THE REIGN OF GILT

THE
REIGN OF GILT

BY
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

New York
JAMES POTT & CO.
1905

Copyright, 1905, by James Pott & Co.
ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL, LONDON
First Impression, September, 1905

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I.—PLUTOCRACY

CHAPTER I
WE ARE NOT ALL MONEY-CRAZED

The eminent Bishop of the Episcopalian diocese of New York has spent practically his whole life among people of wealth and fashion and their associates. He has made some brief excursions, but his social relations, his intimacies have been altogether with what Parton calls “the triumphant classes.” He knows the plutocracy; his diocese lies in its stronghold, includes many of its most conspicuous and aggressive leaders both in making and spending money. There can be no question of his qualification to speak authoritatively of it, of its mode of living and thinking. He has said:

“Hear a group of young girls whose fresh youth one would think ought, in the matter of their most tender and sacred affection, to be as free from sordid instinct as from the taint of a godless cynicism. You will find that they have their price, and are not to be had without it any more than a Circassian slave in the market of Bagdad.”

Again:

“If the first comers to these shores were to come back to-day and see the houses, the dress and the manners of their descendants, they would think themselves in London in the time of Charles, or in Versailles in the time of the Louises.”

When he went on to urge the rich “to illustrate in their habit of life simplicity of attire, inexpensiveness in the appointments and chasteness in the aspect, proportions, furniture and decorations of their dwellings,” he could have meant only that he finds the Americans whom he knows best for the most part ostentatious and extravagant in dress, prodigal and vulgar and ignorantly profuse in their dwellings. And when he charged them with having “the buying of legislatures as their highest distinction” and with “appropriating the achievements of the scholar, the inventor, the pioneer in commerce or the arts, without rewarding them for the products of their genius,” he framed an indictment not on belief but on knowledge which becomes tremendous in view of the conservative character of his mind and his training, the dignity and responsibility of his position and the unequalled opportunity that is his to know whereof he speaks.

Lord Methuen, felled in a trifling engagement in the Boer war by one of those flesh wounds that are most painful but not serious, telegraphed home, “This is the bloodiest battle in history.” His point of view was rather too personal. And somewhat so must it have been with the Bishop when he concluded his survey of the encompassing plutocracy with this wild, despairing cry:

“The whole people are corrupted and corrupting! Moloch is god and his shrine is in almost every household in the republic!”

Fifth avenue and Wall street are not all of Manhattan Island: Manhattan Island is not all of New York City; New York City is not the only city in America; and outside the cities in every direction stretch vast areas of American soil not without its population. The plutocracy is a phase, not the whole. If the distinguished Bishop were as competent to speak of the American people as he is of the plutocracy, we might well feel that it is all over with the republic—that we Americans have bartered our birthright for a few handfuls of yellow earth and richly deserve our fate of social, political and industrial serfdom.

But——

It is as exact a truth as any in chemistry or mechanics that Aristocracy is the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread ignorance, and Democracy the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread intelligence.

An intelligent few may be, as in Russia to-day, crushed down by an unintelligent mass wielded by a tyrant or group of tyrants. An unintelligent mass may for a time get, as in modern England, some measure of liberty through the mutual jealousies of intelligent upper classes warring one with another for supremacy. But let intelligence be diffused, let the sluices be opened so that it flows through the social soil in every direction and the tendency toward Democracy becomes irresistible. Monarchs may plot. Venerable and long-venerated institutions of princely and priestly and property caste and privilege may thunder, “Thus far and no farther!” Schools and colleges may give an education of half-truths and prejudices. Philosophers may deplore and warn, may project subtle and alluring schemes for maintaining or rehabilitating the old tyrannies in a new form. New conditions may produce new and subtle tyrannies that seem stronger than the old. All in vain. As well might a concourse of parliaments and tongues resolve that the heat of the sun be reduced one-half.

In face of any and all obstacles, in face even of the determination of a whole people, confused by false education, refusing to be free and rallying to the defense of some beloved tradition of caste, Democracy marches on hardly more hindered than an epidemic by the incantations of a “medicine man.”

Inertia is characteristic of the great mass of human beings, whatever their stage of development. And if the combat against the instinctive, all but universal reluctance to change had no stronger weapons than the tongues and pens of “reformers,” men would still be huddled in caves, gnawing bones. It is by no effort of its own that a race or a nation moves. It is in obedience to conditions that cannot be resisted and that now gently and now rudely compel man to readjust himself or to perish.

Democracy does not appreciably advance by the energy and enthusiasm of those who believe in it any more than it greatly lags because of the machinations of those who secretly or openly oppose it. Energy and enthusiasm may hasten its formal recognition, its formal embodiment in written laws. On the other hand, adroitness may obtain a lease of formal existence for the outgrown institutions. But in neither case is the great essential fact of the progress of Democracy altered. This progress depends upon the diffusion of intelligence; and intelligence is not a matter of individual choice or even of formal education. If the eyes and the ears are open, if the mental faculties are normal, then wherever intelligence is diffusing, there the mind must be drinking it in. A sponge thrown into the water must become saturated. When intelligence permeates the masses, then out of the action and reaction of the common and the conflicting interests of an ever-increasing multitude of intelligent men there must begin to issue a democratic compromise self-government.

Thus Democracy is not a “cult” to rise and rage and perish. It is not a theory that may some day be discovered false. It is not a plant to be carefully watched and watered lest peradventure it die. It is a condition, an environment, an atmosphere. A force as irresistible as that which keeps the stars a-swinging is behind it. The story of history, rightly written, would be the story of the march of Democracy, now patiently wearing away obstacles, accelerated there, now sweeping along upon the surface, again flowing for centuries underground, but always in action, always the one continuous, inevitable force. There never has been any more danger of its defeat than there has been danger that the human brain would be smoothed of its thought-bearing convolutions and set in retreat through the stages of evolution back to protoplasm.

Until this last half-century it was extremely difficult to study the operations of any great world-principle. But discovery and invention have now given us sight far more penetrating than that of the fabled giant who could see the grass grow. The difficulty now is to avoid seeing and knowing. And to shut out all but some relatively unimportant phenomenon—suddenly and suspiciously acquired wealth here, a corrupt and extravagant or degraded public administration there, a strike or a riot or a momentary moral convulsion yonder—and from it to predict the approach of chaos with tyranny upon its back, is as childish as the fantastic alarms of a tribe of savages during an eclipse or a thunder storm.

That any in America should thus shut the eyes, say “It is night,” and grope and tremble, is more discreditable than a similar folly among Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans. Democracy has been our familiar from the very beginning, and self-government and the absence of rule are as old as our oldest settlements.

Those miserable first settlers, with minds as small and mean as their cabins, had no conception either of freedom or self-government. The tyrannies theological and tyrannies political which they set up to make life as hateful as it was squalid show that they had brought their European ideas with them. But fate was against them. They were of about the same low social rank. They were poor—and poverty is as potent a leveller as death itself. They were isolated. They had to shift each man for himself. So, deprived of rulers and forced to be free, since none cared to bind them, they began to govern each man himself. And they took the material tools which the civilization then current in Europe forced into their hands and, to save themselves from starvation, they set about the conquest of the land, not for a State as they imagined, but for themselves and their children.

Freedom is not the American’s because constitutions or statutes assert it. The constitutions, the statutes are merely written records of a truth no more dependent upon them than the proportions in which elements combine are dependent upon the text-books of chemistry. Besides, constitutions and laws avail only through their interpreters. And interpretation varies with the honesty or open-mindedness of official interpreters, with the spirit of the time, with the caprice of the moment even—a popular outburst, an impulse of bad courage in the public administrations, a greedy fear or desire in some powerful class. Legal enactments affect the surface of a society more or less and for periods of varying brevity; but the society itself is formed by conditions over which man has no greater control than he has over his heart-action. Those conditions constitute what the religious call “God in history” and the unreligious call fate or destiny or natural evolution.

America will remain in the highway to freedom because printing presses are whirling, because railway trains are moving, because news is streaming along the telegraph wires, because schools and colleges and libraries are open—because intelligence is diffused and is ever more widely diffusing. Rights may be and constantly are assailed in isolated instances. But each instance remains and must remain isolated. None has become or can become a precedent. And there must be precedent or there can be no tyranny. Prejudice, even wilful prejudice, still thrives; truth and error have not yet been divorced from their unholy alliance which seduces honest men to the purposes of rascals; passion still rules the heart and the heart still rules the reason. But America must be free, however hard it may struggle against freedom; Intelligence is striking off the shackles. It can no more be stopped or stayed than the law of gravitation can be suspended.

The European, or the American returning from a visit to Europe, is always disagreeably impressed by the evidences of haste, of imperfection in detail, by “the ragged ends sticking out.” But after a moment’s consideration of the reasons for this slovenliness wise criticism is disarmed. In the busiest hundred years the world has ever seen the Americans have had to shape out of a trackless wilderness a complete civilization containing as many as possible of the good ideas of the world’s past and having also all the latest improvements. There has been no time to “gather up loose ends.” The filling in of gaps, the replacing of makeshifts with permanent structures, the finishing and the polishing, have been perforce left to posterity. And, thanks to the passing and the present generations, posterity will have the leisure and the resources, and also the finer qualifications, necessary to that part of the task of civilization-building.

