SQUANDERED GOLD.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10927, 17 November 1913, Page 5

SQUANDERED GOLD.

ONE OF THE CAUSES OF "LABOUR UNREST." If you want to see what isoney can do, you should pay a visit to that mile of millionaires' mansions, New York's Fifth Avenue, where £20,000,000 has been spent on palaces. Look at than stately pile built by Mr Cornelius Vanderbilt, oh which a million has been lavished. . On the decoration of a single room, the ballroom, of this wonderful house £50,000 was spent, and at the back of it is a small garden, not nearly as large as many a suburban householder owns, to provide which a £25,000 house was pulled down, '. Enter the towering, white-granite palace which is the New York home of Senator Clark, and look at but a. few of its fabulously-priced contents. When are told that it cost £200,000 to decorate and furnish you will scarcely marvel, for you will be shown a Turkish room which alone accounted for a fifth of this sum, and which has among its contents a couple of carpets bought for £15,000, and two divans for which the Senator paid £4OOO. In the Oriental Hall is an old-time Persian rung, ablaze with embroidery of jewels, whioh was purchased for £BOOO, and £SOOO was paid for the gorgeous carving of . its walls. In another %i these multi-million-aires' homes you will see, as you enter,, a marble staircase of bewildering beauty which cost its owner, Mr Eldridge Gerry, £20,000; and in the Astor mansion, the bill for which was a round half-miluon of money, there are works of art which £IOO,OOO would not buy. Such are but a few of the marvels of this one street of gold-winners, the most amazing of which is probably the bedroom which Mr Stephen S. Marchand prepared for his wife at a cost of little under £200,000. The description of this ultra-royal room reads like an Arabian Nights' fairy tale, from the bedstead of ebony, ivory and gold, a miracle of artistic workmanship, which cost £38,000, to its ceiling, elaborately carved and decorated at a cost of £3870. The sum of £IOO,OOO was paid for the suite alone, towards which the wardrobe contributed £29,000. And in every other direction the expenditure of Oroesus is on a similar 6cale of magnificence. Mr Alfred Vande'rbilt's extravagance takes the form of horse- . flesh, and he can well afford the £IOO,OOO which he has spent on his stables and stud. The late Mr P. Morgan thought as little of paying £IO,OOO for an old copy of the Four Gospels and £SOOO for a few pages of manuscript as of writing cheques of £BO,OOO for four tapestries and £IOO,OOO for a Madonna. When the millionaire entertains his friends at dinner or dance the last thing he gives a thought to is the expense. Two thousand five hundred pounds was the bill for one dinner given a few years ago at Delmonico's to eeventy-five guests —a paltz-y £33 for each banqueter; and a little later Mr George A. Kessler feasted a couple of dozen guests at £125 each, and no doubt considered the money well spent. Forty thousand pounds was spent on O, dance given by Mrs W. H. Vanderbilt, and £60,000 on another by Mrs Bradley Martin. And so the glittering gtory of squandered gold runs on until we are as little astonished to learn that a young millionaire recently paid '£25,000 for a richly-jewelled and painted ran as a birthday gift to a pretty actress as that Mrs Hillier laid her husband to rest in a £4OOO coffin, or that Mr Mackay/s mausoleum cost £BO,OOO itobuiW. ■■' - *