It may be remarked that the item for charity on the preceding schedule is somewhat disproportionate to the amount of the total expenditure. I offer no excuse or justification for this. I am engaged in an honest exposition of fact—for my own personal satisfaction and profit, and for what lessons others may be able to draw from it. My charities are negligible.

The only explanation which suggests itself to my mind is that I lead so circumscribed and guarded a life that these matters do not obtrude themselves on me. I am not brought into contact with the maimed, the halt and the blind; if I were I should probably behave toward them like a gentleman. The people I am thrown with are all sleek and well fed; but even among those of my friends who make a fad of charity I have never observed any disposition to deprive themselves of luxuries for the sake of others.

Outside of the really poor, is there such a thing as genuine charity among us? The church certainly does not demand anything approximating self-sacrifice. A few dollars will suffice for any appeal. I am not a professing Christian, but the church regards me tolerantly and takes my money when it can get it. But how little it gets! I give frequently—almost constantly—but in most instances my giving is less an act of benevolence than the payment of a tax upon my social standing. I am compelled to give. If I could not be relied upon to take tickets to charity entertainments and to add my name to the subscription lists for hospitals and relief funds I should lose my caste. One cannot be too cold a proposition. I give to these things grudgingly and because I cannot avoid it.

Of course the aggregate amount thus disposed of is really not large and I never feel the loss of it. Frankly, people of my class rarely inconvenience themselves for the sake of anybody, whether their own immediate friends or the sick, suffering and sorrowful. It is trite to say that the clerk earning one thousand dollars deprives himself of more in giving away fifty than the man with an income of twenty thousand dollars in giving away five thousand. It really costs the clerk more to go down into his pocket for that sum than the rich man to draw his check for those thousands.

Where there is necessity for generous and immediate relief I occasionally, but very rarely, contribute two hundred and fifty or five hundred dollars. My donation is always known and usually is noticed with others of like amount in the daily papers. I am glad to give the money and I have a sensation of making a substantial sacrifice in doing so. Obviously, however, it has cost me really nothing! I spend two hundred and fifty dollars or more every week or so on an evening's entertainment for fifteen or twenty of my friends and think nothing of it. It is part of my manner of living, and my manner of living is an advertisement of my success—and advertising in various subtle ways is a business necessity. Yet if I give two hundred and fifty dollars to a relief fund I have an inflation of the heart and feel conscious of my generosity.

I can frankly say, therefore, that so far as I am concerned my response to the ordinary appeal for charity is purely perfunctory and largely, if not entirely, dictated by policy; and the sum total of my charities on an income of seventy-five thousand dollars a year is probably less than fifteen hundred dollars, or about two per cent.

Yet, thinking it over dispassionately, I do not conclude from this that I am an exceptionally selfish man. I believe I represent the average in this respect. I always respond to minor calls in a way that pleases the recipient and causes a genuine flow of satisfaction in my own breast. I toss away nickels, dimes and quarters with prodigality; and if one of the office boys feels out of sorts I send him off for a week's vacation on full pay. I make small loans to seedy fellows who have known better days and I treat the servants handsomely at Christmas.

I once sent a boy to college—that is, I promised him fifty dollars a year. He died in his junior term, however. Sisters of Mercy, the postman, a beggar selling pencils or shoelaces—almost anybody, in short, that actually comes within range—can pretty surely count on something from me. But I confess I never go out of my way to look for people in need of help. I have not the time.

Several of the items in my budget, however, are absurdly low, for the opera-box which, as it is, we share with several friends and which is ours but once in two weeks, alone costs us twelve hundred dollars; and my bill at the Ritz—where we usually dine before going to the theater or sup afterward—is apt to be not less than one hundred dollars a month. Besides, twenty-five hundred dollars does not begin to cover my actual personal expenses; but as I am accustomed to draw checks against my office account and thrust the money in my pocket, it is difficult to say just what I do cost myself.

