RICH RELATIONS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume X, Issue 498, 27 October 1882, Page 19

RICH RELATIONS.

Most people occupy— or at least believe that they occupy — a middle place in the social scale. Above them lies wealth of all gradations, and below them lies comparative and even absolute poverty. They have their rich relations and their poor relations, and if there were an equality in the constitution of the human mind, they might fiud one set counterbalance the other. But there is no such equality. It happens that we are all much more addicted to grumble than to be gratified, and so it conies to pass that we do not take out of our rich relations at all the same pioportion of benefits that we should, considering bow our poor ones afflict us. The latter are a care and an anxiety. They are even — as Charles Lamb puts it— aa impertinence. Kinship requires of us that we should rec««gnise them, but it is scarcely our will that consents to recogni>e their poverty. Conscience assists, or compels, us to discharge what — if the relations are not themselves attractive — is at best a disagreeable duty. And in ths discharge of that duty it is not the relieving of their wants, but the admission of their kinship that is so onerous. We can forgive them for being poor, but we cannot forgive them for being cousins. We suffer from our poor relations, but we scarcely get proportionate comfort from our rich ones. It is true, if there is a title in the family, it casts a lustre over all, but then tae family is ennobled quite as much as the individual. The person who happens to be the head of it has the title, but the whole family enjoy a kind of reflected nobility, lliches, however, are personal and distinct, and relationship to wealth is cold comfort, except for the purposes of boasting. Indeed one of the good things that are lost in the nineteenth century is that proverbial ''rich uucle," so constantly met with in the drama and in three-volumed novels at country libraries. The type seems to have quite disappeared. Kvtn in the world of the dramatist there is a distinction always made between a rich uncle and a rich aunt. The dramatist seeks to hold the mirror up to nature, and the feminine nature seems not to be seen at all to so much advantage in the looking glass. The rich uncle has a kind of feudal feeling for his relatives. He may indulge it in secret, like the testator in th*s Probate Court, or he may return from India weighted down with rupees and benevolence. But in either ca»e be will consider those who bear his own name and even in his celibacy be a family man. With the dramatic aunt it is otherwise. And as she is in the drama so she is also in real life. She has an admiration for a popular preacher or a public institution. She would found a home for lost dogs or decayed monkeys, and in fact, she has much more tendency to originality than her Indian brother. If she recognises relations in her testamentary disposition sh« is prone to do most for the relatives of whom she knows least, partly, perhaps, because ahe has a poor opinion of human nature, and partly, trom a perversity that is baid, by those who study her sex, to belong to it. but her ways are, if not inscrutable, at least incalculable. Old Misa Crawley admired Rawdon and despised Sir Pitt. Moreover, Rawdon was just the man that such a woman would admire — stupid frank, heavy, soldierly, honest. Sir Pitt, on the other hand, was not the kind of character that Miss Crawley could have fancied. And yet it was to Sir Pitt that the mouey in the end went, and poor Raw - don .was strauded. But if the reader remembers Vanity Fair, he will remember the use Becky Sharp made of Miss Crawley, and he will see the one point in which rich relatives answer all expectations. The poor relations can trade on them. The relationship cannot be denied. The fact is too stubborn to be disputed. Becky explained to her wondering and puzzled husband that if the money was not left to him, his case was very nearly as good if people thought it was left to him. But here, again, our century is straugely upsetting the established order of things. It is a century in which men make money and spend it, rather than one in which they inherit it. It is a century in which there are few eldest Bons, in which property is distributed evenly amongst all children, in which the distinctions between " the branch " and the other branches are not very clearly observed. In a word, it is a century in which we seem to have plenty of poor relations and very few rich ones.— Globe.