The rich man’s children—His sons’ education at school and university—His daughters—Love and marriage—Refinement of the aristocracy—Their alliance with the plutocracy—Smart society—Its general characteristics.

The natural desire of every man is to do the best he can for his children, and in this respect the rich man feels that his money is of special advantage to him. But are healthy upbringing and good education superior in quality if they are expensive? The whole trouble with regard to these children is comprised in the fact that they know they are going to have money, so that from the earliest age they accept their elevation from the common herd as a matter of course, and assume the easy assurance and authoritative manner which always characterises them. Their childhood they spend guarded by servants, nurses, governesses, and tutors, often without coming much into personal contact with their parents or deriving any benefits from parental care and affection, the strongest of all the variety of influences in a man’s life; they also have a more or less general consciousness that anything they want can be had for the asking. The boys are sent to public schools, where there are many others in a like position, and where the expense of education is greater than in other schools, and its quality rather inferior. Here they are given a vague notion of ancient Jews, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and of England in the Middle Ages. But nothing is taught them of contemporary history, of English literature, or of how their own country is governed to-day, nor is a moment found during those early years for a preliminary study of political economy or some elementary exposition of industrial and social problems, though such exposition would be invaluable, if only to impress on young and acquisitive minds the fact that such problems exist. In short, the world they are living in is never explained to them. And, whatever they may learn, from start to finish they are assiduously kept in a groove where their own class is represented to them as the predominating and important section of the community, which may expect service but need not render it.

To do schoolboys justice, however, they cannot be accused of being snobs. They care nothing for rank or riches. They have their own particular standard of judging who is “a good chap” and who is not, and on the whole their verdict is shrewd and not unfair. They are apt to be over-severe against breaches of their particular code, and they are very suspicious of any signs of originality. It is in this direction that they make many serious mistakes. But that a boy has a title is a matter of complete indifference to them, or whether or not he be the son of very rich parents is a matter about which they would not think it worth while to inquire. No distinctions are made; the sons of the rich mix with their school-fellows without being conscious of occupying any special position, and their school-fellows accept them without even knowing they are the sons of the rich. The harm they do quite unconsciously is not of an obvious kind, and its very subtilty prevents it from being recognised. They themselves know what the future has in store for them, and it necessarily affects their attitude towards school work and general intellectual training for after life. They are callous and indifferent as to education, regarding it not as an essential preparation for their life’s work, but as a tedious exercise which has to be gone through, and in which they are assisted by the natural curiosity of youth and an instinctive dislike of ignorance. If they are popular this view, accompanied by a certain amount of swagger and a preference for and often a proficiency in games and sport, gives them a position which is distinctly attractive to the boy mind, and their influence spreads very rapidly among those who in after life have got to work for their livelihood. In those schools where there is no disturbing element emanating from the presence of rich leisured boys the standard of efficient work—not estimated by the measure of worldly success which titles and position afford—will be found to be higher than in the few schools which lay themselves out to receive this class of boy. It is not to be inferred that the rich man’s son never has sufficient ability and, indeed, industry to distinguish himself in the intellectual field. But it is the influence and example of those who have been brought up from their earliest childhood knowing that they have not to work in order to live, that creates an atmosphere which must be unfavourable to the training of boys for whom life is not to be one prolonged holiday.

At the university the superiority of the position of richer boys is first acknowledged. They are free to spend their money and make the display, in one direction or another, which is to distinguish them from their fellows for the rest of their lives, and recruits for their band of toadies and tuft-hunters begin to enlist. Should they not be completely independent the question of the choice of a profession has to be discussed, and is almost invariably regarded purely from the monetary point of view of pay and salary. Many either enter professions which they allow to occupy very little of their time or have no profession at all, and their incomes preclude them from deriving any of the unquestionable advantages of professional training and discipline, without which no man can be expected to cultivate the talents he may possess, or acquire knowledge and experience which might make him a useful associate in the general activity of the community he lives in. We will not enlarge on the sort of life they lead—the unrelieved pursuit of enjoyment, the London season, the country house parties, the race meetings, the shooting and hunting, the visit to the Continental watering-place to recover from the fatigues before starting again, and so on and so on. It is sufficient to know that they contribute as little as possible to and extract as much as they can from the general fund of national wealth.

