Let us take the various points raised by his case _seriatim_. Many acutely controversial problems are opened, and it will be difficult to detach the particular actions of the rich man without generalising, to some extent, on the problems themselves. It is no argument against our main contention to say that people with costly tastes have, while gratifying them, been able to exercise powers of a high order, for, obviously, it is in spite of their shortcomings in this respect that they have succeeded, and not because of them. If some men with means have done valuable public service and performed admirable work in many different spheres of life, this they have done as men naturally gifted with high accomplishments, not as rich men. Here we are only concerned with their works and deeds in their latter capacity. It does not affect our argument whether our typical example has been brought up to regard this way of living as natural and necessary for a man of what is called his “position” (that is to say, the purely artificial place which a rich man is able to take up in the community solely on account of his riches), or whether he has made the money for himself and is simply aping the habits and customs of those who already possess it. The distinction between the _vieux riches_ and the _nouveaux riches_ is one they can fight out between themselves. The former scoffs at the latter while all the time he is setting him, and consciously setting him, the example he is to follow. It is not the gaining, but the spending of the money that must occupy our attention here. Our friend’s houses are only a detail in the upkeep of his position. They may be historic castles, sham “ancestral halls,” modern “palatial country residences,” or “fashionable mansions” in town. Does it ever strike the owner as, let us say, a curious arrangement that he should have several houses of fifty to a hundred rooms apiece while some millions of his fellow-men do not own one room? Does he know that in England and Wales alone 507,763 people occupy one-room tenements, 48.4% of which are classified as overcrowded, while 12,458,150 are occupying tenements of two, three, or four rooms?[4] In any case, he would indignantly refuse to admit that there was any remote connection between these two sets of circumstances.