The shortcomings of to-day, as nationally characteristic as our energy and our mental alertness, are most obvious, of course, in the public administration—disagreeable in the national administration, painful in the state administration, shocking in the municipal administration. Because of these spectacles of sloth, incompetence and corruption in public officials, it is charged by many persons of reputation as “publicists” that Democracy is a breeder of public corruption. The truth is just the reverse. Democracy drags public corruption out of its mole-tunnels where it undermines society, drags it into the full light of day, draws its deadly fangs that fasten in fundamental human rights, cuts its fatal claws that sink deep into the throat of freedom. One sees and hears more of public corruption in a Democracy than in a State. An organism that is expelling disease at its surface looks worse than one which is hiding and fostering disease in its vitals.

Corruption is no offspring of Democracy. It is co-existent with human passions and weaknesses. Society is but a conglomerate of individuals; the whole, with all the strength of all the parts, has also all their weakness. In a State the public administration is the parlor; in a Democracy it is the servants’ hall. Public corruption in a State means that the head of the house is corrupt; public corruption in a Democracy means that the servants need attention.

Our serious public corruption—national, State and municipal—is of a kind unknown to the people of two generations ago. About the middle of the last century science developed to the point at which it was able to give man weapons adequate to the thorough conquest of nature and of natural difficulties. The American people at once seized these most timely tools and began the rapid conquest of their vast, undeveloped heritage. Forty years ago this was a sturdy but dull and monotonous agricultural nation. It was hindered in intercourse with the rest of civilization by the wide ocean, across which passage was slow, painful, dangerous. It had a sparse, scattered population leading a severe and sodden rural or semi-rural life. There were no cities in the modern sense, practically no railroads, few and wretched wagon roads, few factories, no great distributing agencies, no telegraphs. Each section was shut off from, was ignorant and suspicious of, the others. Opportunities for advancement, for individual elevation, did not, as now, press upon even the incompetent and unworthy through very profusion, but were rare, uncertain and narrow.

From the recent great industrial-social revolution has emerged the America of to-day—a land undreamed by our forefathers, uncomprehended by ourselves. In every essential of life—in education, in comfort, in refinement—there has been an immeasurable advance. And, most important of all, intelligence and that divine, truly democratic spirit of discontent, which has ever been the harbinger of enlightened progress, have penetrated to the remotest farmhouses, and fight a valiant and a winning battle with the sloth and despair of our city slums. Incidental to this evolution, inseparable from it, logically and naturally a part of it, there have been myriad opportunities for a temptation to corruption. And our corruption has complied with corruption’s universal law. It has been in direct proportion to opportunity.

As long as only old and familiar forms had to be combated the people did not feel, as they do now, the inadequacy, the utter unfitness of their electoral machinery for the work of selecting and controlling their public administrators. This machinery, with some slight changes, is the same that was used in Athens and that was borrowed by the Greeks from the Egyptians. It is the crudest and clumsiest device possible for registering the public will. It works fairly well in small communities where the people are not busy, where everybody knows everybody else, where public administrators can be held to strict personal account by their neighbors, their masters.

Until the two last centuries the world had little use for electoral machinery. And until the last fifty years, at most, there were no conditions that forcibly demanded the invention of a new electoral machine—one that would permit a people to register their will quickly, without circumlocutions, and at the same time without the haste that makes right action an accident.

In addition to this fundamental disadvantage our people are also contending against an almost equally unfortunate limitation. The industrial revolution presses into private service not merely all of the best minds of the nation, but also most of the minds in which large measures of both capacity and character are combined. Even the mediocres who would best fill public office—which in a Democracy should be obedient and never initiatory—have been impressed by high pecuniary rewards into private service. But demand creates supply. Give us a little time and our supply will once more equal the demands upon it. We are manufacturing competent, intelligent men and women workers by the tens and the hundreds of thousands now-a-days—faster than private enterprise can absorb them, in such vast numbers that not the richest plutocracy could seduce and silence all or even a large proportion of them. Give us a little time, another thirty years or so—at most.

Meanwhile let us not forget:—

First—That while we ought to be, and are, concerned about the purity and efficiency of our public administrations, our vital interest is in the projects and acts of the industrial leaders who here ignore, there cajole or bully, the public administration, now use and now defy it.

Second—That the new form of public corruption is an incident—melancholy, deplorable, dreadful, but still only a necessary incident—in that swift yet permanent betterment of man’s condition which practically began in the childhood of men still young.

Third—That while purchasers of inequality and of privilege to extort may evade the laws of the statute books, they cannot evade that law of Democracy which compels them to assist in raising the consuming and producing capacities of the people, the standards of enlightenment, of comfort, of refinement, of civilized desire—of intelligence! The plutocrats themselves are, in the quaint irony of fate, by no means the least efficient of our manufacturers of democrats.

It is not rational, it is distinctly irrational, to assert that moral or mental or physical betterment can tend to disaster, that the growth of intelligence may make men seek to tear down and tear up the fabric of civilization. It is true that the people—not here only, but throughout civilization and wherever civilization touches—are growing more restless, ever less content, ever more inquisitive, ever less reverential to tradition and authority. But are not these the very qualities which, working in the minds of the few in the past, led the human race up from the caves? Newspapers, libraries, schools do not make Huns and Vandals. On the contrary, they tame and eradicate that savagery which is the largest part of the estate we have inherited from our ancestors; on the contrary, they destroy the Huns and Vandals of inequality and privilege who would wrest from man his heritage under Intelligence and Democracy.

As for our own people, whose fate has been forecast in so many jeremiads, how would any man or body of men set about subjecting millions upon millions who are not merely educated but are also intelligent? The world has heretofore offered no opportunity for the trial of any such experiment in enslavement. The experiment if tried must be, indeed, original in conception and in execution. Is there hazard in the prophecy that no man now on earth will live to see it tried? Is there hazard even in the prophecy that it never will be tried? To assume that such an experiment could have any measure of success is to become involved in contradictions and absurdities. Make out the perils that beset our Democratic path as formidable as you please, and still it is less contradictory and absurd to assume that we shall triumph over them.

How will we do it? It is not given to man to foresee even one minute of his own future. But, since triumph we must, rest assured that triumph we shall. If you wish to make a shrewd guess as to the how of it, watch the motions of that infant of yesterday, Science. Already Science has given to us all a thousand things that not the richest of our grandparents could afford, nor the most powerful command. Beyond question it will presently unlock the secrets of the composition of matter and show us how every object that now enters into private wealth or is rationally sought by human desire can be obtained so easily by a little effort on the part of any human being that a man would as soon think of devoting himself to bottling sunshine as to storing up what is now called wealth. Less than two human generations of scientific activity, and already what ominous groanings and crackings in the last remaining of the artificial barriers that have so long dammed up the riches of the earth as wealth to be withheld or doled out by the few. Science is the emancipator, the deliverer, the mighty equalizer and leveler—equalizing and leveling up. Not down, but up, always up. Not by making the rich poor, but by making the poor rich. Not by making the wise foolish, but by making the foolish wise. Not by enfeebling the powerful, but by making powerful the feeble.

For signs of the world’s to-morrow, look not in the programs of political parties, not in the plottings of princes or plutocrats, but in the crucible of the chemist.

We have reminded ourselves of the solid ground upon which rests our faith in ourselves as a democratic people with a democratic future. We can therefore proceed, with fairly tranquil minds, to view some of the “perils” to the republic. And of these the greatest, the one that includes them all, is the plutocracy, which fills so many of our thinkers with grim forebodings. Instead of lying awake o’ nights, worrying about it, let us go boldly and democratically forth in the broad day and gaze straight at it in all its grisly vulgarity.

CHAPTER II
THE MANIA FOR GILT

You stand in front of a huge dam. Its wall rises bare and sheer. You say to yourself: “There can be little water behind it.” But even as you think this, the dam becomes a waterfall, and the waterfall swells into a Niagara. You go round where you see the other side; you find a lake fathoms deep and extending miles up the valley.

Precisely such a phenomenon occurred in this country a few years ago. Behind a dam of long-established customs of simplicity and frugality, concentrated private wealth had been rising for a generation with amazing rapidity. Suddenly it overflowed in a waterfall of luxurious living; and to-day the waterfall has become a Niagara.

The dam that has pent and narrowed the streams of national wealth is the concentration of property that has come about through the imperfect working of the law of combination which steam and electricity established. That imperfection has produced the multi-millionaire, the plutocrat, as the crowning inequality in a succession of inequalities. First, the man with a million or so; then the man with ten millions or so; then the man with fifty millions or so; now, the man with a hundred, with five hundred, with nearly a thousand millions. Every city has its plutocrats. In New York is the capital of plutocracy. As businesses combine, as wealth concentrates, the directors of business, the masters of wealth, segregate. Thus, New York is denuding the rest of the country of its plutocrats. Most of them live in New York now; the rest must soon come.

