For example, a man has just paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a string of pearls for his wife. Our multi-millionaire regards that as an extravagance. He thinks his own wife’s string, which cost one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, represents the limit of prudent expenditure for such a purpose. And those of their friends whom they regard as comparatively poor--the people with from fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year--are pushing them on by concentrating where they scatter. They meet different groups of these moderately rich people at different points in their annual round; and each group is living almost as well as, in some respects better than, they are at that particular point. True, So-and-So’s house in town is a trivial twenty-room affair on a side street, but his place in Newport (he concentrates upon it) is far finer than their Newport place. Smith is decently housed in town and at Newport, but lives in a tiny doll’s house in Curzon street during the London season. Jones is modest in America and England, but how he does blaze on the Riviera! There must be no standing still. There must be progress. The standards, all the standards--house, dress, equipage, number and livery of servants, jewels, works of art, sports, gifts--are rising, rising, rising. Each year, more and ever more must be spent, unless one is to fall behind, lose one’s rank, be mingled with the crowd that is ever pressing on and trying to catch up. In the neighborhood of these plutocrats and their parasites and imitators, struggling thus desperately in gaudiness, it is all but impossible not at times to fear that prosperity, concentrated prosperity, has killed Democracy, has killed the republic. Foreigners look at New York and the galaxy of rich cities eagerly imitating it, and shrug their shoulders and sneer. Americans look, and try to keep their courage and their point of view. CHAPTER III PLUTOCRACY AT HOME Let us glance at our typical Mr. Multi-Millionaire’s town house. It is a palace of white marble, in Fifth avenue, near Fifty-ninth street--the view across the Park from the upper windows is superb. This palace was the inaugural of the family’s recent fashionable career. It is the struggle to live up to it that is making them famous in New York.