TO EDUCATE MILLIONAIRES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 52, 2 March 1901, Page 3 (Supplement)

TO EDUCATE MILLIONAIRES.

America SUGGESTS LESSO-NS IN -i SPENDING MONEY.

Everybody is acquainted with the eccentricities of the American millionaire. There is no freak too foolish—no practice too absurd or extravagant for him to fall back upon, if the •whim takes him. Once a week, on an average, with his dances or his coffins or his palaces of flowers he makes himself the laughingstock of Europe. This has worried the calm contemplative thinkers that write for tKe New York magazines, and one of them in the December "Forum" starts very boldly, with the suggestion "We must educate our millionaires!" The idea is really a lovely one. A school for millionaires! Fancy what a beautiful advertisement could be written of its possibilities:—"Deportment taught. The best uses of the aspirates shown. Lectures on Gentlemanly Dress daily. The wisest hints on spending money given!" Unfortunately this humorous side of the question does not appeal to the Hon. Truxtun Beale (formerly U.S. Minister to Persia), but he sets gravely to work to remind us:— ■ "An unfair and unfriendly critic has said of Americans that they are the only, people who go from rawness to rottenness without passing through the intervening stages of growth. Although this statement Is both unfair ariu untrue, as there arc many Americans who have acquired vast wealth and have led the world in great public charities while retaining the simplicity of their private lives, there is a tendency, nevertheless, in many of the possessors of newlyacquired fortunes of this country to skip over several phases in the course of the. evolution from the useful to the purely ornamental. NOBILITY'S TRAPPINGS. "While -our nouveaux riches do not all consider it necessary to drink themselves to death on gin in order properly to distribute their wealth, like one mentioned by Leslie Stephen, nevertheless (he admits) nearly all of them spend it in many ■ways hardly more useful to themselves and society. "If, however, they were thoroughly educated in the history and origin of the ceremonial institutions abroad; if they •were taught that the retinues of servants in knee breeches and plush forming part of a nobleman's household were the degenerate descendants, sociologically speaking, of the men-at-arms; that his display and expenditure were at one time the necessary insignia of his military, and later of his political, powers; that they are survival- and encumbrances that have outlived their usefulness, and which the nobleman would probably be glad to shake off, then our newly enriched would not be so anxious (he believes) to tangle himself up wdth tho Impedimenta of nobility until he becomes as much their prisoner as their proprietor. It v/ouid only require a little of the right kind of study to make him choose the hlg'hcst, if not always the most conspicuous, type abroad for imitation."

Such faith in mlllionalra nature is really quite touching!