The mighty cataract of extravagant ostentation is continent-wide—from Boston to San Francisco. In New York, the high-curving centre of the down-pouring, glittering stream, the spectacle almost passes belief. There is not the least danger of exaggeration in description; the danger is lest they who have not seen with their own eyes may refuse to believe that men and women can be born under the American flag wild enough to indulge in such prodigality and pretense and folly.

A score of years ago there were in New York only a few private houses that could accurately be spoken of as palaces; to-day there are more than two hundred private houses that are indeed palaces in size, in cost, and in showiness; and hardly a week passes without announcement of several new ones of equal or surpassing splendor. Twenty years ago there were not in all so many as a score of palace-like hotels, apartment houses and business buildings; to-day there are more than five hundred of these wonderful structures of marble and granite over iron, each costing, with its equipment, decorations and furnishings, from two to six millions.

And the whole city—business quarters and industrial, rich quarters and poor—is in a state of chaotic upheaval, so furiously are they tearing down the New York that was new twenty years ago, and replacing it with a New York, in every quarter and every street significant of the presence of colossal wealth, of stupendous private fortunes, of an unprecedented and unbelievable number of great incomes.

Fifteen years ago the number of private equipages on New York’s streets was noticeably small, considering the city’s size and wealth, and their appointments for the most part extremely modest. To-day Fifth avenue and Central Park, from September to mid-June, are thronged with handsome private carriages, notably costly in all details of harness and upholstery, the servants in expensive, often gaudy liveries; and the multitude of women thus swept along in state, in beautiful dresses and hats and wraps, frequently display fortunes in furs and jewels.

As for the shops, it seems indeed only yesterday that you found the costly luxuries in a few fashionable places, and there in small quantities and almost reverently handled by clerks and customers. To-day the shops where the tens of thousands buy are more luxurious than were most of the best shops ten years ago. And in the best shops you are dazzled and overwhelmed by the careless torrent of luxury—enormous quantities, enormous prices, throngs of customers. Twenty-five dollars for a pair of shoes, fifteen dollars for a pair of stockings, two hundred dollars for a hat, one thousand dollars for a hat-pin or parasol, fifteen hundred for a small gold bottle for a woman’s dressing-table, thirty or forty thousand for a tiara, a hundred thousand for a string of pearls—these are prices which salesmen will give you with the air of one who tells an oft-told tale.

Why has an income of ten thousand a year become a mere competence in New York City to-day? Why do the families with ten times ten thousand regard themselves as far from rich? Why do enough New Yorkers to make a populous city regard it as privation if they cannot keep at least three servants, one of them a man-servant, and ride in cabs and have a country place in summer?

The explanation is—the multi-millionaire.

There are in New York City to-day upward of a thousand fortunes of two or more millions. About one-fourth of these are of more than ten millions. There are no less than forty-eight fortunes of more than forty millions, about twenty of these being more than seventy-five millions, and half a dozen of them between seventy-five millions and the mountainous aggregations of the Oil King—three-quarters of a billion, with an income beyond forty-five millions a year.

There is no way of estimating the number of fortunes of from three-quarters of a million to two millions. The income of a million dollars, safely invested, is about forty thousand a year. Many New York men—several thousands—have from their profession or their business annual incomes, available for living expenses, of forty thousand or thereabouts, yet their holdings of property are small. But they belong in the millionaire class because they spend money like the millionaires and are of the most strenuous part of the plutocracy.

It is the multi-millionaires who set and force the pace—the families with incomes of more than a quarter of a million a year. “A man with a hundred thousand a year,” said the late Pierre Lorillard, with humorous seriousness, “is in the unhappy position where he can see what a good time he could have if he only had the money.” And he added that easy circumstances meant “a thousand dollars a day—and expenses.”

Properly and comfortably to live in the style which New York most envies and admires and encourages, a family should have an income of three-quarters of a million at least. But by economy and abstention from too great self-indulgence, and by Spartan resistance to many fascinating temptations, they may keep up the appearances of a very high degree of luxury on a quarter of a million a year. Of course, they cannot have very many or very grand houses; they must not think of racing stables; they would do well to keep out of yachts; they must expect to be frequently and far outshone in jewels and in entertainments; they must keep down their largess, their benevolences. But they can have a small house in town, one or two more in the country, can entertain creditably if they do not entertain too often, and can live—if they are prudent—free from the harassments of money cares.

The quickest way to get at the reason for this curious state of affairs, that may seem to many a flamboyant jest rather than conservatively presented reality, is to look at the life of the typical New York multi-millionaire of the extravagant class. There are multi-millionaires, scores of them, who do not belong in this extravagant class; but there are not so many outside of it now as there were five years ago.

Our up-to-date, luxury-hunting, luxury-teaching Mr. Multi-Millionaire has a fortune which is estimated at thirty millions, but is ten millions more or less in the widest fluctuations of the stock market. His income is about a million and a half a year, but he usually spends three-quarters of a million, and relies upon speculation to put him in funds for extraordinary expenditures, such as a new house, a large gift to education or charity, a large purchase of pictures or jewels.

As human beings compare themselves only with those in better circumstances, he counts himself poor rather than rich—his fellow-citizens, the Oil King, and the Copper King, and the Sugar King, and the Steel King, and the Telegraph King, and the Tobacco King, and the Real Estate King are what he calls rich. He thinks himself unlucky rather than lucky; he avoids intimacy with men of smaller fortunes and no fortunes unless he has known them long, because he suspects that he is usually sought with a view to exploitation—and he is not far from right. He thinks he is opposed to ostentation, severely criticises his richer neighbors and loudly applauds frugality.

He has a wife who is forty-five years old and passes for “about thirty.” They have a son who has been out of college four years, and after learning enough of business to supervise a fortune, has settled down to the life of a “gentleman”; a daughter, who came out last winter and who is being guarded by her mother, her companion, her aunt and her sophisticated self against the wiles of fortune-hunters wearing Cupid’s livery; a son who was at Groton, is now a sophomore at Harvard; a daughter nine years old.

They have three fixed and six or seven temporary residences.

First, there is the palace in Fifth avenue, where the family is united for a few weeks in each year. It is closed from the first of June until the first of October, and when the various members of the family make flying trips into New York they take a suite at the St. Regis or at Sherry’s. Second, there is “the cottage” at Newport, about the same size as the palace on Fifth avenue. Most of the family usually spend the latter part of the summer here. Third, there is the large new house on Long Island, twenty-five miles from New York, where several members of the family spend part of the spring and fall. Luxurious New Yorkers are becoming more and more susceptible to the changes of the season. They are emulating, though as yet at a distance, the smart set of Juvenal’s Rome, with its summer and winter finger rings.

Our family have a small house at a fashionable place in North Carolina; the mother and eldest son go there for a part of February and March. They have a thousand acres and a comfortable house in the Adirondacks—the head of the family likes to shoot and fish. They have a place in the Berkshire Hills—but they do not go there now and they are thinking of selling it. The wife has an apartment in Paris. She must be sure of comfort when she goes over for her shopping. Every few years they take a big house in Mayfair for the season, and go on to Scotland for the shooting. Then there is the steam yacht, an ocean greyhound—last year it cost them sixty thousand dollars for maintenance, a few repairs and refittings. The grown son has persuaded his father to start a racing stable—a small one with fifteen or twenty thoroughbreds. His trainer costs him ten thousand dollars a year, and his jockey five thousand more, as a retaining fee. The father estimates the cost of this addition to the family expense at one hundred thousand dollars a year—he hopes this will include betting losses. The son has long had a string of polo ponies that costs, with all its embroideries, fifteen to twenty thousand a year.

Ten years ago this family had only a small house in town—small by comparison—and the beautiful palace on the Ocean Drive at Newport. But they do not feel that they are now extravagant. Wherever they go they find people of their own set and a good many “rank outsiders” doing the same things they are doing; and they find many doing things they would think far beyond their means.

For example, a man has just paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a string of pearls for his wife. Our multi-millionaire regards that as an extravagance. He thinks his own wife’s string, which cost one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, represents the limit of prudent expenditure for such a purpose. And those of their friends whom they regard as comparatively poor—the people with from fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year—are pushing them on by concentrating where they scatter. They meet different groups of these moderately rich people at different points in their annual round; and each group is living almost as well as, in some respects better than, they are at that particular point. True, So-and-So’s house in town is a trivial twenty-room affair on a side street, but his place in Newport (he concentrates upon it) is far finer than their Newport place. Smith is decently housed in town and at Newport, but lives in a tiny doll’s house in Curzon street during the London season. Jones is modest in America and England, but how he does blaze on the Riviera!

