ior to the gaping herd of her political equals.

This social aspiration, of course, is most vividly violent and idiotic
on its higher and more gaudy levels, but it is scarcely less earnest
below. Every American, however obscure, has formulated within his secret
recesses some concept of advancement, however meagre; if he doesn't
aspire to be what is called fashionable, then he at least aspires to
lift himself in some less gorgeous way. There is not a social
organization in this land of innumerable associations that hasn't its
waiting list of candidates who are eager to get in, but have not yet
demonstrated their fitness for the honour. One can scarcely go low
enough to find that pressure absent. Even the tin-pot fraternal orders,
which are constantly cadging for members and seem to accept any one not
a downright felon, are exclusive in their fantastic way, and no doubt
there are hundreds of thousands of proud American freemen, the heirs of
Washington and Jefferson, their liberty safeguarded by a million guns,
who pine in secret because they are ineligible to membership in the
Masons, the Odd Fellows or even the Knights of Pythias. On the distaff
side, the thing is too obvious to need exposition. The patriotic
societies among women are all machines for the resuscitation of lost
superiorities. The plutocracy has shouldered out the old gentry from
actual social leadership--that gentry, indeed, presents a prodigious
clinical picture of the insecurity of social rank in America--but there
remains at least the possibility of insisting upon a dignity which
plutocrats cannot boast and may not even buy. Thus the county judge's
wife in Smithville or the Methodist pastor's daughter in Jonestown
consoles herself for the lack of an opera box with the thought
(constantly asserted by badge and resolution) that she had a nobler
grandfather, or, at all events, a decenter one, than the Astors, the
Vanderbilts and the Goulds.

IV

It seems to us that the genuine characters of the normal American, the
characters which set him off most saliently from the men of other
nations, are the fruits of all this risk of and capacity for change in
status that we have described, and of the dreads and hesitations that go
therewith. The American is marked, in fact, by precisely the habits of
mind and act that one would look for in a man insatiably ambitious and
yet incurably fearful, to wit, the habits, on the one hand, of
unpleasant assertiveness, of