THE REIGN OF GILT BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS New York JAMES POTT & CO. 1905 Copyright, 1905, by James Pott & Co. ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL, LONDON First Impression, September, 1905 PART I.—PLUTOCRACY...

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 qualificatio

You stand in front of a huge dam. Its wall rises bare and sheer. You say to yourself: “There can be little water behind it.” But even as you think this, the dam becomes a waterfall, and the waterfall swells into a Niagara. You go round where you see the other side; you find a lake fathoms deep and extending miles up the valley. Precisely such a phenomenon occurred in this country a few years ago. Behind a dam of long-established customs of simplicity and frugality, concentrated private wealth ha

Let us glance at our typical Mr. Multi-Millionaire’s town house. It is a palace of white marble, in Fifth avenue, near Fifty-ninth street—the view across the Park from the upper windows is superb. This palace was the inaugural of the family’s recent fashionable career. It is the struggle to live up to it that is making them famous in New York. The palace was to have cost our family a million, including the site. Up to the present time it has cost them two and a half millions, and that does not i

The typical young men of the America of fashion and high finance, created by the multi-millionaire, fall into two classes—the born successes, sons or heirs of rich men; the candidates for success. It is hardly necessary to say that in this connection success always means the accumulation of riches enough to enable one to make a stir even among the very rich. If the young man is a born success, all that is left for him to achieve is to devise some plan for making a stir—the simplest way being to

It is still an open and anxious question whether this fashionable society, the growth, as we have seen, of the last two or three decades, constitutes a genuine aristocracy. The society itself hopes so and tries to believe so, and struggles to forget its uncertain tenure, its sordid basis and its humble ancestry. And it is encouraged in its pretensions by many thousands of agile and aggressive climbers who would not for worlds lose their delusion that their climbing has a goal, and a goal worth a

There is a story of a rich woman—an Austrian, perhaps—who was chilled through by a long drive on a bitter winter day. “Make a huge fire in my sitting-room,” she said to a servant as she entered her country house, “and order wood distributed to the poor of the village.” She sat by the huge fire for ten minutes and then rang the bell. “Never mind about distributing that wood,” she said to the answering servant. “The weather seems to have moderated.” The theory back of this story is the popular one

We find plutocracy’s follies in full swing not alone in the great cities, East and West, where the money-caste must have outward signs of superiority to bolster up its pretensions, but in our national capital as well—in what ought to be the high-set citadel of democratic dignity. Few Americans have any adequate idea of the system of etiquette which has grown up there. The other day a newly appointed high officer of the Government said: “My daughter went to lunch with the daughter of Secretary ——

An attaché of one of the Continental Embassies to the King of England was dining at the Carlton with an American, an old friend of his. The room was filled with English and Americans. Almost all the English were men and women of title or rank, or both. Almost all the Americans were well known both at home and abroad because of their wealth, their fondness for display, and their intimacies and relationships by marriage with the aristocratic caste of Europe. “You Americans are popular here,” said

It cannot, then, be denied that wealth, concentrated wealth—not so much the plutocrat himself as the vast masterful accumulation of which he is the appendage; one might with truth say, the victim—is not only the most conspicuous factor in American life to-day, but also one of the most potent factors. The plutocracy in politics, the plutocracy in business, the plutocracy in society, the plutocracy in the home—in its own homes—that is our “peril.” A great monster indeed, fully up to the harrowing

Ever since the first tall chimneys unfurled the sooty banners of the new, the industrial civilization, we have had the cry that the power machine is a monster whose reign means the debasement of the masses of mankind. And latterly, throughout the world, but most loudly in America, which has been foremost in promoting the new order, it has been charged that the men in control of the new order, the business men, are merciless and relentless; that in the struggle for markets and for profits they ar

Education is the huge dynamo which supplies power to the American people. Not in history or in legend is there recorded such an outburst of international curiosity as that about the real America, as distinguished from the America created in the minds of Europeans by our multi-millionaires, since it became not merely agricultural but also an industrial world-factor, inevitably dominant in an era whose civilization is the first based upon peace and indissolubly wedded to peaceful arts. Europe has

Each year not far from fifty million dollars are spent in America in exploiting cures for digestion troubles; and no doubt we give the doctors and the druggists a thousand millions or so each year in seeking relief from the consequences of our ignorance and our folly in feeding ourselves. Some of us are too poor to get the right sort of food, even when we know what is the right kind; others are both ignorant and incapable of resisting the clamors of appetite. The problems of mental and physical

It is reasonable, and not unkind, to assume that the time will come when we shall no longer have John D. Rockefeller with us. He may not die; as a vindication and a reward he may be honored with the unique distinction of Enoch and Elijah. But, whether by the vulgar route or in fiery chariot with angel escort, go he will, and his son will reign in his stead. The word reign is here used in the metaphoric sense in which it is almost always used now-a-days. For, the son of Rockefeller will not be fr

“Our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers,” wrote Jefferson. And again: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility is or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.” The dignity of labor, the prizes to the laborer—these ideals of a century ago, ideals born no doubt of a vanity which sought to make a virtue of necessity, are still our ideals. But, where in Jefferson’s day his broad and sympathetic mind was almost alone in the belief in the loft

The European “hordes” continue to pour in upon us, and the agitation over, and against, the “foreign devil” increases. We shall soon be “welcoming to our shores” upwards of a million strangers a year, all of them with no “capital”—except their muscles and the potentialities of their minds and hearts. If Washington and Jefferson could have looked forward to this time, they would have lifted jubilant prayers of thankfulness that their hopes that this land would become “the refuge of the poor and o

The American woman is regarded both here and abroad as the strongest and subtlest enemy of the American Democracy. She is pictured in the imaginations of students of our life as ignorant of politics, interested only in her own sovereignty over the American man, or, rather, over his pocketbook, a snob and a climber and a worshiper of European aristocratic institutions; a poor housekeeper and a reluctant mother, and a very vampire for luxury and show, she hides her superficiality and cold-heartedn

It has often been said, and written, that we are about the most unhappy people on the face of the earth, that our unhappiness increases with our Democracy. That our unhappiness is caused by our Democracy. Democracy and discontent, despotism and discontent, constitutional monarchy and content—so runs the argument. If this were true, we as Americans would say, “Happiness bought at the price of self-respect is far too dear. Heaven itself would be too dear at that price. And, however it may be with

In Chicago, in Lincoln Park, there is a wonderful statue. A big, slouching form, loose yet powerful; ungraceful, yet splendid because it seems to be able to bear upon its Atlantean shoulders the burdens of a mighty people. The big hands, the big feet, the great, stooped shoulders tell the same story of commonness and strength. Then you look at the face. You find it difficult to keep your hat upon your head. What a countenance! How homely, yet how beautiful; how stern, yet how gentle; how inflexi