels without exceeding a reasonable sum for their own personal wants. But as a class they insist that efforts to alter our social system are fruitless, disturbing and doomed to failure, the division of the world into rich and poor being a Providential decree, and if the rich can get service from the poor without their grumbling, that is the most desirable arrangement that can be conceived. To this a reply may be given in the words of Professor Marshall:

“Now at least we are setting ourselves seriously to inquire whether it is necessary that there should be any so-called ‘lower class’ at all: that is whether there need be large numbers of people doomed from their birth to hard work in order to provide for others the requisites of a refined and cultured life, while they themselves are prevented by their poverty and toil from having any share in that life.”

The case would not be quite so bad as it is if it were only “the requisites of a refined and cultured life” that they were made to provide. But this point must be considered later.

In order to appreciate fully the responsibility which the possession of riches entails, let us translate an income into terms of actual sustenance for human beings. By this means it is possible to arrive at a more or less positive measure. There is so much that is relative in most human requirements that they cannot serve as a standard or as a reliable quantity to be used in calculating any equation. But the requirements of a human being can be measured in terms of actual sustenance, because they can be estimated with something approaching precision.

Take a man with £20,000 a year, and say we deduct even as much as £3000 for himself and his family. With his remaining £17,000 he has the power of furnishing 170 people with £100 a year apiece. It is not for a moment suggested that he should do any such thing, as he would be quite unable to select 170 worthy people, and even if he could make the choice the 170 people, on the reception of this private dole, would soon become unworthy. This calculation is only taken to serve as a measure of his power. What might be the income or, more correctly speaking, the means of existence of 170 lives, is vested in one man, who is under the impression—and no one attempts to dispute it—that he is capable of disposing of this sum in a way that is generally beneficial.

Now let us state the case fairly from the point of view of the rich man, taking a reasonable and more or less representative type. He may have £10,000, £50,000, or £100,000 a year—that only alters his activities in scope, not in quality. Let us say he has two or three country houses and a house in London. His “position” requires him to keep up a certain establishment, and this means the employment of some forty or fifty servants, grooms, gardeners, chauffeurs, etc., who, he readily tells you, will be thrown out of employment should any of his money be taken from him. If we take the case of a landlord, he will also have tenants, bailiffs, farm labourers, and gamekeepers dependent on him. He keeps the home farm and lets out the other farms on his estate to tenant farmers. Part of his land is built over and brings him in substantial returns in the shape of rent. His villages are in good order and the cottages kept in proper repair. Some thousands of acres or so he keeps for shooting. He may have a deer forest on one of his estates, and perhaps also a grouse moor or a river. Whether he keeps a racing stable, a pack of hounds, or a yacht depends on his particular fancy. He will acknowledge that he spends a certain amount on luxuries, but that “is good for trade,” as great numbers of people have to be employed in the manufacture of these luxuries. He is kind to his poor relations, whom he entertains and helps; and his subscription list to hospitals, charities, and philanthropic works is a large one. He enjoys himself in an unostentatious but suitably expensive way, and his various responsibilities allow him to lead a life consisting of occasional rushes of activity and prolonged intervals of leisure. He most probably finds he can spare a certain amount of money for speculation, with a view to adding more to the sum total of his income. He looks forward to handing down to his children sufficient means to make each of them independent, and meanwhile has his boys educated in the large public schools, where they can associate with boys who are similarly situated.

What possible harm can there be in all this? So far from being parasitic, he counts himself as a beneficent agent in the general industrial activity, at the same time appearing as a credit to his society and a notably refined product of the class of which he is a member. Above all, he is popular, and gains ostensibly the respect and regard of his friends, his neighbours, and his dependents. A favourable case has purposely been made for him, because if we accuse him of self-indulgence and greed, and describe him as a gambler, spending his substance on objects which are generally admitted to be pernicious and unworthy, the case could not be defended at all.

The fundamental theory which makes this man’s position untenable has already been explained—namely, that after he has satisfied his legitimate requirements all the surplus money he keeps is being held back from serving urgent needs; and, moreover, the method in which he spends the surplus is directly or indirectly harmful to himself and others.

We call the money his as if by some miracle he had made it. Often enough he has not helped even by the smallest exertion to create it. The wealth has been and is being daily and hourly produced by the exertion of numberless people who are either employed by him or employed in furthering enterprises in which he has invested his money. It will be said that his share as the wise dispenser of capital, without which labour and enterprise could not be set in motion, is an all-important part of the general process of business. But he invests not to promote enterprise, but to get high dividends; and an elaborate system has been set up in order to tempt him to put his money into concerns that are by no means always sound or of the smallest public utility. Capital would exist and flow far more freely without the large capitalist. He acts as a dam to the stream; a certain amount escapes back into the main channel, but much more is checked and diverted into stagnant and putrefying pools of his own creation. The free flow of blood is life-giving; the clotting or coagulation of blood produces disease.