There must be no standing still. There must be progress. The standards, all the standards—house, dress, equipage, number and livery of servants, jewels, works of art, sports, gifts—are rising, rising, rising. Each year, more and ever more must be spent, unless one is to fall behind, lose one’s rank, be mingled with the crowd that is ever pressing on and trying to catch up.

In the neighborhood of these plutocrats and their parasites and imitators, struggling thus desperately in gaudiness, it is all but impossible not at times to fear that prosperity, concentrated prosperity, has killed Democracy, has killed the republic. Foreigners look at New York and the galaxy of rich cities eagerly imitating it, and shrug their shoulders and sneer. Americans look, and try to keep their courage and their point of view.

CHAPTER III
PLUTOCRACY AT HOME

Let us glance at our typical Mr. Multi-Millionaire’s town house. It is a palace of white marble, in Fifth avenue, near Fifty-ninth street—the view across the Park from the upper windows is superb. This palace was the inaugural of the family’s recent fashionable career. It is the struggle to live up to it that is making them famous in New York.

The palace was to have cost our family a million, including the site. Up to the present time it has cost them two and a half millions, and that does not include the one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar set of tapestries for the dining-room which is on its way from Europe. The site cost half a million; the house three-quarters of a million; the rest went for furniture, and the house still looks bare to the family. “A wretched barn,” madame calls it. There are one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in paintings and statuary in the entrance-hall, fifty thousand dollars in paintings, statuary, and such matters in the rest of the house. Two hundred thousand dollars could easily be spent without overcrowding. The furniture, thinly scattered in the long and lofty salon, cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—it is amazing how fast the money disappears once one goes in for old furniture.

As you look round these show rooms—the vast entrance-hall, the enormous dining-room, the great library, the salon which is used as ballroom, the comparatively small and exquisitely furnished reception-rooms—you are struck by the absence of individual taste. You are in a true palace—the dwelling-place, but in no sense the home, of people of great wealth, but of no marked æsthetic development. They have the money, and to a certain extent the faculty of appreciation. But others have supplied the active, the creative brains.

You go up the grand stairway, and at the turn pause to look down at the magnificent rug which almost covers the floor of the entrance-hall, up at the splendid painting which adorns the ceiling. The owner—you know him well—tells you that each cost twenty-five thousand dollars.

And then he takes you into the wife’s living-rooms. She is out of town.

Madame lives in five great rooms—a sitting-room, a dressing-room, a bedroom, a room where her clothes in use—quantities of dresses, hats, wraps, boots, shoes, slippers, drawers full of the finest underclothing—are kept, and a bathroom. She is very crowded, she will tell you. For instance, where is her secretary to sit and work when she wishes to use her sitting-room for a private talk with her son or daughter, or some intimate friend?

You look round these rooms and again you note the absence of individual taste. Madame is always on the wing; she has no time to impress herself on her immediate surroundings. But a very capable artist has been at work and has not neglected the opportunities which his freedom in the matter of money opened to him. He has created several marvelous color schemes through harmonious shadings in rugs, upholstery, the brocade coverings of the walls, the curtains, the woodwork and the ceilings. You are not surprised that a hundred thousand dollars went in making suitable surroundings for a lady of fashion and fortune. You know that there are several dozen suites more expensive than this within gun-shot, and scores almost as expensive within a radius of half a mile.

If she were at home there would be on that dressing-table five or six thousand dollars in gold articles: brushes, combs, hand-mirrors—each gold and rock-crystal hand-mirror cost seven hundred and fifty dollars—bottles, button-hooks, and so forth, and so forth. If she were here, there would be in that safe at least fifty thousand dollars in jewelry—a small part of what she has, the rest being in the safe-deposit vaults.

The two marvels of this suite of hers are the bed and bath-tub. The bed is on a raised platform in a sort of alcove. The canopy and curtains are of a wonderful shade of violet silk. The counter-pane and roll-cover are of costly lace. The head-board and foot-board are two splendid paintings—one of sleep, the other of awakening. You think nine thousand dollars was cheap for this bed, even without canopy, lace and other fineries.

The bath-tub is cut from a solid block of white marble and is sunk in the marble floor of her huge bathroom. It is a small swimming-pool, and its plumbing is silver, plated with gold. On the floor of this room at the step down into the tub there is a great white bear-skin, and there is another in front of the beautiful little dressing-table. Three palms rise from the floor and tower—real trees—toward the lofty ceiling.

Going on through the palace you discover that it is arranged in suites—somewhat like a very handsome and exclusive private hotel. And then you learn that here is not one establishment, but seven, each separate and distinct. Our multi-millionaire’s family have outgrown family life and are living upon the most aristocratic European plan.

In a smaller, more plainly furnished suite of rooms than those occupied by his wife, lives the husband. In a third suite lives the grown son; in a fourth the grown daughter; in a fifth and sixth, these the smallest, live the young son and the young daughter. The seventh establishment consists of forty-two personal assistants and servants.

Each member of the family has his or her own sitting-room and there receives callers from within or without the family—except that the daughter receives men callers in the smallest of the three reception-rooms on the ground floor. Each has his or her own personal attendants; each lives his or her separate social life. They rarely meet at breakfast—it is more comfortable to breakfast in one’s sitting-room; they rarely meet at luncheon—luncheon is the favorite time for going to one’s intimates; they rarely meet at dinner—one or more are sure to be dining out or the mother is giving a dinner for married people.

It is with eyes on this lofty height that the New York family, just emerging from obscure poverty, with five or six thousand a year, anxiously ask themselves: “Now, can we at last afford a man to go to the door and wait on the table?”

For the man-servant is the beginning of fashion, and its height can be measured—as certainly as in any other way—by the number of men-servants and the splendor of their liveries.

Of course, our family of pacemakers have an “adequate” supply of secretaries, tutors, governesses, valets, maids; and the housekeeper has her staff, the chef his, the butler his, the head coachman his, the captain of the yacht his. Then there are caretakers, gardeners and farmers, the racing-stable staff, various and numerous occasional employees. At the request of Mr. Multi-Millionaire, his private secretary recently drew up a list of all persons in the family’s service. It contained—with the yacht out of commission and the Newport place not yet opened—seventy-nine names.

Mr. Multi-Millionaire, becoming interested in statistics, went on to have his secretary take a census of the horses and carriages owned by the family. Of horses there were sixty-four, excluding the seventeen thoroughbreds in the racing stable at Saratoga, but including the hunters and the polo ponies. The little girl had the fewest. Poor child! She had only a pair of ponies and a saddle horse, and she complained that her sister was always loaning the hack to some friend whom she wished to have riding with her. The grown son had the most—thirteen; he must hunt and he must coach and he must play polo, or try to. The father himself was almost as badly off as his little daughter—he had only four.

Of vehicles there were at the town stables a landau, two large victorias and a small one, two broughams, a hansom; an omnibus, seating six; four automobiles, a tandem cart, a pony cart. At the several country places—a coach, a drag, a surrey, a victoria phaeton, two dos-à-dos, two T-carts, four runabouts, three buggies, two breaking carts, making a total of thirty-one.

The secretary remarked that these vehicles, assembled and properly distanced, would, with their animals, form a procession about three-quarters of a mile long. He then tried to read Mr. Multi-Millionaire some statistics of harness, saddles, and so forth, but was forbidden.

In further pursuit of this statistical mania, Mr. Multi-Millionaire discovered that his family and their friends—and the servants—had drunk under his various roofs during the past year nearly two thousand quarts of red wine, about one thousand quarts of champagne, one hundred and fifty quarts of white wine, one hundred and fifty quarts of whiskey, one thousand eight hundred quarts of mineral water, and an amazing amount of brandy, chartreuse, and so forth. The family’s total bills for drink, food, cigars, and cigarettes had been of such a size that they represented an expenditure of about three hundred and seventy dollars a day—about one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a year. His wife became very angry when he showed her these last figures. She told him that he was meddling in her business and that she didn’t purpose to spend her whole life in watching servants.

Our multi-millionaire did not make his fortune; he inherited it. But he has been very shrewd in managing it, for all his extravagance. Though he is cautious about expenses in one way, he shows by the allowances he makes to the various members of his family that he believes in carrying out to the uttermost the idea that his family must live in state. His wife has a million in her own name, but he makes her an allowance of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain herself and their households. The grown son has had an allowance of twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and when he marries it will be trebled—perhaps quadrupled. This is large for persons of their modest fortune, but many fathers of smaller means are doing as much for their children, and our multi-millionaire will not see his children suffer. His grown daughter has an allowance of fifteen thousand dollars—more than she needs, as she has only to buy her clothes and pay her small expenses out of it. The boy in college has five thousand dollars a year; he is always in debt, but his mother helps him. The youngest child has ten dollars a week—her clothes are bought for her, and she can always get money from her father or mother when she wishes to make handsome presents.

