ON LAWFUL EXPENDITURE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue III, 18 January 1896, Page 66

ON LAWFUL EXPENDITURE.

(BY

MRS LYNN LINTON)

A controversy bas always raged round the point where lawful lavishness ends and unjustifiable extravagance begins. The dicta of prudence, coupled with the demands of charity, are brought into play here; while there, the general good following on the distribution of wealth is shown to be like the touch of a moral Midas, turning the base metal of extravagance into the gold of a public benefit. In truth, nothing is less positive nor more elastic than this matter of the lawfulness or the unlawfulness of expenditure ; the whole value or discredit lying in proportion, and the individual conditions of each case. A great many good people hold expenditure to be wrong as contrasted with charity ; and to give seems to them a better thing than to employ. They speak with a fine disdain of certain sons of Maecenas who will spend say a thousand pounds on the flowers of an entertainment ; and they substantially echo the reproach of those who murmured against the use to which was put that ‘ alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious,’ which might have been sold and the money given to the poor, as they speak of the many poor people who are starving, and contrast their destitution with the lavishness which gives so large a sum of money for things which will last only a few days at most. But they do not remember that this sum represents the work and wages of dozens of industrious men ; while giving in charity simply helps to breed beggars and increase pauperism. Yet, if this thousand pounds given by a millionaire is represented by five given for the decking of a small dinner-table by one who perhaps has five hundred a year all told, then ‘if one will’the extravagance is criminal, and the sneers of a censorious world are not undeserved. The spendthrift squandering his patrimony on worthless companions and degrading pleasures, till he touches the bare boards, has ever been a figure in human society, and a lawful butt for the shafts of the satirist. Wherever he has been found —in Athens, Rome, Paris, London — he has cut the same sorry figure, and earned the contempt with which his name has been covered. Even when something less than this—when only more freehanded than prudent, and of the kind who is no one’s enemy but his own—he has wrought for condemnation ; and the wiser thinkers do not even love him for his generosities, nor say other than Dr. Johnson, ‘ I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.’ When the astute meet with the soft, the contest is unequal, and the result a foregone conclusion. Those who cannot take care of themselves can hardly expect others to be their guardians. And though we except from this general disdain both sailors and women, aud look for neither prudent suspicion from the one, nor resolute resistance from the other, still, even these must lie in the bed they themselves have made ; and if that bed be emptied of its feathers aud stuffed full of thorns instead, who is to blame but themselves. Talking of women, the oddest contradictions in the way of expenditure meet in their bosoms. Extravagant beyond all measure, so that they bring husbands and lovers to ruin for mere whims of fancy, they are mean in small things, and crazy for cheap bargains to the extent of a national disaster. She, who will drain an exhausted purse for a diamond necklace worth six thousand pounds, will haggle over a pound more in the yearly wages of a good servant, or fret out her soul over the introduction of an extra scullery maid in her ample kitchen. A millionaire’s bill of portentous dimensions is contrasted with the order for Australian mutton and margarine for butter. The golden stream flowing freely from the bunghole is sought to be checked by plugging up the minute trickle at the spiggot. By which the two characteristics are satisfied—the desire for beautiful things no matter what the cost, and the love of small economies no nratter what the intrinsic valuelessness of the saving. Where the revenue is royal, expenditure ought to be royal, too ; else is the owner a curmudgeon whose material wealth bnt the more clearly shows his moral poverty. Of what use to starve his employes to amass those piles which he cannot take with him ? Grant that he founds an institution that shall bear his name and perpetuate his memory, how long does the individualitv of that memory last ? Of all the charities distinguished by the name of their founders, who knows anything, or cares anything, about their personality ? Lost in the darkness of backward time, that name is the familiar

vox et preterea nihil . and of what avail to the dead the mere name that stands for nothing better than a colour, a signpost, an adjective to the living ? Doubtless many charities have been founded by men who were sincerely philanthropic ; men who thought they could not employ their money better than by making human lives so far brighter and happier for all time. But when not of this purely benevolent kind, these grand donations and the like have been the very culmination of egoism in the desire to be renowned in the future, though at the expense of the present. It is the same spirit as that which makes a man grind the faces of the poor, stint his wife and under-educate his family, that he may • cut up ’ well in the Court of Probate, and be quoted as a warm man who left his plum with all the bloom on it. In nothing is character more convincingly shown than in the amount and quality of a man’s expenditure. One goes in for unique curios, for which he gives fancy prices in nowise represented by the intrinsic worth of the article. Another will have his money’s worth in material, and looks on taste and pedigree as no better than so many bulrushes in my lady’s vase. A third must have bold luxury in the mounting of his household ; and a fourth contents himself with a modest plenty in the house, while giving all his strength to his garden, his greenhouses, his outbuildings, his estate. After these, with their lawful lavishness, pants the crowd of feeble imitators; the haunters of old bric-a-brac shops and eager purchasers of rubbish ; those who content themselves with cheap imitations of costly ornaments ; those who spend on show what ought to go in substance ; those who give to peddling little ‘ improvements ’ what they take from the butcher and the baker. The millionaire's wife wears sables which cost a king's ransom; and is justified, The extravagant little wife of a poorly paid professional spends half her yearly allowance on a collarette that is out of place in her wardrobe. The wealthy bibliophile with a taste for bindings and rare editions has his imitator in the impecunious connoisseur, who gives the price of his week’s food for a book with a damaged binding and illegible text. A youth of ‘ precious ’ tendencies will ruin himself on old prints, old lutes, old crucifixes, old altars ; and when reproached for maladministration of his slender income, pleads the aesthetic value of his purchases, and the spiritual comfort they give him. And but few recognise the exact relation between income and expenditure, or can draw the line where the lawful ends and the unlawful begins—between, say, the superb splendour of a ducal marriage where nothing is beyond allowance, and the disproportion of a wedding costing fifty pounds, where the income of the young couple is under two hundred a year.