Social problems; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
In further pursuit of this statistical mania, Mr. Multi-Millionaire
discovered that his family and their friends--and the servants--had
drunk under his various roofs during the past year nearly two thousand
quarts of red wine, about one thousand quarts of champagne, one
hundred and fifty quarts of white wine, one hundred and fifty quarts
of whiskey, one thousand eight hundred quarts of mineral water, and an
amazing amount of brandy, chartreuse, and so forth. The family’s total
bills for drink, food, cigars, and cigarettes had been of such a size
that they represented an expenditure of about three hundred and seventy
dollars a day--about one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a
year. His wife became very angry when he showed her these last figures.
She told him that he was meddling in her business and that she didn’t
purpose to spend her whole life in watching servants.
Our multi-millionaire did not make his fortune; he inherited it. But he
has been very shrewd in managing it, for all his extravagance. Though
he is cautious about expenses in one way, he shows by the allowances he
makes to the various members of his family that he believes in carrying
out to the uttermost the idea that his family must live in state. His
wife has a million in her own name, but he makes her an allowance
of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain
herself and their households. The grown son has had an allowance of
twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and when he marries it will be
trebled--perhaps quadrupled. This is large for persons of their modest
fortune, but many fathers of smaller means are doing as much for their
children, and our multi-millionaire will not see his children suffer.
His grown daughter has an allowance of fifteen thousand dollars--more
than she needs, as she has only to buy her clothes and pay her small
expenses out of it. The boy in college has five thousand dollars a
year; he is always in debt, but his mother helps him. The youngest
child has ten dollars a week--her clothes are bought for her, and she
can always get money from her father or mother when she wishes to make
handsome presents.
The most interesting person in the family is the mother. She is its
moving force, one of the moving forces in the extravagant life of New
York City to-day. You see her name and her pictures in the newspapers
very often, always in connection with the news that she is doing
something. She was the first in New York to have huge flunkeys in
gaudy knee-breeches and silk stockings in waiting at her front door.
She was the first to have as an entertainment for a few people after
dinner several of the grand opera stars and the finest orchestra in
the country. She is a woman with ideas--ideas for new and not noisy
or gaudy, but attractive ostentations of luxury. She spends money
recklessly, but she gets what she wants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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