The most interesting person in the family is the mother. She is its moving force, one of the moving forces in the extravagant life of New York City to-day. You see her name and her pictures in the newspapers very often, always in connection with the news that she is doing something. She was the first in New York to have huge flunkeys in gaudy knee-breeches and silk stockings in waiting at her front door. She was the first to have as an entertainment for a few people after dinner several of the grand opera stars and the finest orchestra in the country. She is a woman with ideas—ideas for new and not noisy or gaudy, but attractive ostentations of luxury. She spends money recklessly, but she gets what she wants.

She is one of the busiest women in town. And the main part of her business is one which engages New York women, and men, too, ever more and more—the fight for prolonging youth.

You would never suspect that she is the mother of a son twenty-five years old. Indeed, you would not suspect from her looks or her conversation that she is a mother. She is making her fight for youth most successfully. Of course, she uses no artifices—the New York women who care greatly about looks have long since abandoned artificiality, except as a fad. Her hair is thick and dark and fine. It is her own, kept vigorous by constant treatment. Her skin is clear and smooth and healthily pale—it costs her and her beauty assistants hours of labor to keep it thus. Her figure is tall and slender and girlish—her masseuse could tell you how that is done. She lives, eats, exercises, with the greatest regularity. And she eats little and drinks less.

On dress she spends about fifty-five thousand dollars a year. You will not see her many times in the same hat or dress; and she has a passion for real lace underclothing and for those stockings which seem to have been woven on fairy looms of some substance so unsubstantial that only fairies could handle it. She bought twelve thousand dollars’ worth of underclothing when she was in Paris last spring. Her bills at the dressmaker’s of the Rue de la Paix were twenty-seven thousand dollars, and at the milliner’s twenty-four hundred dollars. She has about five thousand dollars invested in parasols. She has sixty-seven thousand dollars’ worth of wraps—sables, chinchillas and ermine cannot be got for small sums. She has many evening dresses that cost from eight hundred dollars to twelve hundred dollars each. She has few dresses that cost as little as one hundred and twenty-five dollars. The average price for her hats would be, perhaps, fifty dollars. She had one with fur on it last winter that cost two hundred and seventy-five dollars.

The chief reason for her large expenditure for clothes is that now-a-days every detail of each costume must be in harmony. She must have slippers, stockings, skirt, dress, hat, parasol, all to match or in perfect harmony. For she is one of half a dozen New York women who are famous for style, and having established this reputation she must live up to it. When she ceases to fight for youth—which will be in about ten years—she will probably cut her expenditures for dress in half. By that time extravagance will have so far advanced that her successor will spend seventy-five thousand dollars or more on dress. The last season has seen a three-league advance. It is now the fashion to wear for a drive down the Avenue those delicate shades which are ruined so quickly. Next season the color scheme of the Avenue will be still more gorgeous and varied—and prodigiously more expensive.

But it is her mode of keeping house and entertaining that makes the thousands and tens of thousands fly. Her establishments are maintained like so many luxurious hotel restaurants. Though her housekeeper is a capable person and she herself studies her accounts closely, it is impossible to be ready at all times to house and feed an indefinite number of people of exacting taste without spending great sums of money. It costs to be able to say to the butler at the last moment: “There will be ten for luncheon, instead of six,” or “There will be twelve for dinner, instead of four,” or “There will be four for dinner, not eight.”

Our Mrs. Multi-Millionaire lives no better in respect of her table than scores of people in her set and around it. She pays her chef one hundred dollars a month and her butler seventy-five dollars a month, and so do they. She has no better supplies on hand than have they. Her bills at the shops where they sell things out of season—peaches at four dollars apiece, strawberries at fifty cents apiece, and peas at a dollar a small measure—show no different kinds of items from theirs. They, too, have Sèvres plates at five hundred dollars the dozen. They, too, have fruit plates and finger-bowls of gold plated on silver that cost twelve hundred dollars the dozen. They, too, have solid-gold after-dinner coffee cups at two thousand dollars the dozen, and solid-gold spoons at four hundred dollars the dozen. The difference between the dinners of those of her fortune and the dinners of those of fewer millions lies in quantity, not quality. Where they would have to make an effort in arranging an unusual dinner and could not have more than a dozen at table, her establishment and many more establishments like hers would easily and without effort expand to entertain, in a fashion once called royal, two or three scores of guests.

The main and very conspicuous characteristic of this typical leader in New York’s extravagance is, naturally, restlessness. Like the other women of her set, like their imitators, down and down through the strata of New York’s wealth-scaled society, she wanders nervously about, spending money, inventing new ways of spending it, all because she is in search of something, she knows not what, that ever eludes her. And this restlessness, this nervousness, this hysteria, possesses the women and the men alike. Does it come uptown with the men from Wall street? Does it go downtown from the women and the fever of Fifth avenue? It is impossible to say. We only know that it possesses both and that it influences their every relation of life, public and private.

A fashionable woman sails for Europe—more than five thousand dollars’ worth of flowers, jewels, books, things to eat and drink, go to the steamer on sailing day from her friends. A young couple are married—their intimates and relatives give them three-quarters of a million in wedding gifts. A brother meets his sister on her way downstairs on the morning of her birthday—“Here is a little gift for you,” he says, pausing just long enough to hand her a paper. It makes her the owner of a million in gilt-edged securities. A husband comes home from the office—“I’ve put through my deal,” he says. “You can have your new house, but I won’t stand for more than a million and a half.” A father calls his son into his study and says, “You will be twenty-one to-morrow. I fix your allowance at seventy-five thousand dollars a year.” A doctor goes to a banker to get a small subscription for a new hospital—“Why not build a new hospital?” asks the banker. “I’ll give a million. If that’s not enough I’ll give two.”

It is amazing how many great and beautiful palaces of a kind such as is occupied by our multi-millionaire are being added yearly to New York’s fashionable quarter. And there is not a single palace in New York that is comfortable. No way has yet been devised for making them otherwise than chilly and draughty. The human animal is too small for such huge surroundings; and there are not enough competent servants or even competent available housekeepers to make the domestic machinery run smoothly.

The new millionaires slip into New York, into their new palaces, attracting little attention. Men with a scant million or two are coming all the time unobserved. If it were not necessity that drove them here, many of them would doubtless become angry at their insignificance and would go where less money gives distinction. But the rapid concentration of the directing forces of the business of the country in Manhattan Island compels them to yield to the entreaties of their wives and daughters and remain.

Scores of these palace owners have or seem to have no way of getting acquainted with anybody whatsoever. There are millionaires’ families that stare drearily out of the windows, bored to death in their isolation, and wishing they were back in the Western town where they used to have lots of fun. There are others who give entertainments in the vast rooms of their palaces at which you will find their clerks, a few nondescripts male and female, and no others—these standing or strolling awkwardly about, trying to forget that they are miserable in reflecting on the cost of the pictures and the decorations.

In the surroundings above outlined, how could anyone, whether newly rich or long rich, lead other than a sordid life? Money is there necessarily the basis of all action, the determiner of the complexion of every thought.

To the narrow vision of the palace dweller and of those who look only at palace dwellers, America seems like a greedy, ill-mannered child released upon a candy shop. In the wide, the true aspect it seems a man, intelligently developing himself, fevered by a sense of the shortness of life and the vastness of its opportunities.

In the one aspect it suggests an express rushing along, with the engineer mad and the passengers drunk. In the other aspect it suggests its own miraculous sky-scrapers, rising swift as an exhalation, high as the clouds, yet securely founded upon the rock.

CHAPTER IV
YOUTH AMONG THE MONEY-MANIACS

The typical young men of the America of fashion and high finance, created by the multi-millionaire, fall into two classes—the born successes, sons or heirs of rich men; the candidates for success. It is hardly necessary to say that in this connection success always means the accumulation of riches enough to enable one to make a stir even among the very rich.

If the young man is a born success, all that is left for him to achieve is to devise some plan for making a stir—the simplest way being to marry some woman with a talent for doing original and striking things. No matter how great his income, if he is not to suffer the fate of being an obscure follower, a merely rich person, suspected of stinginess, stupidity and vulgarity to boot, he must do something out of the ordinary—assemble an astonishing establishment, have the finest pictures, give the finest dinners and dances, run the fastest horses or the most demoniac automobile, give large sums on some original plan to education and philanthropy.

The chances are that the born success will marry in his own set—that is, the daughter or the heiress of some rich man. This will be due in large part to deliberation; also, neither is likely to know well many people who are not rich or of the rich. If he is the eldest son, the probabilities, the increasing probabilities are that he will inherit the bulk of the fortune, no matter how many brothers and sisters he may have. Some one in the next generation must maintain the family magnificence. Naturally, therefore, an unwritten law of primogeniture is rapidly growing in force and effect.

And this custom, combined with the rapidity with which great wealth piles up in America for him who has great commercial skill, insures us a future of ever more dazzling splendor, of luxury and extravagance—an immediate future; we will not here speculate as to that future which is more remote, but not less certain.