The girls meanwhile receive hardly any real education at all, except in the knowledge of the little world which they are taught to believe is the whole world, and within the walls of which they are probably destined to spend the remainder of their days. The moment of “coming out” is held before them as the one thing to look forward to. And when the longed-for day arrives, it is only the signal for the commencement of an exhausting round of pleasures sanctioned by their society and represented to them as being the one absorbing business of life. It is only charitable to accuse them of being uneducated, otherwise it would be hard to explain psychologically the attitude of mind, of cheerful acceptance of the fate in store for them instead of rebellion against it. If, in rare cases, they attempt to follow a line of their own and join the professional class, every conceivable obstacle is put in their way, and the prejudice against work which is not the business of “a lady” is generally strong enough to drive them back into the smooth groove of leisure. Not infrequently this fatal obligatory idleness crushes the spirit out of them.

In later years love and marriage, difficult enough problems for anyone, have additional snares and pitfalls for the children of the rich. It is true that the rich man can marry the penniless girl to whom he is devoted, and the rich girl can accept the man who is struggling for a living. But the far more frequent occurrence is for the rich girl to be captured by the man who wants her money, and for the rich man to be entrapped by the ambitious mother who wants his wealth for her daughter. Not even experience teaches. Instances could be given of women who have married for money, and though every page of their life has taught them the folly of this irreparable step, yet they refuse to learn.

They spend their later life in arranging marriages at all costs with rich men for their daughters, placing insurmountable obstacles in their way if they attempt marriages on moderate means, which must entail their dropping out from the ranks of the select. So it is that here again money, far from assisting, impedes and even stifles the natural preferences of human affections, and the average of unfortunate and disastrous unions is far higher among the rich than in any other class. Some people are apt to believe that the society scandals which afford so much material for newspaper reports and gossip give an unfair impression of the frequency of these disasters, which they maintain arise just as often in other classes of society, but are not as widely reported. This is not the case. In the middle and lower professional classes, where marriages have been contracted by parties free to exercise their natural choice and where lives are filled with work and occupation, scandals of this description are very rare. It is in the class where, as we have shown, the power to select is restricted and distorted, where life itself deteriorates into prolonged idleness and self-indulgence and the natural obligations of motherhood are disregarded and shirked, and it is also at the very bottom of the scale, where vice and degradation produced by want engender brutality, where, in fact, there is too much and where there is too little, in the scum and in the sediment, that married life becomes most frequently intolerable.

A critic may now begin to insist that it is all very well to condemn the large servile establishments, futile luxuries, defective education, and foolish marriages as the outcome of riches, but that, taking them as a whole, the class that have the assured possession of wealth are superior in the refinements of mind and body to the lower classes, and that as you go higher in the scale of society the proportion of mental and physical excellence gradually increases.

The very use of the words high and low shows how completely the money standard is accepted sociologically. If you have money you are high-class, if you have not money you are low-class. Though poverty may militate against refinement, have riches anything to do with it? The two principal effects that riches exercise on character are either to weaken it into effeteness or debase it into coarseness. Our aristocracy, for instance, so long as they were occupied with fighting or with the responsibilities of government—so long, in fact, as they had some business of their own—preserved a certain distinction, and by a careful process of selection and intermarriage, avoided any coarsening of their breed. This, for a time, may have endowed them with a certain high average of refinement of manner and tastes. But when by the changes in our system of government, and later by the rise of democracy, that is the great mass of the people awakening to a consciousness of their own existence, the aristocracy became more and more cut off from national services and had recourse to leisured lives of unemployment and pleasure, the characteristics of effeteness and what the French call fin de race began to show themselves. In many cases downright impoverishment overtook those who had squandered their incomes on unprofitable amusement and stupid dissipation, till at last they seem to have come to a determination to rehabilitate their position and reinforce their caste by means of commercial and American money.

The plutocracy gained ground immensely by the absorption in its ranks of ancient families and long genealogies, and the aristocracy became increasingly tainted with commonness, losing its distinction and substituting for it ostentation, vulgarity, and the appreciation of money for its own sake. They derived no advantage physiologically in the shape of health and vigour which any alliance with the poorer class might have given them.

So far from anything in all this indicating that money produces refinement, the exact opposite is proved. That a full competence enables a man to appreciate the refinements of life is, after all, what we are doing our best to show; but riches—that is to say, anything beyond the competence—can only act as a fatal impediment even to this.