Let us take the various points raised by his case seriatim. Many acutely controversial problems are opened, and it will be difficult to detach the particular actions of the rich man without generalising, to some extent, on the problems themselves. It is no argument against our main contention to say that people with costly tastes have, while gratifying them, been able to exercise powers of a high order, for, obviously, it is in spite of their shortcomings in this respect that they have succeeded, and not because of them. If some men with means have done valuable public service and performed admirable work in many different spheres of life, this they have done as men naturally gifted with high accomplishments, not as rich men. Here we are only concerned with their works and deeds in their latter capacity.

It does not affect our argument whether our typical example has been brought up to regard this way of living as natural and necessary for a man of what is called his “position” (that is to say, the purely artificial place which a rich man is able to take up in the community solely on account of his riches), or whether he has made the money for himself and is simply aping the habits and customs of those who already possess it. The distinction between the vieux riches and the nouveaux riches is one they can fight out between themselves. The former scoffs at the latter while all the time he is setting him, and consciously setting him, the example he is to follow. It is not the gaining, but the spending of the money that must occupy our attention here.

Our friend’s houses are only a detail in the upkeep of his position. They may be historic castles, sham “ancestral halls,” modern “palatial country residences,” or “fashionable mansions” in town. Does it ever strike the owner as, let us say, a curious arrangement that he should have several houses of fifty to a hundred rooms apiece while some millions of his fellow-men do not own one room? Does he know that in England and Wales alone 507,763 people occupy one-room tenements, 48.4% of which are classified as overcrowded, while 12,458,150 are occupying tenements of two, three, or four rooms?4 In any case, he would indignantly refuse to admit that there was any remote connection between these two sets of circumstances.

When we come to the staff necessary for the maintenance of these large establishments we touch a problem of employment which must be examined more closely. It is not sufficient to state baldly that these people are employed, and that if the opening were not available for them they would be unemployed. The immediate result of their being discharged would no doubt in some cases be unemployment. That is just the mischief of uneconomic employment. If a large number were simultaneously dismissed there might be temporary unemployment on a large scale, as it would amount to dislocation, like the extinction of some dying industry. But the eventual readjustment would subsequently be by that much the stronger and better adapted to the real requirements of the community. To employ a man in useless and unremunerative work can be regarded in some aspects as worse than not employing him at all. It is not intended, however—and, indeed, it would be impossible—here to enter into a discussion on the whole problem of unemployment, but there is undoubtedly a very great economic waste that largely contributes to the gravity of the problem, arising from the fact that a large number of people are being forced to devote their labour and energy to work which is, so to speak, final and sterile. It is precisely the same with regard to the production of expensive luxuries. The employment of a large retinue is only another form of the possession and enjoyment of articles of excessive luxury. The employers and possessors have all disagreeable burdens and every sordid worry lifted from them, their smallest and their most extreme desires for pleasure met, their special appetites satisfied, their peculiar vanities titillated, and their artificial position safeguarded and maintained, without their giving more than a passing thought to the mass of people required to carry on this work. Plenty of examples might be quoted in contemporary as well as past history to show that after generations of the enjoyment of “the vile joys of tainting luxury” men deteriorate, both physically and mentally.

As for the particular line of life which domestic service offers under modern circumstances, it is not too much to say that it is, as a rule, very demoralising, more especially for the men. And its demoralising tendency increases in proportion to the size of the establishment. The single general servant lives a life of hard work but genuine service on four to eight shillings a week, often living in friendly relations with master or mistress, and really lifting from them the burden of necessary domestic duties which they with limited incomes and professional work of their own cannot possibly find time to perform; and this remains true in other small households. In the large house the faithful old family servant, who is more of a friend than a servitor, is rare in these days of ostentation. The butler, on wages of fifty to sixty shillings a week, which together with board and lodging represents from £250 to £300 a year, has a life of leisure, ease, and excessive comfort, seldom having to exert himself even up to his limited capacities. Male house-servants are often chosen for their looks; their work is very light physically, they are overfed, and being under-educated, can hardly be blamed for becoming demoralised. These able-bodied men, whose muscles, if not their minds, might be devoted to some really serviceable purpose, are still increasing in numbers. Over 25,000 more male servants have got employment in the last ten years, the total number now being 227,995. Even deducting the single indoor servant, the single coachman or gardener, this means a large increase of ornamental male attendants. Female servants are becoming more difficult to secure in the higher grades, because the class of women from which they are drawn value their liberty and are not so ready to sacrifice it for food and comforts. In fact, they are showing signs of impatience of control, and of preferring the risky though exhilarating struggle of independence. But still large retinues of men and women exist solely employed in keeping up huge houses to satisfy the vanity and minister to the comfort of a comparatively few rich people. No work of a more hopelessly barren, profitless, and, indeed, degrading character could be found for them. A system of tips deprives their smallest acts of what might be an obliging and disinterested intention. Arrangements are organised with tradesmen to defraud the employers in what is thought a perfectly legitimate way; the actual waste of food is appalling, and by extras, gratuities, perquisites, commissions, and pickings a considerable amount is added to the wages of the upper servants. In these large establishments immorality exists more as a rule than as an exception, but it can be kept secret, for these communities of private servants—like everything else connected with the lives of the rich—cannot be made the subject of investigation.