A short time ago a young man—a “born success”—went to a beautiful country house near New York to make a Saturday-to-Monday visit. He brought with him two huge trunks. These were taken to the almost magnificent suite of rooms which had been assigned to him. His valet unlocked the trunks and summoned the chambermaid. The two servants stripped from the bed the sheets and pillow-cases and covers; then from the trunks they took the young man’s own wonderful bed-clothing, woven especially for him by the best looms in Europe. These creations were put on the bed in place of the silk and fine linen which the owner of the country house, a very rich man, regarded as fit for a king, but which this young man thought far too coarse for contact with his delicate skin.

The host was given to extravagance, was used to and in sympathy with the eccentric efforts of too-rich people to attract attention to themselves. But this insulting refinement “got” on his nerves. As his guest was a very rich man, and was therefore entitled to that reverential deference which only the rich are capable of feeling for and giving to the rich, the host let no outward sign of his state of mind appear. But he confided the insult to his other guests as a “joke,” and had them privately laughing and jeering at his young friend.

This young man is one of the small advance guard of the new generation of plutocrats—the generation that has about the same knowledge of life as it is lived by the great mass of Americans that we have of the mode of life in a Hottentot kraal. We shall soon be far better acquainted with these sons and grandsons of somebodies than we are at present. Soon the wealth and industrial energy of the country will be controlled by them, or, rather, through them by a clever and unscrupulous few. Let us therefore pause for a moment upon these American “born successes,” taking at random some one of them as a type—one we will call, for convenience, Jones.

His father was a great business man, and in forty years of intelligent, incessant and unscrupulous effort amassed a vast fortune so invested that it gave the possessor control of an enormous financial and industrial area. The father was a self-made man; he had a profound reverence for book-learning; he was resolved that none of his own deficiencies should be reproduced in his son. His boy was to be a “cultured gentleman,” moving in the “best society.” Also, the boy should have all the “fun” which first poverty and then business cares had denied to the old man. He sent young Jones to the most famous schools both here and abroad; and he gave him plenty of money. It is not definitely known whether the old man was proud of the results of his method of bringing up a boy so far as he saw them before he died; but there is reason to believe that he was. Certainly, the boy was as different as it is possible to imagine from his plain, rather coarse, very manly if also very unscrupulous father. The boy had all his father’s supreme contempt for the ordinary moral code and for the mass of “weaklings” who live under it and suffer themselves to be plucked. There the resemblance between the two ends. In place of a brain, the boy acquired at college and elsewhere a lump of vanities, affectations and poses. Surrounded by hirelings from infancy, he became convinced that he was the handsomest in body and the most brilliant in mind that the world had in recent centuries produced. He thought, having been assured of it by shopkeepers and agents, that his taste was almost too fine for a coarse, commercial era, that his nerves were almost too delicate even for the works of the greatest musicians and painters and sculptors and poets, that he was living both within and without a sort of tone-poem.

When he came into his own and descended to Wall street, he was gratified but not surprised to learn that Wall street entertained his own exalted opinion of himself. And when he heard on every side that, in addition to being such an exquisite as a Lucullus or a Louis XIV would have copied, he was the greatest financier that ever lived, a boy-wonder at high finance, a greater than his father, the brain of a Nathan Rothschild in the body of a young Apollo, he accepted it all as the matter-of-course. Like so many of our very rich, he had an economical streak in him—but this was a profound secret, hardly known even to himself. So, he readily fell in with Wall street’s pleasant way of saving its own money and living off the money of other people. He plunged into the wildest extravagances, imitating and striving to outdo the young scions of plutocracy with whom he associated uptown. And like them, he made the people of whose trust funds his wealth gave him control, pay the bills. It is vulgar to pay one’s own bills, but there is no objection to their being paid out of another’s pocket. It saves one from the degradation of counting the cost, of thinking about prices and limits of incomes and such low things.

No sooner was he fairly launched than a half dozen of the great plutocrats, with wild shouts of adulation, proclaimed him their leader, put him in a commanding position in all their big swindling schemes called “finance” in Wall street. “You’re it, my lad,” they cried. “We take a back seat. Go up front where you belong. We’ll do whatever you say.”

Is it strange that the young man went about as if he were Mercury of the winged feet? Is it strange that he got into the habit of greeting his fellow-men with that gracious sweetness which kings alone have—and they only on the stage or in novels? And when it is added that uptown the married women flattered him, all the girls languished upon him, everybody pronounced him a devil of a fellow, a heart-breaker, a real, twenty-four carat, all-wool “cuss,” is it not wonderful that he did not go quite mad and dress in purple and wear laces and a sword?

Indeed, he did have those moments of absolute mental aberration, and had to go to or give fancy balls to hide his lunacy from the world. At those balls he always dressed in some ancient kingly costume; and so evident was it that he thought himself indeed a king, holding a grand levee, that a smirk followed in his wake as he stepped grandly about—a smirk that burst into a titter as soon as he was out of ear-shot. Yet really he was not the least bit more ridiculous than the other sons and daughters of plutocracy, all dressed up as kings and queens and nobles and grandees, and wondering if the imaginary were not the real and their moments in ordinary clothes a nightmare.

On and on he went, madder and madder, so crazy about himself that even his plutocratic “lieutenants,” who were using him as a stool-pigeon, could hardly keep their faces straight. At last he got to the stage at which the old kings of France got just before the Revolution—the mental state superinduced by beginning their education by setting in their copy-books as a writing model, “Kings may do whatever they please.” He never had had any sense of trusteeship; he had been flattered into believing that the railway or manufactory in which he owned a large amount of stock was his very own, that wages and salaries paid and dividends declared were his royal and gracious largess. But he at first had a dim sense that this great truth must not be publicly aired, that it was prudent to let the common people believe they had some share in the enterprise. Now, however, this dim respect for, or, rather, tolerance of, a popular delusion vanished. With rolling eyes and haughty nose and lips and high-stepping legs he advanced boldly and publicly into his kingdom. A Russian grand-duke said of the Russian people, “These fleas imagine they are the dog.” Young Jones said in effect the same thing of the depositors and stockholders in “my” enterprises, and showed publicly that he thought it.

Great excitement. His plutocrat “lieutenants,” seeing that their graft through this joyous young ass was imperiled, tried to quiet him. Failing there, they tried to cajole, then to cow the insurgent “fleas.” But all in vain. The ears of Jones, attuned only to adulatory sounds, were assailed by such shuddering rudenesses as “Petty larceny thief! Jackass! Swindler! Puller-in for the big gamblers! Crazy numskull!”

Frightful, wasn’t it? Not that he was in the least disturbed in his own exalted opinion of himself. An angel come from heaven direct would have moved him only to light, incredulous laughter by telling him the plain truth about himself. Still, the clamor was unpleasant; the open sneers, the sly stabs. And, above all, the ingratitude! The ingratitude of his associates in “society” who had got so much expensive entertainment and so much inspiration from him. The ingratitude of the people, his vassals, whom he paid salaries and wages and dividends, whom he permitted to deposit in his banks and to invest in his enterprises!

His soul is brave, as becomes the soul porphyrogenetic. But, as it is also a sensitive soul, how it is wrung!

The trouble with our young Jones is that he was premature—not in thought, but in showing his thoughts. Only premature. The madness that ravaged him is in the plutocratic air. Many eyes are rolling, many fingers are twitching in the premonitory symptoms of the malady. A few years at our plutocracy’s present rate of progress, and Jones will be recognized as a martyr. “Jones was born a little too soon. Jones came to a climax a little before the season,” the dandies will say.

June is the time for roses. Jones came in April. Poor Jones! Poor April rose!

Such is the mode of the “born success”; now for the young man who is born with brains and appetites and ambitions only. He is determined to achieve a plutocratic success; looks about him for the road that leads to palaces, equipages, yachts—all that gives one title to a seat at the table of honor at this banquet of extravagant luxury. He sees at once that to become a multi-millionaire he must use his brains to force or to cajole the multi-millionaires to make him one of them.

He must pattern after those who are far on the way to achieving his kind of success: this corporation lawyer earning his hundred thousand or more a year as the legal servant of rich men; that railway president with his fifty thousand a year and perquisites, earned as the commercial servant of rich men; that manager getting a salary of one hundred and twenty-five thousand as a seeker of safe investments for surplus millions of income—again a servant of rich men; that bank president with salary and opportunities together netting him upward of two hundred thousand a year—again a servant of the rich; that broker who put by half a million last year as a result of his skill and assiduity in the service of rich operators; that doctor who made seventy-five thousand in fees and two hundred thousand in Wall Street last year on “tips” from grateful patients—again the rewards of service to the rich.

Our young candidate for success has brains to sell; he wants customers with money. He hopes ultimately to sell these brains at a very high price; he wants customers with lots of money, millions of money, in which he may presently share largely. He must ingratiate himself with the rich; must go where they are to be found, not only in business hours, but also in hours of relaxation. He must not only work hard; he must also play hard and high—must lead the life of the rich as far as possible. His air, his dress, his style of living, all must be such that he will be regarded as rich and progressive. To drudge and to economize and to keep away from the extravagance downtown and up will mean a small success, or at best one that will not lead to the lofty height of fashion and social position upon which he has fixed his eyes.

