MORAL DEGENERATION.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 71, 26 March 1910, Page 10

MORAL DEGENERATION.

NO MORE IDLE RICH. "The Passing of tho Idle Rich" is the title of a new book from the pen of Mr. Frederick Townsend Martin, who is devoting hi: career to promoting a higher standard of culture and humanity among the upper ten thousand of America — misnamed the "Four Hundred." Mr. Martin — to quut- his newspaper admiiers— "tears aside the veil of the inner t^nctum of Fifth-avenue society and reveals to an astonished world tho amazing moral reformation which has overtaken his plutocratic compatriots." He describes the idle lives they used to live when idleness was deemed honour able. Now a new spirit has como over American society, which considers idleness a di.'giace. Even the richest consciences, it seems, have awakened, and their owners have joined the great army of workers attending offices in Wall-street, arriving punctually, however tired the previous night's dancing has made them. Mr. Martin adds that the great ladies of New York society, while they do not tconi delights, now live laborious days. They may be day in day out soothing the pillows of the sick and poor in tho hospitals, and none suspects when they appear, brilliantly gowned, gay and witty, at evening parties, how arduously thqr have been devoting themselves to charitable woi-fcs. The moral ot the book is that rich Americans deecrve their magnificent homes and expensive motor cars.