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Arthur Ponsonby Baron Ponsonby
Published by Good Press, 2022
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Chapter X
A plutocracy may not ever actually govern the country; a greater calamity could hardly be conceived, but the rich are, nevertheless, our leaders, and every rich man is setting up a pattern which, without his being aware of it, perhaps hundreds of thousands are anxious to copy. The poor admire and like the rich, and the rich know it. In their humility, and sometimes envy, they watch them with awe as beings of another and more glorious world. They read of them in their novelettes; an atmosphere of splendour and romance surrounds them. They see them in their brilliant settings, they hear of their great doings, they know of the magnificence of their establishments, and as the chasm between them is still unbridged, they are spellbound by the fascination which only the mysterious and the unknowable can give. They see no connection whatsoever between the position of the rich and their own, nor do the rich themselves acknowledge that there is any. The ignorance of the rich about the poor is profound, but it is nothing to the ignorance of the poor about the rich. The chasm between the two is never spanned. Those who live with the rich approve their methods and are blind to sights they do not want to see. They are heedless and unconscious of the world of toil and privation, or only apprehend it occasionally when a beggar or tramp somehow manages to evade being tucked away out of sight and thrusts himself before their unwilling gaze. Even then they become accustomed to the sight of these unfortunates, whose existence they believe is due to the bad management of public authorities. And those who study the far side of the chasm are so much preoccupied and aghast at the tangled confusion that confronts them that they only have time to cast a glance of contempt at the self-indulgence and luxurious living which seems too distant to be real, too ridiculous and wicked to be quite true, and they refuse to regard it seriously as a component part of the various enigmas they are attempting to solve. Even economists, who are occupied with dissertations and discussions on production, consumption, and distribution, seldom turn their attention seriously to the moral impulses that cause, and the fashions and habits that control, the great accumulations of capital and the appalling waste which results.
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