Moreover, a New York family like mine would have to keep surprisingly well in order to get along with but two thousand dollars a year for doctors. Even our dentist bills are often more than that. We do not go to the most fashionable operators either. There does not seem to be any particular way of finding out who the good ones are except by experiment. I go to a comparatively cheap one. Last month he looked me over, put in two tiny fillings, cleansed my teeth and treated my gums. He only required my presence once for half an hour, once for twenty minutes, and twice for ten minutes—on the last two occasions he filched the time from the occupant of his other chair. My bill was forty-two dollars. As he claims to charge a maximum rate of ten dollars an hour—which is about the rate for ordinary legal services—I have spent several hundred dollars' worth of my own time trying to figure it all out. But this is nothing to the expense incident to the straightening of children's teeth.

When I was a child teeth seemed to take care of themselves, but my boy and girls were all obliged to spend several years with their small mouths full of plates, wires and elastic bands. In each case the cost was from eighteen hundred to two thousand dollars. A friend of mine with a large family was compelled to lay out during the tooth-growing period of his offspring over five thousand dollars a year for several years. Their teeth are not straight at that.

Then, semioccasionally, weird cures arise and seize hold of the female imagination and send our wives and daughters scurrying to the parlors of fashionable specialists, who prescribe long periods of rest at expensive hotels—a room in one's own house will not do—and strange diets of mush and hot water, with periodical search parties, lighted by electricity, through the alimentary canal.

One distinguished medico's discovery of the terra incognita of the stomach has netted him, I am sure, a princely fortune. There seems to be something peculiarly fascinating about the human interior. One of our acquaintances became so interested in hers that she issued engraved invitations for a fashionable party at which her pet doctor delivered a lecture on the gastro-intestinal tract. All this comes high, and I have not ventured to include the cost of such extravagances in my budget, though my wife has taken cures six times in the last ten years, either at home or abroad.

And who can prophesy the cost of the annual spring jaunt to Europe? I have estimated it at thirty-five hundred dollars; but, frankly, I never get off with any such trifling sum. Our passage alone costs us from seven hundred to a thousand dollars, or even more and our ten-days' motor trip—the invariable climax of the expedition rendered necessary by the fatigue incident to shopping—at least five hundred dollars.

Our hotel bills in Paris, our taxicabs, theater tickets, and dinners at expensive restaurants cost us at least a thousand dollars, without estimating the total of those invariable purchases that are paid for out of the letter of credit and not charged to my wife's regular allowance. Even in Paris she will, without a thought, spend fifty dollars at Reboux' for a simple spring hat—and this is not regarded as expensive. Her dresses cost as much as if purchased on Fifth Avenue and I am obliged to pay a sixty per cent duty on them besides.

The restaurants of Paris—the chic ones—charge as much as those in New York; in fact, chic Paris exists very largely for the exploitation of the wives of rich Americans. The smart French woman buys no such dresses and pays no such prices. She knows a clever little modiste down some alley leading off the Rue St. Honoré who will saunter into Worth's, sweep the group of models with her eye, and go back to her own shop and turn out the latest fashions at a quarter of the money.

A French woman in society will have the same dress made for her by her own dressmaker for seventy dollars for which an American will cheerfully pay three hundred and fifty. And the reason is, that she has been taught from girlhood the relative values of things. She knows that mere clothes can never really take the place of charm and breeding; that expensive entertainments, no matter how costly and choice the viands, can never give equal pleasure with a cup of tea served with vivacity and wit; and that the best things of Paris are, in fact, free to all alike—the sunshine of the boulevards, the ever-changing spectacle of the crowds, the glamour of the evening glow beyond the Hôtel des Invalides, and the lure of the lamp-strewn twilight of the Champs Elysées.

So she gets a new dress or two and, after the three months of her season in the Capital are over, is content to lead a more or less simple family life in the country for the rest of the year. One rarely sees a real Parisian at one of the highly advertised all-night resorts of Paris. No Frenchman would pay the price.

An acquaintance of mine took his wife and a couple of friends one evening to what is known as L'Abbaye, in Montmartre. Knowing that it had a reputation for being expensive, he resisted, somewhat self-consciously, the delicate suggestions of the head waiter and ordered only one bottle of champagne, caviar for four, and a couple of cigars. After watching the dancing for an hour he called for his bill and found that the amount was two hundred and fifty francs. Rather than be conspicuous he paid it—foolishly. But the American who takes his wife abroad must have at least one vicarious taste of fast life, no matter what it costs, and he is a lucky fellow who can save anything out of a bill of exchange that has cost him five thousand dollars.