If assistance to those who need it is the object of domestic service, it is striking to note that on the money basis, generally speaking, the wrong people are served. Who in the community most require and should specially have the help of servants? The old and infirm, the weak and ill, the very young and the hard-worked. Service under such conditions raises itself to the level of one of the highest occupations that can be imagined. But this is not our system. A man or woman may be ill, old or over-worked, without being able to get the assistance of a single soul. Another man or woman may be young and healthy and have at his or her command a retinue of thirty servants or more, solely because they have money and servants are forced, by economic pressure, to devote their lives to the menial task of furbishing up the endless and complicated appanage of wealth.

Now let us turn to the inanimate luxuries, taking into account only indisputable luxuries—that is to say, articles of high price which have no special artistic value, to which much labour has been devoted and which are not produced to serve any legitimately useful purpose. Luxury has been well defined as “that which creates imaginary needs, exaggerates real wants, diverts them from their true end, establishes a habit of prodigality in Society, and offers through the senses a satisfaction of self-love which puffs up but does not nourish the heart and which presents to others the picture of happiness they can never attain.”

Bond Street catalogues abound with any quantity of examples. Furs at one thousand guineas, fifty-guinea dressing-bags, twenty-guinea hats, thousand-guinea tiaras, fruit and vegetables out of season, cigars at three shillings apiece, ruinously expensive wines, and fantastic foods of all descriptions. There is no need to exaggerate, for all those articles can be bought for much higher prices than those quoted. A great amount of skilled labour of a high order goes to the production of these luxuries, and a great amount of labour of the lowest and most cruelly sweated description is also enlisted for their production, and incredible as it may seem, it is on the ground that they give employment that these luxuries are defended. It was calculated in 18845 that, even giving a liberal extension of meaning to the term “necessaries” and “comforts” of life, over six millions of manual labourers, who with their families constitute thirteen millions of the population, were engaged in producing what, in contradistinction to the above, must be classified as luxuries.

A prominent statesman,6 expressing the views of his class, said a few years ago: “The more human wants are stimulated and multiplied, the more widespread will be the inducement to hire. Therefore all outcries and prejudices against the progress of wealth and what is called luxury are nothing but outcries of prejudice against the very sources and fountains of all employment.”

On such an argument as this the defence of luxuries generally rests. The essence of the fallacy lies in the fact, which cannot be repeated too often, that labour spent on such articles is unremunerative and unproductive, because its ultimate result is only to gratify various forms of vanity and greed. To exemplify by a concrete instance what is unremunerative and what is remunerative, let us take a hundred-guinea ball-gown and a pair of boots. It is not possible to estimate the number of people employed in producing the ball-gown. There is the silk, satin, or whatever the principal material may be; there are the trimmings of chiffon, hand-embroidery, lace, braid, beads, sequins, ribbons, etc., etc.; some hundreds of pairs of hands, including factory-workers, dressmakers, sempstresses, etc., will have touched some part of the gown before it is delivered to the wearer. To what end are all these specialised departments of labour concentrated? The gown is worn a few times in the one season; the wearer has the satisfaction of feeling as well dressed as A. to F., and far better dressed than F. to Z. In fact, the net result of all this expenditure of energy is the generating of a rather foolish pride, the encouragement of conceit on the one side and envy on the other, and the hardening of a nature into ways of worldliness and vanity.

As for the boots. Again, many more hands than can be calculated have helped to produce them, but they are directly and immediately serviceable to the purchaser, to whose activity the wearing of boots is an essential, and in general they minister to the efficiency of human machines.