He may have a streak of incurable folly in him. His effort to be “a man of the world” may draw him from discreet dissipation into that vortex which swallows up all weaklings not secured by great wealth. But let us suppose that he is not a weakling and that he keeps clearly in mind that at the basis of all success lies clear-headed, incessant industry. He works steadily at his business, commercial or professional; he shows capacity and is advanced; he is soon getting four or five thousand a year. At the same time he has prospered in what may be called the uptown end of his business; he has made acquaintances among the rich socially; several women of importance are interested in him and are telling their husbands and their husbands’ friends that he has brains. The men are seeing that the women are not mistaken.

In any American city except New York or Chicago, our young man would now be regarded as a person of some consequence. In New York or Chicago he has merely reached the point at which he can, if he is sagacious, measure his insignificance. He has worked hard, but the real day’s toil has only begun. He has raised himself from the class that includes hundreds of thousands; but he is still in a class that includes tens of thousands.

Perhaps this discourages him, makes him feel that he can never attain the paradise of multi-millionaires, or that, if he did attain it, he would be too exhausted to enjoy it. Perhaps experience has given him a clearer insight into the real meaning of his ambitions, and he is disgusted with their pettiness and sordidness, and begins to long for self-respect and decency and manhood. Perhaps his dream of success has been interrupted by a dream of sentiment. He may decide to marry and settle down—he has found New York drearily cold and lonely.

In that event he gives up his bachelor apartments in the edge of the fashionable district; he is seen no more at his club—indeed, he has resigned from it; he is forgotten by his fashionable friends; he and his wife live obscurely in a flat or an apartment hotel far from the world of fashion, or in a cottage down in the country—a commuter’s cottage, as unlike as possible the multi-millionaire’s cottage of marble or limestone, of which he once dreamed. And as he is no longer of the world with which we are concerned, he drops out of sight—for the present.

But, on the other hand, perhaps his discovery of his insignificance does not discourage him, but only serves to rouse him to greater efforts. His close inspection of the palaces and performances of the fashionable and extravagant rich has fired his imagination and energy. In that case he does not marry. “I am too poor,” he says, as he looks at his paltry income of five thousand a year and thinks on the humble ménage it would maintain, and remembers that his poorest married acquaintances up in the Fifth avenue or Lake Drive district have fifteen thousand a year and cannot afford to entertain or to keep a carriage, and are always fretting about money. He considers what a “decent” hat or dress for a woman costs, and—well, his tailor’s bill was seven hundred dollars last year and he has almost no clothes. He remembers his bills for the few small and very modest dinners he gave—a week’s earnings gone in a few minutes and the dinner a poor affair beside the poorest he has had at the houses of his rich acquaintances. To console himself for his heroic sacrifice of sentiment to ambition, he takes a somewhat better apartment for his bachelor self in a more fashionable apartment house—his rent is twelve hundred a year. He works hard downtown; he continues to work hard uptown. He works as cleverly in the one quarter as in the other. He is always seen with rich people; he belongs to fashionable clubs; he dines in palaces; he goes for Saturday-to-Monday visits at great, extravagantly maintained country houses; he is seen in boxes at the opera, at the horse show; he expands his tastes and his expenditures with his rapidly expanding income. His “fixed charges” are now fifteen thousand a year—very moderate for a man of his associations.

In addition to these absolute necessities he spends about fifteen thousand more upon presents and entertaining. Half a dozen men living in the apartment house he lives in spend twice as much as he does and do not consider themselves, and are not considered, either extravagant or dissipated.

He is making a great deal of money, but he feels—and is—poor. However, he is sustained and soothed by the certainty of riches immediately ahead. He has been spending, but it has been in the nature of an investment—a most judicious investment from the standpoint of his purposes. And presently his cleverness and audacity and “large ideas” have their reward; and then he marries.

She has tastes which are exactly his. She is willing to marry him because she has not made the success she and her mother dreamed of and strove for. She has some money—their joint income, while not imposing as New York incomes go, is still large enough to enable them to make “a decent start in life,” as their “set” interprets life.

Presently we find them installed in a “small” house or “little” apartment—the rent is more than ten thousand a year, and they have twelve servants. His skill as a money-maker is talked about; her dresses are admired and envied; their equipages, their surroundings, their dinners are models of luxurious good taste. As both are shrewd managers, their forty thousand a year enables them to seem to be spending twice that amount. They are in the high-road of plutocratic happiness and are creditably charioted. And as the years pass, their increasing wealth rolls up on itself as large wealth has a habit of doing. They annually tour the multi-millionaire circuit in great state—North Carolina, Hempstead, the Hudson, London, Paris, Newport. They have children.

No healthier, rosier, more intelligent children can be found anywhere than theirs. They have the best care that competent nurses and governesses can give. They live by the clock, are fed the most expensive and at the same time the most sensible food. They are dressed in a manner that makes plain mothers blink and stare. There are only two of them and the elder is only seven, but their clothing bill last year was fourteen hundred. It will be less, much less, as they grow older, for it is not good form to dress boys and girls extravagantly—at least not yet. They speak French and German as fluently as they speak English, and far more correctly. They have everything for mind and body—except the direct constant care of their mother. They have everything—that money can buy.

Let us go back to the cross-roads and take a candidate for success who, when he achieved his modest five thousand a year, married and went to live in a flat or small suite in an apartment hotel of the kind that would have been called luxurious a dozen years ago, but is now third-class. Let us assume that his wife, whether she came from out-of-town or from the city, is the typical present-day big-city woman of extravagant ideas—is, like her husband, wealth-crazy and luxury-crazy and society-mad.

In all probability they will have no children. Children are not popular among the extravagant in New York—dogs are less expensive, less troublesome, fully as affectionate and far less unfashionable. The extravagant rich still tolerate children, possibly because of a quaint, made-in-England theory that aristocratic families should maintain the “family line.” But “climbers” cannot afford the necessary time and money. It was Swift—was it not?—who first called attention to the fact that the attitude in climbing and in crawling is the same.

Our young climber is busy all day downtown—busy making money. His wife is busy uptown—busy spending the money he makes, or as much of it as she can threaten or wheedle away from him. She falls into a set of young married women with husbands and tastes like hers. They, like their husbands, think only of wealth and extravagance. And while they wait for their dreams to come true they invest every cent they can lay their hands upon in an imitative vain show.

Our young man’s wife reads the fashionable intelligence with her coffee. She presently goes forth as fashionably dressed as if their income were three or four times what it is. She walks in fashionable streets or sits in some fashionable restaurant, there to view and study and envy the fashionable women she reads about. She “shops” in the fashionable millinery and dressmaking establishments—not to buy, but to steal hints for the use of her own cheaper milliner and dressmaker in getting together her imitation costumes. She strives to model her person, her dress, her walk, her conduct, her conversation upon the conception of what is fashionable in the multi-millionaire’s set.

As our young man has the genius for money-getting, he gradually becomes rich. As his wealth grows he and his wife “drop” the “friends” of less income, gather about them “friends” of their own fortune, and reach out for “friends” who have fortunes greater than their own. And at last, perhaps by way of a season in London under the guidance of some impecunious woman of title, they arrive at the bliss of being able to tour the multi-millionaire’s circuit in good company all the way. And a crowd gapes at their palace doors and windows whenever they “entertain.”

Those city crowds that pause to gape whenever more than one carriage halts before a palace!

Fifteen years ago the most extravagant millionaire in New York—a great financier—spent upon his domestic establishment, everything included, eighty thousand a year. Very few people of his set spent half as much, and the most of them spent less than twenty-five thousand. To-day, for the fashionable extravagant set, eighty thousand a year would not be far from the average expenditure, taking rich and “poor” together. When that financier’s family were the leaders, the principal entertainments in fashionable society were modest affairs—though they were not then regarded as economical—and were given by association. To-day every palace has its great dining-hall and its huge ballroom. And the very rich who have not palaces give their big entertainments individually in hotels and restaurants, hiring a large part of the building for the exclusive use of their guests, and spending thirty or forty thousand dollars or more—in not a few instances far more—upon each entertainment.

To-morrow—

In this early twentieth century—which bids fair to be known as America’s century—New York, the capital of our plutocracy, blazes out a world-capital. Into it are pouring wealth and luxury, pictures, statuary and works of art of all kinds and periods; jewels and collections of rarities. In it are rising miles on miles of palaces, wonderful parks and driveways. It has begun to be a City Splendid. It has already won a place in the line of world-capitals back and back through the ages to the mighty, nameless, forgotten cities of the Valley of the Euphrates. And New York begins where the others reached their climax.

