Special Mention

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 25, 1902

The “Era of Burning Money.”

“It is the era of burning money,” remarks Mr. Paul Latzke in an article in the Saturday Evening Post of February 15. He does not mean that everybody is burning money, or that there are fewer poor people in the land to-day than there have previously been; he is speaking of the nation’s metropolis—New York City—and of the representatives of wealth and fashion which that city contains. After speaking of the prodigious advance in real-estate values which is a feature of its current history, this writer says:—

“This much is apparent to any one who cares to look around: Money is being circulated at a rate that eclipses all past records. It is the scramble of the shopkeepers, the purveyors to this epoch of luxury, that has forced up rents and land values. It is because the people here are so eager to spend money that the persons who cater to them are practically unable to keep up with the demand. To-day the limit has apparently been reached in display and indulgence, when lo! to-morrow the doings of to-day pale into insignificance.”

“For years it has been said that the acme of luxury in hotel-keeping was reached at the Waldorf-Astoria, where the guests and the ordinary strollers in the lobby walk on oriental rugs, and gaze on art treasures beyond price scattered about the reception rooms and parlors. Now plans are announced for a hotel farther up the avenue that is to make the Waldorf look like an inn by comparison. Here guests are to dine off china the smallest piece of which will cost five dollars. The table napery is to be woven by the finest looms in France. The lodgers are to sleep in chambers in which every article would rival the furniture once used by kings alone. The men behind this scheme are all practical, hard-headed business experts, who would not invest a dollar except in a certainty, and they feel that they have a certainty here.”

Ah, there is another “certainty” about all this, not realized by these hard-headed business men, or by those who are seeking how they may burn some of their “heaped-up wealth”; and that certainty is that this unheard-of heaping up of treasure, this revelry of luxury which eclipses anything known in ancient or modern times, is declared by inspired prophecy to be a characteristic of the time when the end of all things is impending. “Go to now, ye rich men. . . . Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.”