on the 'off' evenings of their 'sociables' proclaim as
with the audible sound of the roaring of a million mice....

"And however one indicates one's impression of the
clearance, the clearance itself, in its completeness, with the
innumerable odd connected circumstances that bring it
home, represents, in the history of manners and morals, a
deviation in the mere measurement of which hereafter may
well reside a certain critical thrill. I say hereafter because
it is a question of one of those many measurements that
would as yet, in the United States, be premature. Of all
the solemn conclusions one feels as 'barred,' the list is quite
headed in the States, I think, by this particular abeyance
of judgment. When an ancient treasure of precious vessels,
overscored with glowing gems and wrought artistically into
wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been converted
through a vast community into the small change,
the simple circulating medium of dollars and 'nickels,' we
can only say that the consequent permeation will be of
values of a new order. Of _what_ order we must wait to
see."

America has no Church. Neither has it a peasantry nor an aristocracy,
and until well on in the Victorian epoch it had no disproportionately
rich people.

In America, except in the regions where the negro abounds, there is no
lower stratum. There is no "soil people" to this community at all; your
bottom-most man is a mobile freeman who can read, and who has ideas
above digging and pigs and poultry-keeping, except incidentally for his
own ends. No one owns to subordination As a consequence, any position
which involves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority is difficult
to fill; there is, from the European point of view, an extraordinary
dearth of servants, and this endures in spite of a great peasant
immigration. The servile tradition will not root here now; it dies
forthwith. An enormous importation of European serfs and peasants goes
on, but as they touch this soil their backs begin to stiffen with a new
assertion.

And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. There
is no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne, no
legitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper social
structure of leisure, power and State responsibility which in the old
European theory of Society was supposed to give significance to the
whole. The American community, one cannot