t the paradise of parvenus, and these occasionally commit
grotesque mistakes in the distribution of civilities. Because you
chose to "stay in" for a season or two, they will take for granted, if
suddenly brought in contact with you, that you have never "been out"
and could not go if you tried. Of course, to feel hurt by such cheap
hauteur proves that you are in a manner worthy of it; but even though
you are not in the least hurt, you cannot refrain from a thrill of
annoyance that a country which has boasted in so loud-mouthed a way to
Europe of having begun its national life by a wholesome scorn of all
class distinction, should contain citizens cursed by a spirit of such
tawdry pride. At least the aristocracies of other lands, vicious and
reprehensible as they have always been, are yet an evil with a certain
malign consistency for their support. Like those monarchies of which
they have formed a piteous adjunct, they have always been the
outgrowths of a perfectly natural ignorance. Though distinct clogs to
civilization, their existence remains pathetically legitimate.
Nuisances, they are still nuisances with a hereditary hold on history.
Their chief modern claim for continuance is the fact that they were
once authorized by that very "divine right" which is now the scorn and
jest of philosophy, and that the communities which they still infest
are yet unprepared for the shock of their extirpation. It is clear
that they will one day be sloughed off like a mass of dead animal
tissue, even if they are not amputated like a living limb that has
grown hopelessly diseased. They are as surely doomed by the slow
threat of evolution as is the failure to establish trial by jury in
Russia. They are tolerated by progress for the simple reason that
progress is not yet ready to destroy them. Hence are all imitations of
their permitted and perpetuated folly in wofully bad taste. They are
more; they are an insult, when practised in such a land as ours, to
republican energies, motives, and ideals. Heaven knows, we are a
country with sorry enough substantiality behind her vaunts. We call
ourselves freemen, and our mines and factories are swarming with
haggard slaves. We declare that to be President of the United States
is the most honorable office a man can hold, and our elected
candidates (except when they have the splendid self-abnegating courage
of a Cleveland!) wade to Washington through a perfect bog of venal
promises. We prate of our de