After dispassionate consideration of the matter I hazard the sincere opinion that my actual disbursements during the last ten years have averaged not less than one hundred thousand dollars a year. However, let us be conservative and stick to our original figure of seventy-five thousand dollars. It costs me, therefore, almost exactly two hundred dollars a day to support five persons. We all of us complain of what is called the high cost of living, but men of my class have no real knowledge of what it costs them to live.

The necessaries are only a drop in the bucket. It is hardly worth while to bother over the price of rib roast a pound, or fresh eggs a dozen, when one is smoking fifty-cent cigars. Essentially it costs me as much to lunch off a boiled egg, served in my dining room at home, as to carve the breast off a canvasback. At the end of the month my bills would not show the difference. It is the overhead—or, rather, in housekeeping, the underground—charge that counts. That boiled egg or the canvasback represents a running expense of at least a hundred dollars a day. Slight variations in the cost of foodstuffs or servants' wages amount to practically nothing.

And what do I get for my two hundred dollars a day and my seventy-five thousand dollars a year that the other fellow does not enjoy for, let us say, half the money? Let us readjust the budget with an idea to ascertaining on what a family of five could live in luxury in the city of New York a year. I could rent a good house for five thousand dollars and one in the country for two thousand dollars; and I would have no real-estate taxes. I could keep eight trained servants for three thousand dollars and reduce the cost of my supplies to five thousand almost without knowing it. Of course my light and heat would cost me twelve hundred dollars and my automobile twenty-five hundred. My wife, daughters and son ought to be able to manage to dress on five thousand dollars, among them. I could give away fifteen hundred dollars and allow one thousand for doctors' bills, fifteen hundred for my own expenses, and still have twenty-three hundred for pleasure—and be living on thirty thousand dollars a year in luxury.

I could even then entertain, go to the theater, and occasionally take my friends to a restaurant. And what would I surrender? My saddle-horses, my extra motor, my pretentious houses, my opera box, my wife's annual spending bout in Paris—that is about all. And I would have a cash balance of forty-five thousand dollars.

REVISED BUDGET

Rent—City and country $7,000

Servants 3,000

Supplies 5,000

Light and heat 1,200

Motor 2,500

Allowance to family 5,000

Charity 1,500

Medical attendance 1,000

Self 1,500

Travel, pleasure, music and sundries 2,300

______

Total $30,000

In a smaller city I could do the same thing for half the money—fifteen thousand dollars; in Rome, Florence or Munich I could live like a prince on half the sum. I am paying apparently forty-five thousand dollars each year for the veriest frills of existence—for geranium powder in my bath, for fifteen extra feet in the width of my drawing room, for a seat in the parterre instead of the parquet at the opera, for the privilege of having a second motor roll up to the door when it is needed, and that my wife may have seven new evening dresses each winter instead of two. And in reality these luxuries mean nothing to me. I do not want them. I am not a whit more comfortable with than without them.

If an income tax should suddenly cut my bank account in half it would not seriously inconvenience me. No financial cataclasm, however dire, could deprive me of the genuine luxuries of my existence. Yet in my revised schedule of expenditure I would still be paying nearly a hundred dollars a day for the privilege of living. What would I be getting for my money—even then? What would I receive as a quid pro quo for my thirty thousand dollars?

I am not enough of a materialist to argue that my advantage over my less successful fellow man lies in having a bigger house, men servants instead of maid servants, and smoking cigars alleged to be from Havana instead of from Tampa; but I believe I am right in asserting that my social opportunities—in the broader sense—are vastly greater than his. I am meeting bigger men and have my fingers in bigger things. I give orders and he takes them.

My opinion has considerable weight in important matters, some of which vitally affect large communities. My astuteness has put millions into totally unexpected pockets and defeated the faultily expressed intentions of many a testator. I can go to the White House and get an immediate hearing, and I can do more than that with judges of the Supreme Court in their private chambers.

In other words I am an active man of affairs, a man among men, a man of force and influence, who, as we say, "cuts ice" in the metropolis. But the economic weakness in the situation lies in the fact that a boiled egg only costs the ordinary citizen ten cents and it costs me almost its weight in gold.