IN A MONEY DELUGE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11685, 29 April 1916, Page 7

IN A MONEY DELUGE.

THE NEW YORK WAR BOOM. DRUNK WITH DOLLARS. (By SYDNEY BROOKS, in tho " Daily Mail.") New York is one of the tragedies of tho war. Yet even as I write tho words tboy seem absurd. Wliero is the suggestion of tragedy? I look out over tho city from tho sixteonth floor of my hotel and everything seems as usual —tho samo crystalline brightness of tho atmosphere, tho samo whito whiffs of steam against the bluest of skies, the samo glimmering panorama, of speckless, towering edifices. Or I watch it at night, gemmed and twinkling with a billion lights—the same New York one has always known, with a movement, a joyousnoss, an exhilaration quicker and sharper-edged than any tiling wo ever Had in London.

Where, then, is tho tragedy? "Why, precisely there; in this very fact and condition of sameness. New York, incredibly enriched by the war, is pursuing tlie old life,'playing the old/giddy social game as though nothing else in tho world mattered or even existed. The gayest, tho most crowded, the most altogether hectic season in its history is drawing to a close. The social place on Manhattan Island was always a hot one. This year it has been a gallop. New York was always a pleasure-loving city. But in the past few months it has eclipsed all its own frenzied records. It has known many booms but never such a boom as tho war has brought it. It has been deluged before with spates of money, but never with such a sustained and wholesale inundationas this. It has seen millionaires spring up by the score, but now it has to number them by the hundred. GOOD SPENDERS. How little Americans really aro for dollars is shown by tlie prodigality with which they spend them. They enjoy the pursuit: they aro glad to have the'symbol of victory iu their hands and pockets; but they are tho last people in the world to hoard what they have gained. Instead, they fling it around with unrestrained gusto. One cannot imagine an American • uiiser. In this careless, spendthrift atmosphere, among these insatiable gamblers, lie would either bo reformed or snuffed out. And of all the cities in the Union, Aew \ork is the one with by far the mosf ample facilities for relieving Americans .of their winnings. It exists very largely for that end, and long practice has made it almost as expert as Monte Carlo. But never before has it had anything liko the opportunities of the- past few months for 1 indulging its art. All the Americans who need "to live abroad and all who were accustomed to fleo to Europe from the terrors of the American winter have this year flung themselves upon New York. The metropolis was never so choked with people who were itching to spend within its borders the money that in the years of peace plastered Paris and Egypt and the Mediterranean. IN NEW YORK. And besides these repatriated sons and daughters of the Republic, cut off from their normal scenes. of pleasure, and obliged to fall back iipon New York as at any rate better than nothing, there lias been a vast influx of new millionaires, the direct product of the war. I do not know ho wmuch the Allied Governments have already spent or agreed to spend in tho United States.

But it can hardly be less than £500,000,000. I do'not know what increase as the result of the war has been mado in the market value of. American securities, but it has certainly been prodigious; and therp are scores of companies engaged in, producing munitions whose shares are quoted to-day at anywhere from £3O to £BO higher than the figures of a year ago. And in addition the bank deposits show an increase* of somo £200,000,000, and thousands of men of moderate means have beeomo wealthy, and wealthy men have become millionaires, and millionaires have become billionaires through their ownership of the indispensable raw materials of war. There has never been anything like it. Even in the great days of the steel boom of nearly fifteen years ago, when every train that reached Manhattan Island seemed to deposit fresh carloads of Western millionaires consumed with tho one ambition to outshine and outspend the effete and conservative denizens of New York—evon then the hotels and theatres were not so crowded, Fifth Avenue was not such an impassable jam of superlative cars, the opera was less bediamonded. the restaurants saw fewer dinners that would have made Lucullus gasp and stare, luxury was less of a commonplace, and extravagance rioted less obtrusively than today. New York then was merely intoxicated with money. To-day it reels and staggers and stinks with it. On one fresh from the heroic temper, the earnestness and abnegations of Eng* land, tho city, in its present- dementia of profligacy makes an appalling impression. And it appals him not less when ho reflects that a baro two years ago the aimless, tawdry life which he finds hero in full swing was not essentially dissimilar from the life that ho and his wore leading on the other side of tho Atlantic. Well, we in England have put all that behind us for a very long while to come. New York also may bo roused, and at no very distant date, to a nobler mood. But for the present its immersion in getting and spending shuts off from it Europe and 'the war as with an impenetrable curtain. It is in vain that the papers here publish from all the belligerent nations brilliant and comprehensive accounts of whafc is going on.. Nobody has time to read them. Still less has anyono time to reflect upon them —anyone, I mean, in that dining, dancing, infinitely be-, paragraphed section of New York that calls itself society, and that .misrepresents the metropolis in tho eyes of America and tho worH. THE DEEPER THINGS. But outside the whirl and froth of an existence tliat seems a continuous orgy there are sober, sensitive, keen-thinking men and women be met by the hundreds, in whom the war and American policy in regard to it usurp all other thoughts and emotions. They are the people who support tho innumerable war charities with which New York abounds. Heart and soul they denounce and abominate tho figure their country has been made to cut during the past eighteen months. No Englishman would dare to say one-half the things that are said in New York about President Wilson's diplomacy; and nowhere, I suppose, in the world will one hear more passionate indictments of Germany and tho Germans. And now and then across the babel of pleasure will be heard the majestic voice of a Choato or a Poot, or the full-blooded notes of a Roosevelt, or the less resonant but not less earnest utterances of minor notables, who have seen with their own eyes the cataclysm that has overtaken Europe. They are worth listening to. Their speeches breathe the authentic spirit of that virile, idealistic Americanism which is very far from being an exhausted force, which even in New York is not) dead, to which even New York will respond

—g> - when the right man* makes the rigMi, appeal. , -«-,'.-I*^. Tho same may not be far away wEjl%£.. this splendid city "will put away its "* tops And its junketings and prove -itself/ 1 ; aa rich in the virtues as it is in the fogies of a great metropduSv'k*\ ' 111 B ■ ■- • I?