AMERICAN MILLIONAIRES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3163, 8 March 1911, Page 9

AMERICAN MILLIONAIRES.

THE FEELING OF UNREST. A special correspondent of “The Times” says that in proportion as the Amercan people grow richer they grow more discontented, and in revisiting the 'country one cannot fail to be struck with the extraordinary and feverish unrest. The -fundamental fact is that many people have grown rich too quickly. Speaking specially of the Western States, he says::— _ ‘ln the decade from 1597 to 1907, and especially in the first few years of tbe new century, fortunes were made with great rapidity—in a few weeks, a low months, or in a year or two. They were the result of the extraordinary rise m all values, and were to a large extent the fruit of bold speculation or at least of speculative methods in the conduct of legitimate business. It was no longer a case of laborious effort and slow building; and the men who thus became suddenly rich were of a type different from that of the successful men < f the preceding generation. It was as if chance drew a certain number of sands of names almost at random put of a hat once in every six months for a period of some five years, and said: ‘These men shall be millionaires next 'Spring.’

“The newly-rich who thus came into their estates, without the iong years of stern training in business economies, were conscious of no respocsibiitics and not unnaturally they began spending, and are spending to-day, with a lavishness formerly undreamed of; and this it is, more than anything else, which has contributed to the general increase in extravagance and to the almost universal raising of the scale of living. But, what is even more important, the attitude of the public towards them is different from their attitude towards the rich men of the older type. V ithout saying anything so absurd as that- all these newly-rich are unworthy of their fortunes or are using them in unworthy ways, one cannot help seeing that the example set by many of them is unedifying. Whereas in Great Britain the unlovely rich are comparatively few, they are here constantly in evidence; and there is no doubt that the people resent them,, their manners, and extragavances, intensely. —America’s Problems New.— “It would be idle to deny that the majority of the more serious-minded Americans regard the present trend of things with grave forebodings, and one may constantly bear predictions of the inevitableness of some great social cataclysm, which may take the form of a financial panic worse than any which the country has known, or of a terrific class war. Much of this despondency is but the usual misgiving, an elder generation. common to all countries and all ages, contemplating the new-fangled and flighty ways of a younger. There presumably never was a time when the world was not going to the dogs. It is certain, however, that the United States is now confronted with problems which arc new, and in the solution of which* the experience of other nations (even if the American people were ever inclined to profit by the experience of others) will he of little use. Unrest and discontent in a people of down-trodden and poverty-stricken would not be much of a novelty: but here we have a people conspicuously restive and discontented while conspicuously well-to-do.”