as waste. It was both an
instinct and a principle with him to avoid waste. He did not have the
gas turned down low in a temporarily vacated room because he would save
two cents by doing so, but because he justly regarded waste as wicked.
His example in this particular, in a city so given to careless and
ostentatious profusion as New York, was most useful. We needed such an
example. Nor did he appear to carry this principle to an extreme. He was
very far from being miserly, though keenly intent upon accumulation.

In the life of the Old World there is nothing so shocking to a
republicanized mind as the awful contrast between the abodes of the poor
and the establishments of the rich. A magnificent park of a thousand
acres of the richest land set apart and walled in for the exclusive use
of one family, while all about it are the squalid hovels of the peasants
to whom the use of a single acre to a family would be ease and comfort,
is the most painful and shameful spectacle upon which the sun looks down
this day. Nothing can make it right. It is monstrous. It curses
_equally_ the few who ride in the park and the many who look over its
walls; for the great lord who can submit to be the agent of such
injustice is as much its victim as the degraded laborer who drowns the
sense of his misery in pot-house beer. The mere fact that the lord can
look upon such a scene and not stir to mend it, is proof positive of a
profound vulgarity.

Nor is it lords alone who thus waste the hard earned wealth of the
toiling sons of men. I read some time ago of a wedding in Paris. A
thriving banker there, who is styled the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild,
having a daughter of seventeen to marry, appears to have set seriously
to work to find out how much money a wedding could be made to cost. In
pursuing this inquiry, he caused the wedding festivals of Louis XIV's
court, once so famous, to seem poverty-stricken and threadbare. He began
by a burst of ostentatious charity. He subscribed money for the relief
of the victims of recent inundations, and dowered a number of
portionless girls; expending in these ways a quarter of a million
francs. He gave his daughter a portion of five millions of francs. One
of her painted fans cost five thousand francs. He provided such enormous
quantities of clothing for her little body, that his house, if it had
not been exceedingly large, would not have conveniently held them. For
the conveyance of the wedding party from