r. Hearst--
American View of the House of Lords.

It would seem to be inevitable that any general diffusion of corruption
in political circles should act deleteriously on the morals of the whole
community. It will therefore seem almost absurd to Englishmen to
question whether on the whole the code of commercial ethics in
America--the standard of morals which prevails in the every-day
transaction of business--is higher or lower than that which prevails in
Great Britain. The answer must be almost a matter of course. But,
setting aside any expression of individual opinion and all preconceived
ideas based on personal experience, let us look at the situation and
see, if we can, what, judging only from the circumstances of the two
countries, would be likely to be the relative conditions evolved in
each. To do this it will be necessary first to clear away a common
misapprehension in the minds of Englishmen.

It is somehow generally assumed--for the most part unconsciously and
without any formulation of the notion in the individual mind--that
American society is a sort of truncated pyramid: that it is cut off
short--stops in mid-air--before it gets to the top. Because there are no
titles in the United States, therefore there are no Upper Classes;
because there is no Aristocracy therefore there is nothing that
corresponds to the individual Aristocrat.[309:1] If there were a peerage
in the United States, the country would have its full complement of
Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, and the rest. And--this is the
point--they would be precisely the same men as lead America to-day;--but
how differently Englishmen would regard them!

The middle-class Englishman, when he says that he is no respecter of
titles and declares that it does not make any difference to him whether
a man be a Lord or not, may think he is speaking the truth. It is even
conceivable that there are some so happily constituted as to be able to
chat equally unconcernedly with a Duke and with their wife's cousin, the
land agent. Such men, I presume, exist in the British middle classes.
But the fact remains that in the mass and, as it were, at a distance the
effect of titles on the imagination of the British people is
extraordinarily powerful.

That the men in America are precisely the same men, though they have no
titles, as they would be if they had, is best shown by the example of
Americans who have crossed the Canadian border. If Sir William Van Horn