But if balls are not wrong, ball-gowns must be worn. It is a question of degree; and here again we get to the theory of the limit which in this conjunction can be expressed thus: In relation to human needs, in relation to human powers of enjoyment, in relation to the beneficial effects of pleasure, even in relation to the dictates of fashion, there is a distinct limit not to be expressed in figures up to which expenditure (in this particular case on dress) is legitimate and relatively productive, beyond which it becomes progressively unremunerative and harmful. A hundred guineas, by any conceivable method of calculation, greatly exceeds this limit.

To assert that the purchase of luxuries is good for trade is quite as ridiculous as to say that a man can benefit the building and furnishing trade by burning down his house once a year. We do not want to create more artificial wants before we have satisfied the crying human needs which already exist. There is no loophole through which a reasonable defence of the senseless expenditure, which goes on in an increasing measure, can be made. Luxurious living has never been quite so blatant and unashamed as it is to-day, and the effete epicureanism and decadent effeminacy it produces stand out in rather sharp contrast to more hopeful signs of progress and moral and intellectual refinement and vigour which, happily, are visible around us.

A lady writing in a review in the early ’seventies describes life in the country house, with its futile routine of heavy meals, sport, card-playing, and vacuous inanities which take the place of conversation, all very much as it is to-day. The writer speaks with dismay of gowns costing sixty guineas and of £1000 a year spent on clothes. But these figures are almost negligible compared with the sums spent nowadays. It is only through occasional actions in the courts that the outside public get an idea of what is actually spent, and it is surprising that there are not more disclosures, considering the mountainous debts that are piled up in West End shops. But the shopkeepers are very reluctant to lose a really leading customer, and they know how to meet the inconvenience of not being promptly paid. A typical case may be given of an article of clothing, the cost price of which was nine guineas, being sold for £28 7s. There may be delay in payment, but there appears to be compensation in the profit.

When one hears of the woman who spent last year £36 5s. on a hat, or another who gave £1250 for a sable cape, it is not the isolated action of criminal folly that chiefly strikes one, but it is that the hat and the cape act as indicators of the sort of price such women are in the habit of paying for their clothes, a large supply of which are in the market ready to meet this artificial demand. Moreover, the habit of extravagance, especially as regards female clothing, is catching and runs through all classes once the example is set. It is a common enough and very depressing sight to see absurdly elaborate clothes, which are cheaper imitations of the latest fashions, worn by women of the lower middle-class, whose deplorable want of education is shown by their inability even to pronounce their mother tongue. They watch the rich, and gather from what they see that fine feathers make fine birds, and it is not on them that the blame should rest.

Vanity exists and insists on being satisfied. It is no good blinking the fact. Luxuries, in one form or another, will continue to be produced. But there is no reason why we should not stem the current lest it swell to danger point. There are many well-known historical examples of the enervating and degenerating effect of luxury on national life, and the modern tendency towards an increased production of these indulgences should be combated not only as a moral weakness, but as an integral factor in the general economic problem. When one considers what real comfort of living, with all the necessary intellectual and artistic equipage, opportunities for amusement, and domestic convenience, can be secured to-day at a comparatively moderate sum, it makes the wild and profligate extravagance the more inexcusable and the more futile.

Anyhow, let us abandon once and for all the foolish and ignorant attitude of regarding this display as a desirable form of industrial stimulus which should be fostered and encouraged. Preaching and writing against it has never been of the smallest avail, but it has been necessary to deal with it here as a very important, if not predominating, element in the analysis of the rich man’s conceptions of his duties.

In addition to luxuries of establishment, clothes, and food there is a complicated ritual of sport which in this country reaches an almost incredible pitch. It has been estimated that forty-five millions are permanently invested in the apparatus of sport, and an income of over forty millions spent annually upon it. We need not discuss all the intricacies of the numerous branches of sport, observing where its effect is healthy and where harmful. No one will contend that the most expensive forms of it are by any manner of means the best. But the most obvious harm to be noted in this connection is the amount of land which is taken away from agriculture for sporting purposes. Landlords often keep up their shooting at a great loss, amounting to something like five to ten pounds per bird shot, all for the sake of having the shooting and asking friends down for a few days in the year to enjoy it. It is gravely regarded as an essential part of the education of a young man in this particular world to learn how to shoot. No question, even with respect to his education or possible professional career, is treated with more seriousness than the moment he first handles a gun, and family advice is sought as to how and when encouragement can be given to the development of this essential qualification which, coupled with a knowledge of bridge, will make him a desirable visitor in any country house.

