s something just
ahead of him, beckoning him and tantalizing him, and there is always
something just behind him, menacing him and causing him to sweat. Even
when he attains to what may seem to be security, that security is very
fragile. The English soap-boiler, brewer, shyster attorney or
stock-jobber, once he has got into the House of Lords, is reasonably
safe, and his children after him; the possession of a peerage connotes a
definite rank, and it is as permanent as anything can be in this world.
But in America there is no such harbour; the ship is eternally at sea.
Money vanishes, official dignity is forgotten, caste lines are as full
of gaps as an ill-kept hedge. The grandfather of the Vanderbilts was a
bounder; the last of the Washingtons is a petty employe in the Library
of Congress.

It is this constant possibility of rising, this constant risk of
falling, that gives a barbaric picturesqueness to the panorama of what
is called fashionable society in America. The chief character of that
society is to be found in its shameless self-assertion, its almost
obscene display of its importance and of the shadowy privileges and
acceptances on which that importance is based. It is assertive for the
simple reason that, immediately it ceased to be assertive, it would
cease to exist. Structurally, it is composed in every town of a nucleus
of those who have laboriously arrived and a chaotic mass of those who
are straining every effort to get on. The effort must be made against
great odds. Those who have arrived are eager to keep down the
competition of newcomers; on their exclusiveness, as the phrase is,
rests the whole of their social advantage. Thus the candidate from
below, before horning in at last, must put up with an infinity of rebuff
and humiliation; he must sacrifice his self-respect today in order to
gain the hope of destroying the self-respect of other aspirants
tomorrow. The result is that the whole edifice is based upon fears and
abasements, and that every device which promises to protect the
individual against them is seized upon eagerly. Fashionable society in
America therefore has no room for intelligence; within its fold an
original idea is dangerous; it carries regimentation, in dress, in
social customs and in political and even religious doctrines, to the
last degree. In the American cities the fashionable man or woman must
not only maintain the decorum seen among civilized folks everywhere; he
or she must a