Life — September 27, 1883 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

By THE WAY, CHANDL ABOUT ARCTIC NAVIGATION? Secretary Chandler: No, DO you ? Secretary Lincoln: YOU KNOW ANYTHIN Secretary Lincoln: NOT THE FIRST THING. Secretary Chandler: THEN LET’S SEND OFF AN- OTHER EXPEDITION AND GIVE THEM MORE DETAILED DIRECTIONS. “© AUREEL,” as he loved to be called by his intimates, was a blunt, plodding man, who in his well-to-do prime was pronourced vulgar and in the days of his crushing moneyed power considered eccen- tric. These eccentric qualities, physical, mental and moral, are inherited by Pumpkyns II., who at once, by still-dredging in Wall Street ooze, and by a system of highway robbery too vast for the nippers of the law to compass, proceeds to augment the mighty pile with a heartlessness and zeal which must make the ghost of his frugal father caper with delight. Meantime, these forty years have wrought awful changes in the house of VAN KANTALOUPE, The suzerainty of Waibac has been lost to the heirs, through the impertinent intrusion of that vandal instrument known technically as a foreclosure. Perhaps it is because the brain power of the great NicHOLAS KARTOFEL has weakened as it filtered through his posterity, and possibly because tremendous estates are no longer procurable by a cheap outlay of bad rum and worse gunpowder, as they were in the days of the statesman of Waibac, but it is certain that the princes of the house of VAN KANTALOUPE, in order to meet the demands of the sordid rent-gatherers, and keep up the family pride, are compelled to that method of domestic economy familiar to the trade as “+ jumping” the tailor, “ playing” the grocer and “‘ choking off” other hardened vendors of the necessaries of life. Now in these days it comes to pass that that most careless or grossly ignorant or vicious gardener, Fate, plants together the gilded sprouts of PumPkYNS II, and the haughty VAN KANTALOUPE. suckers in that exclusive portion of our Metropolitan Garden, Murray Hill, where they cannot help but commingle and observe each other’s ways. They commingleand observe—but alas! the re- sult. PuMpKYNSVAN KANTALOUPE, one sequel tothe commingling, has now only the PuMpkyns’ vulgarity without the PuMPKYNs’ * LIFE: power, and the spendthrift prodigality of the VAN KANTALOUPF. clan, without their stupid Dutch honesty and icy virtue ; while in Van KANTALOUPE PUMPKYNS (heir-apparent), the other sequel, may be observed the once well-sustained Aauteur of Waibac sim- mered ‘down to a chronic stiff neck, combined with a grossness of fleshly indulgence which probably makes the tough old ghost of Pumpxyns I, creep, and a reckless, wanton extravagance which must certainly make him howl. In the above case, as our esteemed subscriber must admit, hy- bridization has improved neither stock from an aristocratic standpoint; for PumpKYNs VAN KANTALOUPE can trace his pedi- gree only on his father's side of the house, and VAN KANTALOUPE PuMpkyns only on his mother’s, and this, as can readily be seen, makes both their families lop-sided. It is a fallacy too often indulged in on this side of the pond that dollar-getting is an aristocratic occupation. It is not. Worse than unaristocratic, it is exceedingly bad form. Your true aris- tocrat lives upon his patrimony. He toils not, neither does he spin, and, as Solomon in all his glory owed neither Poole nor Smallpage, nor Bell, it is doubtful that Solomon was arrayed like one of these. Your true aristocrat, therefore, is idle. He is born in idleness and educated in idleness; he marries, dies and is buried in idleness, and he leaves an estate of idleness to the chil- dren who come after him, together with an enormous transmitted talent for doing nothing. Now, if money were like malaria, and would cling to a person in spite of his most violent endeavors to shake it off, it might be possible for the aristocrat to keep the pa- ternal dollars, or subject them to the law of increase. But a large estate is like a large army, requiring brains to bring it together, and brains to keep it together; and, as brains are not ancestrally obtainable as easily as money, and but seldom transmitted with money, your true aristocrat's property soon shows a disposition to crawl away from his heirs, and they know neither enough to whistle it back or tie it up. By hybridization with a dollar-getter some little fresh acquisitive talent may be infused, but the result- ant, as we have seen, is a mongrel—neither an aristocrat nor a dollar-getter, but with the worst qualities of both and the good points of none, All this strictly agrees with the hypothesis of Darwin and HAECKEL, according to which our mutual friends, the First Circlers, are inexorably governed. Couclusively proving this, is the fact that examples of the phenomenon of Reversion are often to be seen in American aristocrats. The apostle of Pangenesis is gloriously vindicated as we behold in our youthful LEyDENs, Van Varies, Kartorets and VAN KANTALOUPES, the same qualities which characterized their ancestors 8,000 years ago, when the primal founder of American aristocracy swung from branch to branch of his own family tree by his tail, and the first of the dollar-getters grubbed for truffles on his own acres and account, without the impertinent restraint of a social ring through his nose. Our esteemed subscriber will see that it is just this law of Natural Selection which kills both the Aristocrat and the Dollar- getter in time. The Aristocrat must live. To live he must have the means of subsistence. The means of subsistence, in these effete days, are brains or moncy. The former is an improba- ble property with him, as we have just seen, and the latter, in his hands, fleeth as a shadow and continueth not. His effort at Natural Selection is therefore the Dollar-getter’s daughter, and the union is his destruction as an Aristocrat. comicbooks.com