At card-playing, which occupies a vast amount of time in the lives of the rich, sums amounting to hundreds are often lost or gained by one person in one evening. But of the various sinks which help to drain away their money, horse-racing almost holds the first place. There are no statistics to show how many people have been ruined by it, or how many have been lured into a life of gambling by their success in the betting ring. But its popularity is certainly on the increase, as we can see by looking at the number of horses that have run under the rules of racing in the last thirty years. In 1878 there were 2097; in 1908 this figure had risen to 3706. The number of larger race meetings advertised in advance have more than doubled since 1881 (78 in 1881, 164 in 1909). Some sort of estimate of the money spent on it, apart from betting, can be gathered from the amounts won. In 1908 the winning owners secured between them nearly a quarter of a million pounds, the sums won by the first thirty-six amounting to £246,001 15s., the largest total secured by one owner being £26,246.7

The populace are invited to join in this pursuit, though, of course, they must be railed off to prevent too close contact with those who come in coaches and motor-cars. The crowd is vaguely supposed to be having a good time, and any attack on horse-racing is met by hackneyed arguments about “keeping up the national sport” or “improving the breed of horses,” and perhaps, again, the objection of unemployment for jockeys and bookies might be dragged in.

It does not appear, however, to be a good method of improving the human breed. In observing the crowd on a race-course, whether it be the well-dressed portion or the ill-dressed, the betters or the bookies, neither a deep knowledge of humanity nor a very close power of observation into physiognomy is required to note the prevalence of a remarkably low type. But a still more vivid impression of what the pleasures of racing mean can be gained by going out on the road in the evening towards the scene of a large race meeting when the people are returning. Brakes and carts in endless procession will pass you loaded with men shouting in the excitement of semi-drunkenness, or with heaps of humanity sodden and silent in complete intoxication. Outside every public-house on the roadside traps await those who are squandering their gains on further refreshment or soothing the despair of losses in the temporary oblivion of drink. The localities where there is an annual race week suffer considerably, the inhabitants become infected by the gambling and betting mania, and during the actual days of the races the place is infested by the lowest dregs of the riff-raff who journey about from one race meeting to another. This so-called sport produces the lowest possible type; it degrades many who take part in it with sinister rapidity, it encourages fraud and deception, it is a canker of rottenness in public life, and it receives the highest sanction and patronage.

Many people are present at a race meeting without being conscious that it is attended by any evil consequences. They go to meet their friends, perhaps putting an occasional sovereign on a horse to give them some interest in the racing. To them the crowd is a natural part of the proceedings, the heavy bets of the ring an amusement. To have been there is something to boast of, and conveys the idea that they have associated with smart people. Thoughtless, as in so many of their other pursuits, they accept the whole proceeding as a recognised sport and they inquire no further. The philosophy of these people is the prevailing philosophy: “Do not examine below the surface, or you are bound to find something disagreeable. Take things as they come; skim the cream off the top; avoid that which is unpleasant or difficult to explain; and above all things, do what others do.”

Yachting, which also runs away with a great deal of money, comes under a very different category. It is a health-giving and often strenuous occupation, and the seamen employed are, anyhow, deriving incidentally some positive benefit from the life they lead. Nevertheless, out of the 4655 private yachts registered in the current year (an increase of over 3500 in the last forty years),8 only a very small proportion are actually navigated by owners who have any knowledge or love of seamanship. The great majority are floating houses of luxury (viz. a 700-ton steam yacht, for which £25 a day is paid for coal when in use), or racing yachts, mere toys used to minister to the fanciful pleasures of the rich.

But in expressing the strongest disapproval of these excessive luxuries, it is not for a moment suggested that people should rush into the opposite extreme—live in discomfort and adopt the craze for “the simple life,” which is only an inverted form of vanity and ostentation. There are many of the lesser luxuries which give great pleasure and sufficient honest gratification to justify their existence. There may even be some reluctance in condemning extravagance, because the nature of the extravagant man is far preferable to the economical and cautious disposition which sometimes sinks into niggardly meanness. Moreover, any attempt at excessive restrictions and unnecessarily harsh discipline in the upbringing of children invariably leads to a violent reaction in the direction of profligacy and extravagance.

Let human nature be allowed free play in all directions; but it is not taking up the attitude of an ascetic or of a prig to condemn unhesitatingly unnatural excesses, reckless licence, the extremes of self-indulgence and greed, the exercise of which by some few involves the neglect, misery, and ruin of so many others. Thieves when they steal use violence and are pronounced enemies of society. These few people, by a silent conspiracy in which we all seem to acquiesce, are also stealing and are equally enemies of society.