Note 74 — Chapter II · WEALTH
Reading edition
George du Maurier attributes this happiness in the wealth of others to what he calls “The British Passion for inequality,” illustrated by him in
Punch
. An Englishman is walking with a Frenchman in Hyde Park, and gives utterance to that passion in these words:—
“Sturdy Briton. It’s all very well to turn up your nose at your own beggarly Counts and Barons, Mossoo! But you can’t find fault with our nobility! Take a man like our Dook o’ Bayswater, now! Why, he could buy up your Foreign Dukes and Princes by the dozen! and as for you and me, he’d look upon us as so much dirt beneath his feet! Now, that’s something like a nobleman, that is! That’s a kind o’ nobleman that I, as an Englishman, feel as I’ve got some right to be proud of!”