Whatever refinement there may be in the upper classes is only a survival, an element that is not being preserved, but is rapidly waning. Their general disposition and influence is a source of anxiety to many who are watching the signs of the times with attention. A recent article in the National Review sounded a grave note of warning. “Inherited vitality of race,” said the writer, “which upper-class women still preserve until they dissipate it in keeping up with the procession, is frittered away by parental irresponsibility, often commencing before birth, and by the ever-increasing excitement, restlessness, and luxury of our generation.... Greed of money is unblushing, and perhaps most shameless amongst mothers and daughters.... Plutocracy and vanity are in possession.” Out of such poor stuff, he concludes, no man of character or ability can come forward in public life.

Another significant result of the kind of life of continual excitement, constant change, combined with sensuous ease, led by these people, is the noticeably declining birth-rate among those who are well off.

It is not worth while here to enter into a diatribe against the habits and customs, the fashions and fancies, of what is known as Smart Society, which is the general aggregate of people of affluence; or attempt to describe the various sets, the life struggle for those in one grade to lift themselves into what they think a higher and smarter grade; the necessary qualifications to enter this society; the wild and ceaseless hunger for excitement and amusement which prevents any time being allowed for reflection, reading, or even ordered thought; the cynical and inane quality of the intercourse; the endless gossip; the contempt for anything that is considered dowdy; the accepted low level of morality and network of irregular relationships; the snobbishness, the artificiality, the want of education; in fact, all the low standard of living down to which any set of human beings is bound to fall if the key-note of their existence is idleness and the foundation of their position is money. They are frightened of thought because it might plunge them into desperation, they are frightened of knowledge because it might dispel their dearest illusions, they are frightened of work because it might reveal their incompetence, they are frightened of progress because it may shatter their citadel.

One would have imagined that the so-called sporting instinct which we are so proud of nurturing in our public schools and the spirit of fair play would have made men ashamed to continue to lead lives solely and systematically devoted to extravagance and selfish enjoyment while so many of their fellow-men are condemned to the dismal existence of toil and squalor, even if they refused to admit that the one influenced the other. There are, of course, people in this society who endeavour, more or less successfully, to stand up against the drift of fashion and are conscious of the falseness of their privileged position, but they are exceptional. It appears to be impossible for the very great majority to get the delusion out of their heads that, by pensions and doles, and charities and patronage, and presents of game and subscriptions, and the employment of people in senseless occupations, they are doing all that can be expected of them to help “the lower orders.”

If in all this luxury there were some trace of splendour or magnificence, if art, literature, or music were generously patronised, and beauty and good taste appreciated, some slight justification or excuse for it might be found. The rich magnates of Renaissance Italy or eighteenth-century France had, on the whole, a favourable though capricious influence on art and literature. But the rich magnates of twentieth-century England are chiefly noted for the deplorable vulgarity of their taste and their ignorance of the best works in painting, literature, and music. At the best, some few of them are collectors, and if ever they seek the advice of experts to establish some permanent method for the encouragement of the arts, too often their motive is not any profound reverence for artistic beauty, but the spurious fame or titular distinctions they can gain by this means. The private collections they form are rarely exhibited, and being withheld from the public view and from popular appreciation, the true function of these great works of art is almost nullified.

Taking it as a whole, the manner of living of this set of people would not be worth a moment’s attention were it not that human beings are being sacrificed and talents and capacity prostituted, and that the example set by these few is assiduously studied and followed by a large section of the population who aspire to associate with those of higher rank and greater wealth. So it is that special notice is taken of all they do; the limelight is turned full upon them, and nothing can surpass the servility of that section of the public press that recounts the doings of these parasites, describing with intense solemnity their entertainments and their hunting and shooting exploits, and giving embarrassingly intimate episodes from their private lives for public consumption. By publishing broadcast these alluring pictures it attempts to glorify their profitless and empty existence.

From time to time, in sheer exasperation at the senselessness of it all, men come forward and inveigh against society life; but not only does this not make the very smallest impression, but the objects of their invective enjoy abuse and thrive on the advertisement it gives them.

The life of this society represents the outward and visible expression of all the various contributory elements we have been trying to analyse; it has, therefore, been necessary to allude to it in order to give some general notion of the way many of the rich live. And it is done in no cavilling or pharisaical spirit, but with the keen desire to expose a state of social corruption which can only be corrected in the long run by being brought fully into the light. The beauty, the smartness, and the brilliancy on the surface, like the flowers and lights and jewels of their entertainments, produce an attractive glamour and present an alluring picture for those who cannot see further behind the scenes, and form one of the chief inducements for money-making and for continuing the fight for material gain.