ONE INFLUENCE OF ROYALTY.

Timaru Herald, Volume LVIII, Issue 1808, 17 July 1895, Page 4

ONE INFLUENCE OF ROYALTY.

• The demoralising influence of Royalty, even under such tactful management as that of Queen Victoria, is that it sets up a false standard of living. The cost of the institution is enormous.; It involves an expenditure 1 of about' three-quarters of a million? 'a year. '' I reoently niadt»a calculation that if Adam, when turri'ed out of Paradise, had been compelled to work for fifteen shillings >a week • (tVe average wage of British workers) until; he had earned one year's income of the Royal family of England,-he wouldn't have got-half through the job yet; lam taking, of course, the orthodox view of the age of the world, which, like a good many .other orthodox "views, may not be strictly accurate; 1 A large amount of the cost ■of • Royalty > goes to the • maintenance of vulgar display. Simplicity and elegance, it seems to me, would be more m keeping with Royal dignity than the barbaric flunkeyism and pageantry suggestive of Hengler's Circus. Royal luxuriousness and display set up an entirely false standard of living, and the mischief of it is that the people immediately below .the Royal family m social rarik do'their- best to keep up the same kind of display, and these m their turiiare imitated by the ranks next below them, and so this false notion of what'constituted dignity takes possession of all classes from the nobs down to the snobs, and a false standard of living is set up all round. Hence gambling; on. the turf and on the Stock Exchange and all the frauds and swindles by which men saturated with this false idea seek to get wealth without working for it, and to rival their neighbours m costly frivolity «nd gluttony s~-(NeioAge.y