dollars and find it wanting. But this does not in the least alter the
matter. The people who inveigh the most fiercely against the pretensions
of blue blood are generally, the world over, the ones who are devoured
by the most ardent retrospective ambitions for grandfathers and
grandmothers; and the Americans who cry out loudest against the hollow
vanity of the European aristocracy are generally those who have
genealogical trees and coats-of-arms of authenticity more or less
questionable hanging in their back parlor, and think themselves a step
removed from those among their neighbors who boast of no such property.

It may not be pleasant for us to acknowledge to ourselves that our
countrymen abroad are cankered with toadyism and are frightful snobs;
but so it is, nevertheless. The fact is very visible, veil it as we may.
The American who has not had it forced upon his attention in innumerable
ways--by the undisguised _empressement_ of those among his compatriots
who frankly spend their whole time running after persons with titles,
entertaining them and fawning upon them in every possible manner, no
more than by the intensely American Americans who profess supreme
disregard for all precedence and distinctions established by society,
and yet never fail to let you know, quite accidentally, that Count This,
Baron That and Marquis the Other are their very particular friends--has
had an exceptional experience indeed.

This manner of disposing of all Americans abroad by putting them into
one of these two categories may seem somewhat sweeping, and it will be
objected that there are hundreds of our countrymen in Europe who could
never come under the head of either. Granted. These hundreds undoubtedly
exist: they are made up of people of superior mind and intelligence, of
people of superior culture, of people who occupy that exceptional social
position which, either through associations of hereditary ease,
refinement, wealth and elegance, or by contact with "the best" of
everything from childhood up, confers on those who belong to it very
much the same outward gloss the world over. But it is never among such
exceptions that the distinctive characteristics of a nation are to be
sought. These are to be looked for in the great mass of the people. Now,
the great mass of Americans who go abroad are people of average minds,
average education, average positions; and that, thus taken as a mass,
they are lamentably lacking both in good t