Life, 1914-07-09 · page 10 of 40
Life — July 9, 1914 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes wealth inequality and social classes. The article "Best People: Our Trials with Them" critiques the wealthy elite who inherit fortunes and resist redistribution, while simultaneously mocking reformers and regulators who demand equality. The top cartoon shows a man fishing while a woman holds his catch—likely satirizing how the wealthy effortlessly accumulate resources ("Quick, Charles!"). The bottom cartoon depicts a woman serving food to two wealthy gentlemen at a lavish table ("An Absorbing Subject Well Treated"), suggesting the article's point: wealthy people are preoccupied with material excess while dismissing those—particularly Prohibitionists and reformers—who challenge their dominance. The satire cuts both ways, mocking both acquisitive elites and tiresome moral reformers.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
54 Best People: Our Trials with Them F course it is all right that the best people should inherit the earth. It has always been so. Who should inherit it if not the best people? But it seems there is always trouble if too much of the earth is inherited by any one group of folks. The people who are not the best begin presently to feel pinched, and then there is a howl. For the other-than-best-peo- ple insist that they, too, have a right to live, and begin to crowd and claw in an ungentlemanly and un- reasonable manner, and to make a fuss, and all because the best people seem to be getting too much—too much land, too much money, too much power. They are not intelligent enough to take just enough, but they are hardly to be blamed for that. Hardly anybody is intelligent to that extent. The machinery of acquisition, once it gets a good start, cannot be stopped at a given point. It grows by what it feeds on, and must go on or else collapse. Its engineers can direct, but hardly control, it. They are caught themselves in its cogs and must hang on for dear life. There are best people whose activi- ties are more centered on material things than the activities of other best people are, and there are many best people, nowadays especially, who are “OvICk, CiLARLES!" constantly trying to put back large parts of what they have got. But very little dependence is placed on volun- tary moderation in calculations to keep the world balanced. What the calcula- AN ABSORBING SUBJECT WELL TREATED tors count on is that when any group gets too much the other groups will pitch onto it and get the excess away from it. That is always going on in the world, Individuals are modera individuals are benevolent, but m chinery must run, morselessly acquisitive and have to he choked off in due time before they get all there is. nd groups are re- ND then there is another kind of hest people, and another set of troubles with them, Besides the un- controllably acquisitive people, who are not so very numerous after all, there reformatory and regulative ideas about right con- duct and habits, and insist upon it that all the other people shall live up to what they think is right. These reformatory people are terribly numerous, and tireless in their labors One lot of them are the Prohibitionists (led just now by the gallant but quite are the people, who h