IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16037, 30 January 1920, Page 5

IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.

MONEY- MOTOR ,’vf<) VI V, MASTA*

03y Frederick William Wile, >» Daily Mail.; There are 20,01/1 mere millionaire?, i* Oho United .States than lietore the war. About one-half of all the diamond* in the world, estimated to he worth L 200,000,000, are owned in, the same country. Importations of pearls Jumped from .£400,000 in 1912 to over Jt2,000,000 in 1917. Considerably more than JO per cent, of Iho world's gold--some estimates place the amount as high an 7o per cent.—is held in American vaults. In the State of Pennsylvania there in a motor car to every 20 inhabitants. New York contains 6,000,000 population and 100,000 private cars. The United States to-day is struggling with the adversities of the mast fabulous prosperity in the history of nations. Money-mad is the only accurate; description of America to-day, unless it be ailiteratively supplemented and termed ’‘motor-mad and movie-mad” besides. The Republic reels with wealth. It contains only two classes of inhabitants —the rich and the less rich. There is not a man, woman, or child who needs to 1m poor, for there is absurdcdly wellpaid work for all. Labour of all kinds earns the fattest wages on record. A char-woman in New York or Chicago gets 14s 6d a- day. Housewives in the cities often advertise in vain for general servants to whom they give J514 to £l6 a month. To cajole prospective ‘‘help” to reply, advertisements plaintively seek “ladies willing to assist) in housework.” Conditions in smaller towns are even worse, for servants succumb to the lure of the cities, with their biggin; wages and brighter "movies.”

Tim NEW POOR GROWING. It must not )>e assured that everybody in the United States is in Easy. Street. There is an immense growing now poor class, just as there is in England. Incomes of jBIOOO mean at least 50 per cent, less than they did live years ago. Food, clothes, rent, pleasures, everything, cost from 35 per cent, to double what they used to. But the amazing fad to me, returned to America after an absence of four years, was the omnipresent wherewithal to meet the new price of existence. The situation in the United States seems to bo that if you have anything to sell—literally anything—you can dispose of it at your own price, and no questions asked.

There is an orgy of buying and spending that infects all classes and affects all commodities. Merchants and manufacturers no longer "cater” to customers. Would-bc buyers now conic to them, humbling asking to have orders lillc-d. In many branches of trade it has ceased to lie necessary to send out travellers. “Drummers'' (commercial travellers) still on the road are patrolling familiar routes merely to keep them intact for the day when abnormal conditions will vanish and sane times come again. “Mad, mad, mad!” exclaimed Mr Frank A. Vanderlipp, the famous Now York financier and economist, when I asked him in his office on the 37th (or 47th, I forget which) floor of the Equitable Building to loagnose life in fh© United States to-day. “Last night,” he explained, 'T happened to be walking in Broadway through the after-theatre crowds which surge through the Great White Way between 33rd and 50th Streets. Having packed the picturepalaces and playhouses earlier in the evening, they were now looking for cafes and restaurants and cabarets ami dancing halls where they might spend still more money. “The spectacle was America in composite at this hour-—a concontrated. irresistible determination lo burn un as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, and in as many different ways as possible.”

Mr .Yandorlip spoke freely, for his war work consisted of a campaign to inculcate thrift in the American people. It was a hard job.

CONTRAST WITH LONDON. I asked a fellow American who cross* od with me in the Mauretania what strikes him as the on I standing- differ, once between London and New York. Be said: ‘'London looks down at the heel.” He thinks that people in the streets are shabby. He finds the shops, with the exception of a few luxurious establishments in Bond Street, sordid and tawdry. The omnibuses and taxi cabs impress him as being third rate, the buildings neglected, almost everything unkempt—all of this as compared with glittering, gorgeous, flamboyant New York.

On the United States, too, the war has had effects, but of what a vastiv different kind. Barring our army of heroic dead, 70,000 odd, and our host of wounded and maimed, another 350,000, the sole effect of the war on America was to make, her embarrassingly rh-h. Now that khaki and navy blue are disappearing from the streets, it is almost impossible to detect any visible signs boat as far as the U.S.A. is concerned, here ever was a war. New York screams wealth at you, whichever way you turn. EifWi Avenue, with its endless stream of luxurious motor cars, and ravishing shops, and queenly dressed women and girls, shouts at you day and night that never since time began was there so mnch money in one place.

I have remarked before that New York is not American, but it is America on a large scale so far as riches, prosperity, and extravagance are concerned. In Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, San Francisco, lon Angeles, Mineapolis, even in “provincial” Washington conditions are relatively the same. They are the same in the still smaller places, where there is a successful eifort to emulate the money-spending habits of New York, in these -communities, too, everything is expensive; everybody has a car, and the war won prosperity of Die nation is in evidence in some direction or other. THE DAT OF BECKONING. Well may thinkers like Mr Vanderlip wonder where it is all going to end. Few Americans think the bubble will not burst. Those who have not been bereft of their reason bj the nation's inordinate and incomparable “boom” are conscious that a day of reckoning is coming. Wise ones are busy and systexnatically ordering their affairs so ’as to be fortified when it arrives. Not all the money in America is being spent and wasted on ephemeral baubles. In many communities—East, West, and South—there is a new civic spirit born of the country’s superabundant well-being. Municipalities are preparing to construct “cities beautiful.” There i* plenty of money now for the carrying out of cherished projects for the country’s welfare. Bead-building is in progress that will eventually make America the motorists’ Paradise. States like New York and Pennsylvania think nothing of floating ■£20,000.000 bond issues for the construction of motor car highways.