he artist
and buys his work. Their _conservatoires_ form the singers, and their
schools the painters and architects of Europe and America.

The English copy them in their big way, just as the Romans copied the
masterpieces of Greek art, while they despised the authors. It is rare
that a play succeeds in Paris which is not instantly translated and
produced in London, often with the adapter's name printed on the
programme in place of the author's, the Frenchman, who only wrote it,
being ignored. Just as the Greeks faded away and disappeared before
their Roman conquerors, it is to be feared that in our day this people of
a finer clay will succumb. The "defects of their qualities" will be
their ruin. They will stop at home, occupied with literature and art,
perfecting their dainty cities; while their tougher neighbors are
dominating the globe, imposing their language and customs on the
conquered peoples or the earth. One feels this on the Riviera. It
reminds you of the cuckoo who, once installed in a robin's nest, that
seems to him convenient and warmly located in the sunshine, ends by
kicking out all the young robins.

No. 23--A Common Weakness

Governments may change and all the conditions of life be modified, but
certain ambitions and needs of man remain immutable. Climates, customs,
centuries, have in no way diminished the craving for consideration, the
desire to be somebody, to bear some mark indicating to the world that one
is not as other men.

For centuries titles supplied the want. This satisfaction has been
denied to us, so ambitious souls are obliged to seek other means to feed
their vanity.

Even before we were born into the world of nations, an attempt was made
amongst the aristocratically minded court surrounding our chief
magistrate, to form a society that should (without the name) be the
beginning of a class apart.

The order of the Cincinnati was to have been the nucleus of an American
nobility. The tendencies of this society are revealed by the fact that
primogeniture was its fundamental law. Nothing could have been more
opposed to the spirit of the age, nor more at variance with the
declaration of our independence, than the insertion of such a clause.
This fact was discovered by the far-seeing eye of Washington, and the
society was suppressed in the hope (shared by almost all contemporaries)
that with new forms of government the nature of man would undergo a
transformation and r