purpose than to uplift
the man of wealth and humiliate his humbler brother. That purpose is a
_crime_; a crime incompatible with genuine Christianity; a crime which
was once checked by the religious fervor of Wesley, but checked only for
a time. Its criminality is not so much in the heartless motive as in its
_wanton destruction of happiness and life_ to achieve a selfish purpose.

This feature of social ostentation, its _absolute cruelty_, has not
attracted the investigation of moralists and pietists. On the contrary,
the crime is cherished in the _higher_ ranks of the clergy, and an
eminent divine in Cincinnati occupying an absurdly expensive church,
actually preached a sermon in vindication of LUXURY--defending it on the
audacious assumption that it was right because some men had very
expensive tastes and it was proper that such tastes should be gratified.
A private interview with John Wesley would have been very edifying to
that clergyman, as the more remote example of the founder of
Christianity had been forgotten.

That squandering wealth in ostentation and luxury is a crime becomes
very apparent by a close examination of the act. There would be no harm
in building a $700,000 stable for his horses, like a Syracuse
millionaire, or in placing a $50,000 service on the dinner table, like a
New York Astor, if money were as free as air and water; but every dollar
represents an average day's labor, for there are more toilers who
receive less than a dollar than there are who receive more.[9] Hence the
$700,000 stable represents the labor of a thousand men for two years and
four months. It also represents seven hundred lives; for a thousand
dollars would meet the cost of the first ten years of a child, and the
cost of the second ten years would be fully repaid by his labor. The
fancy stable, therefore, represents the physical basis of seven hundred
lives, and affirms that the owner values it more highly, or is willing
that seven hundred should die, that his vanity may be gratified.

[9] According to J. R. Dodge, there are five million
agricultural laborers in this country whose wages do not
average over $194 a year.

This is not an imaginative estimate. A thousand dollars would save not
one but many lives in the Irish famine. It would save more than a score
of lives in New York, if diligently used among those who are approaching
the Potter's Field, which annually receives eight thousand of the dea