NEW YORK THE PARADISE OF PARVENUS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 40, 3 October 1891, Page 438

NEW YORK THE PARADISE OF PARVENUS.

To be a great leader is to be a great feeder. You must dispense terrapin and canvas-back ducks and rare brands of champagne in lordly dining halls, or your place is certain to be secondary. You may, if a man, have the manners of a Chesterfield and the wit of a Bilsac ; you may, if a woman, be beautiful as Marie Stuart and brilliant as De Stael ; and yet, powerless to ‘ entertain ’ you can fill no lofty pedestal. ‘ Position in New York means a corpulent purse whose strings work as flexibly as the dorsal muscles of a professional toady.’ And this kind of toady has an exquisite Hair for your greatness and your dignity the moment he becomes quite sure of your pecuniary willingness to back both. New York is at present the paradise of parvenus, and these occasionally commit grotesque mistakes in the distribution of civilities. Because you choose to ‘ stay in ’ for a season or two they will take for granted, if suddenly brought in contact with you, that you have never been ‘ out,’ and could not go if you tried. Of course to feel hurt by such cheap hauteur proves that you are in a manner worthy of it; but even though you are not in the least hurt, you cannot refrain from a thrill of annoyance that a country which has boasted in so loud-mouthed a way to Europe of having begun its national life by a wholesale scorn cf all class distinction should contain citizens cursed by a spirit of such tawdry pride. At least the aristocracies of other lands, vicious and reprehensible as they have always been, are yet an evil with a certain malign consistency for their support. Like those monarchies of which they have formed a piteous adjunct they have always been the outgrowths of a perfectly natural ignorance.

Though distinct clogs to civilization, their existence remains pathetically legitimate. Nuisances, they are still nuisances with a hereditary hold on history. Their chief modern claim for continuance is the fact that they were once authorized by that very ‘ divine right ’ which is now the scorn and jest of philosophy, and that the communities which they still infest are yet unprepared for the shock of their extirpation. It is clear that they will one day be sloughed off like a mass of dead animal tissue, even if they are not amputated like a living limb that has grown hopelessly diseased. They are as surely doomed by the slow threat of evolution as is the failure to establish trial by jury in Russia. They are tolerated by progress for the simple reason that progress is not yet ready to destroy them. Hence are all imitations of their permitted and perpetuated folly in wofully bad taste. They are more; they are an insult, when practised in such a land as ours, to republican energies, motives and ideals. Heaven knows, we are a country with sorry enough substantiality behind her vaults.—Edgar Fawcett.