The Extravagance of Great Expositions
The growing fad of great memorial expositions, calling for millions of dollars in aid from the government, is doing much to arouse the spirit of extravagant display in this country. Every city that can in any way connect its history or locality with some prominent event of the past seems to be ambitious to have the government spend a few millions for the purpose of inducing a six months' rush of business for local profit. There has been so much precedent already that no representative in Congress, who has a pretentious city in his district, feels safe in refusing an appropriation lest his own constituency may be the next to ask a like favor. An Eastern journal aptly says that "if the tendency goes on, in less than a century [it might have said a decade] the country will be in a perpetual ecstasy of shows." It is doubtful if any city has yet profited by such shows; the temporary financial gains through extortionate prices for everything in sight, and the influx of innumerable immoralities, have been more than offset by an aftermath of business and social demoralization. These great shows are sustained, next to government donations, by the "lovers of pleasures," and in turn sow the seed for a vast increase in that class of people. It is the same spirit that brought ruin to the great cities and great governments of the past. It seems strange that, while the American people profess aversion to the superfluous and demoralizing and impoverishing extravagances of the Old World, they should so persistently encourage the very causes that directly lead to such results.