T HE poor have so little sympathy for the rich !
They have never lived among them, and they do not know what they suffer. They have only time to look upon the surface of things. They see the soft raiment and the palace. They see those who have little carelessly giving of that little, and those who have much parting with a small portion after mature consideration. If they would only cultivate their sympathies, they might see that it is easier to share a crust than a motor-ear. But no, they will not see it. They romp into Heaven with their half-crusts in their hands, and never cast a compassionate eye upon the motor traffic( stuck in the needle's eye. Yet where is the Christian who can share a ear ? Truly it does take a great deal of grace even to con- template the action. No decent man could eat his fill while another sat hungry at the board, not even if there were no " more where that came from." He would have to divide even the toast, or else lose his appetite for it. But very nice people roll to railway stations and pass unconcerned by others who are running for the train, or perhaps if they are really kind and considerate folk they may take a newspaper so as not to see them. After all, the matter is not a simple one. The occupant of the car must decide in a few seconds if it is really the train that the panting person is running after, if he would be more embarrassed than pleased by the invitation, if the chauffeur will think it silly to stop, and, should the hurrying person be of the softer and more numerous sex, whether his action may not be misunderstood and constitute any sort of an " attention." Social embarrassments have no meaning where necessity is concerned. If the King were starving and one were eating, one would not wonder in what terms to offer His Majesty three-quarters of the bread and cheese. But, weighted with riches, one hesitates to show presumption to Royalty or condescension to one's neighbour's cook.
It is very inconvenient, this difficulty of sharing. Almost the whole of the financial trouble which just at present is over- shadowing the life of the well-to-do might be removed if the rich knew how to share even where the question of charity does not come in. If we could but share servants, we should all have enough. But half a loaf is not always better than no bread, and half a servant is worse than none. Shared luxuries are no luxuries at all, and no man can serve two masters, or at any rate no one can "master" half a man. It is ridiculous of the owners of such-and- such a place to leave it, say their critical neighbours in villas round about. If they would all live together, they could keep it up; but those who have experience of wealth will assure them that a governess is almost the only luxury that can be shared. Even a garden is reduced to a tenth of its pleasantness if one is liable to meet one's best friend uninvited upon the path. No two men ever, we suppose, owned one horse. Boys, perhaps, may have a pony between them ; but then the ultimate owner—the ultimate court of appeal for the pony—is the father. We defy the best- tempered people in the world not to quarrel if they attempt joint ownership, and the bigger the thing divided the worse the quarrels. For instance, even the rich would like sometimes to give away ; but where there is no ultimate owner no one likes to give. Take the simple question of garden produce. A joint owner of a small garden might feel free to give. It is easy to give cabbages and cabbage-roses when those are all that you have got ; but orchids and asparagus are very different things. Nobody gives the former, at any rate, without a second thought, and the second thoughts of two heads mean inaction.
Again, it is perfectly easy to keep open house where there is only cold mutton for dinner, and where you do not consider such social refinements as which of your friends will " do together." If it is all one to you whether the military representative at the nearest tribunal and the most obstinate of conscientious objectors sit down together or not, you never need hesitate to go into the highways and hedges and force your friends to share your mutton. But all these things are very difficult when meals and company can be " thought out." On the whole, of oourse, the promiscuous guest system answers, and the plain food in enjoyed and finished ; but then, as we have been pointing out, Providence has a favour to the poor, who alone seem able to carry out counsels of perfection. Nothing upsets the household of the people who " live like pigs " ; any one is welcome to take the umbrella of the man who bought the very cheapest he could, and isn't sure on Monday morning whether or not he lost it on Saturday night ; but if everything is of the beet and everything is well arranged, you simply must turn away from the borrower unless you feel pretty sure he will at least give the loan back. It is always far easier to get a penny or twopence from a poor person than an analogous sum from a rich one, and easier to get a guinea from the fairly well off than £100 from the really rich. It seems disgraceful on the surface ; but, after all, money has a positive as well as a relative value. The widow could in no circumstances regret her mite—if she remembered it next day, and no doubt she did not. She would probably say to herself: " Well, by now I should have eaten it." If some interfering person had proved to her that the fulness of the Treasury was undesirable, she would have been able to reply : " Well, my mite mold do little damage any way," and comfortably to forget the matter. Had she been rich and put in a large sum, she would have been liable conscientiously or selfishly to regret it. It is immensely difficult to alter an ordered way of life, but the way of hand to mouth can hardly be changed for the worse—at any rate, no gift is missed for long.
Riches do not always do away with generosity, but in the few cases which have come under the present writer's notice they have made it more difficult. As a matter of fact, it is a very rare thing for a man to get suddenly rich. As a rule, wealth comes slowly, and is only realized after middle age. Marriage may bring sudden affluence, but to marry a rich wife cannot make a man generous, because the more just he is the more completely he recognizes that the money is not his to play with. In general, such a marriage seems to make him quiet, comfortable, close, and gently sad.
With the women whom marriage enriches the case is slightly different. The few the present writer has seen have disappeared altogether from the scene of their former activities, and it is difficult to say how they fared. If they have needed help in their single days, they are not inclined to come back and give thanks for it. Perhaps their indifference is not to be wondered at. Benefits cannot be just paid back in kind, and marriage makes new duties for every one. A married woman is a steward of her husband's property, and the vast majority of wives are very faithful stewards. The kind relations of former days are very apt to be an embarrass-
ment, especially if they have some trouble to make two ends meet. They think what they did was undervalued ; but was it ? Or, rather, did their help cost them much after all ? Where there is little, a little less makes little difference. It is a difficult thing to fit a stranger into a house every department of which reaches a certain standard. Minute arrangements, each made with serious regard to the good of individuals, are not so easily rendered elastic. But the poor, or the comparatively poor, never think of all this. The rich woman sees innumerable difficulties in the way of generosity which never, she is bound to realize, hampered her poor relations, and she forgets that, even given the freedom of poverty, kindness is not shown without any effort. We heard a man say in the days of 21 per cent. that the then low percentages inclined one to spend capital—parting
with £100 made so small a change in one's income. The remark is, of course, ridiculous. It proved nothing but that the speaker would surely find his way to ruin, yet it does throw a light on the
fictitiousness of money values. Every one not quite a pauper has a belief somewhere at the back of his mind that there is a
secret of wealth to be found by men who diligently seek, but it
eludes those with large incomes and those with small. Some people think it is to be found by those who determine to live in
the class next below the one they were born in. They will not send their sons to Public Schools or bring up their daughters to do nothing; in this humble way of life they will, they think, find the peace of plenty. As a rale, the result is that their children reproach them for parsimony or bad management, and the people they mingle with refuse them sympathy because they are richer than their social class-mates.
Being poorer than the average of the class you live in has many
advantages ; but obvious as they are, how very few people take them. All rich people know that they are no happier than poor people, and it is certain that they do not find it easier to be good ; but neither the beat nor the most frivolous among them ever give it up and choose poverty. At least, it is easy to go through a long life and never meet one who has. It is very rare, this voluntary poverty —like death-bed repentance and love at first sight. The last does happen ; there is evidence for it. The last but one, we believe, has happened ; there is Scripture for it. The first—well, we know many people who knew some one else who voluntarily became poor. Most of us when we hear of such men and women do not declare our disbelief ; we keep an open mind, much as we do about ghosts. But then, as we said before, the poor have no sympathy with the rich and are often cynical about them.
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