CHAPTER V
CASTE-COMPELLERS

It is still an open and anxious question whether this fashionable society, the growth, as we have seen, of the last two or three decades, constitutes a genuine aristocracy. The society itself hopes so and tries to believe so, and struggles to forget its uncertain tenure, its sordid basis and its humble ancestry. And it is encouraged in its pretensions by many thousands of agile and aggressive climbers who would not for worlds lose their delusion that their climbing has a goal, and a goal worth achieving. But uneasy doubts refuse to down, and whenever one of the fashionables says, with a brave essay at the careless, matter-of-course tone, “We of the upper classes,” he—or she, for it is more often she—can’t refrain from a furtive glance to see whether all faces within sight are perfectly sober, self-complacent and approving.

No such uncertainty, however, exists in the case of the servants of wealth and fashion. They know that they themselves are an aristocracy, and they are determined that there shall be no doubt about their being dignified, if menial, bulwarks of an aristocracy of their employers. These servants, both male and female, are not Americans. Once in a while you will find among them a naturalized American; once in a long while you will find a shamefaced, apologetic American-born. But they are essentially an immigrant aristocracy, and nine-tenths of them are from England, where the iron caste-distinctions of feudalism have come down even unto the present day, not only merely intact, but monstrously exaggerated, where snobbishness is not only part of the statute law, but deeply imbedded in the vastly more potent customary law, and is even incorporated in the divine law, is read out from the pulpit each Sunday and piously echoed by reverent congregations.

In Europe the “upper class” and its haughty servants are born to their lofty stations; here the “upper class” is manufactured, largely out of watered stock and bonds and stolen franchises, and its servants are imported. It is the natural instinct of small people, suddenly elevated in material wealth, to try to believe that the wealth which relieves them of the necessity for daily labor also produces a chemical change, a refining transformation, in the clay whereof their singularly human-looking bodies are composed. Against this instinct is the good old American sense of humor that recognizes in the unerasable physical and mental mint-marks of human brotherhood Nature’s mocking rebuke to the vanities of pose and pretense. But few people’s sense of humor extends to themselves; and if they get the least encouragement, off they go on a high horse. Our rich people get more than a little encouragement from certain of their fellow-citizens and from upper-class foreigners, who for obvious reasons cultivate and flatter them in the delusion that it is not their bank accounts but themselves that are superior. But the fashionable section would never have gone so fast or so far in this hallucination had it not been for this important menial aristocracy. Students of human development, in their passion for dealing only with the seemingly big, with the high-sounding, often reach conclusions ludicrously wide of the truth, often neglect those humble but mighty causes that really shape human destiny. They find in the great and burning thoughts of philosophers the explanations of revolutions which a glance at the prices of bread would more justly explain. Let us make no such mistake. In seeking the cause of our rich people’s sudden and furious craze for caste let us not be proud. Let us turn away from the bronze front doors and the magnificent drawing-room and go humbly to the area gate and the backstairs quarters, where the real cause of their curious, amusing and pitiful backsliding from the grand concepts of Democracy is to be found.

When rich Americans first began to go abroad the servility of English servants offended. But custom soon changed that. Servility is insidious. The Americans, longing to feel themselves the equals of the complacent and secure upper class in England, and realizing that they could never hope to get deferential respect from their fellow-countrymen—even from those willing to go into domestic service—began to import servants. “The English servants are so much better, you know; understand their business and their place.” But the English servant’s “place” in the social hierarchy is dependent upon his master’s place. Whoever seeks to lower the master in the social scale seeks to lower the servant. On the other hand, whatever raises the master socially raises the servant. Your Englishman who is a servant born and bred is even more incapable of understanding and warming up to Democracy than his king would be. He loathes Democracy—does it not lower him in the social scale by putting all men on the same level; does it not take away his dear gods of rank and birth and leave him godless and adrift? He wants none of it. It may be good enough for foreigners, but not for an Englishman.

Once the imported members of the servile aristocracy were among us in considerable numbers they began to plot and to compel an aristocracy above them. The general theory is that these rich Americans who have gone crazy about themselves were infected by associating with the aristocracies of the Old World, and no doubt that association is partly responsible. But the main cause of the malady is that every American family living ostentatiously, or even at all luxuriously, soon found established within its gates an aristocracy of caste that compelled the family to seem to put on airs. And any American family that assembles a household staff of these aristocrats will soon be strutting and posing, however hard it may strive to remain sensible. The servants simply won’t have “under-bred” Democracy; they would despise themselves if they found themselves working for men and women not their superiors. And it isn’t in human nature, weakened by the example of all around it, to resist the subtle and insinuating compulsion of the “well-bred” hints and innuendos of “well-bred” servants. A man and a woman are no longer master and mistress of themselves, not to speak of their house, when they have given way to the luxury and vanity of a real high-class English butler backed up by half a dozen English footmen, an English coachman and three or four English grooms. He and she will begin to cut pigeon-wings like a colored gentleman on the first warm day of Spring. He and she will do it because the servants expect it, because the servants have convinced them that it is the correct form, because the servants will not tolerate any departure from the pose of “my lord” and “my lady”—and because such posings are so titillating to the vanity. And from striving to seem a truly “my lord” and a truly “my lady” before the “well-bred” butler and coachman and their henchmen, the man and the woman pass on naturally and by imperceptible stages to making the same ludicrous struggle in all seriousness before their associates, all of whom are doing precisely the same silly thing from precisely the same silly cause.

There is a woman in one of our big cities who is now a leader of fashion, very “classy” indeed, most glib on the subject of the “traditions of people of our station.” Her father was an excellent peddler, her mother a farmer’s daughter who could be induced to “help out” a neighbor in the rush of the harvest time. This typical American woman behaved very sensibly so long as her sensible father and mother were alive and until the craze for English households arose. She fell in line. But the haughty servants were most trying at first. For instance, she loved bread spread with molasses. She ate it before the butler once; his face told her what a hideous “break” she had made. She tried to conquer this low taste—never did weak woman fight harder against the gnawings of sinful appetite. At last she gave way, and in secret and in stealth indulged. She was not caught and, encouraged, she proceeded to add one low common habit to another until she was leading a double life. It had its terrors; it had its compensating joys. But before she had gone too far she was happily saved. One morning her maid caught her, and the whole household was agog. The miseries endured in the few following weeks completely cured her. She is now in private, as well as in public, as sound a snob as ever reveled in “exclusiveness.”

This is no isolated case. For bread and molasses substitute any plain, natural human habit not tolerated in England, and you have a story in outline that would apply to hundreds. How contemptuously our fashionables would deny if accused! How indignantly the younger generations who have never known what it was to be free from the English strait-jacket would protest against such coarse insinuations about our aristocracy. But the laughable truth remains unshaken—and also the truth that our aristocracy is wofully servant-pecked.

Fully to realize what a tremendous pressure this servile aristocracy entrenched in the privacy of the home can exert, let us glance at the composition of a fashionable household in America to-day. Take a family of some aspiring money-lender or stock swindler or franchise grabber who has got together in one way and another—principally another—a fortune of a dozen millions or so. There are himself, his wife with the longing to be “in it” or to keep “in it” gnawing at her, the grown son and the grown daughter. Papa is willing to have the family show off, but he is not quite ready to go the limit. So the establishment is what other fashionable people call modest, and what his wife and two children tell him is “mean.” Here is the schedule:

General Staff—Housekeeper, a broken-down “gentlewoman”; butler, formerly with the Earl of Tyne and still with him in spirit; chef, a Frenchman, but thoroughly Anglicized in soul, though not in accent or cooking; coachman, an Englishman, recently with Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Doodles; chauffeur, a Frenchman who speaks to nobody unless spoken to and keeps clear of the whole mess as much as possible.

Housekeeper’s Staff—Two English parlor maids from the best English houses, most expert in handling bric-à-brac and such perishables; two very humble, very impudent English chambermaids; a French laundress, who disdains all but the butler and the coachman, and sighs for the haughty chauffeur; a seamstress, a great gossip and an authority on “fashionable intelligence”; a linen woman, daughter of an English tavern-keeper whose glory was that he had been valet to a duke; a useful woman, for packing, etc., etc., most “respectable,” most English; a useful man, for heavy work, windows, errands, etc., an Englishman who shows that he is spiritually prostrate whenever a superior speaks to him; three chambermaids, very English-Irish.

Butler’s Staff—Two Englishmen to stand in the hall in immaculate livery, white silk stockings, etc., etc.; two Englishmen, equally immaculate, to assist at table, etc.; two other English assistants, not at all times immaculate.

Coachman’s Staff—Four English grooms.

Chauffeur’s Staff—One assistant, learning the profession.

Chef’s Staff—An assistant, a Frenchwoman; two English kitchen maids or “scullions.”

Personal Servants—Valet to the master, a quiet, well-bred, insolent Englishman; valet to the young master, an understudy to the other valet; maid to Madame (French); maid to Mademoiselle (French); valet to the upper caste men-servants (English); valet to the lower class men-servants (English); maids to the servants (three English-Irish); laundress to the servants (English).

Quite a staff—and it does not include Madame’s private secretary, an American, a “gentlewoman,” thoroughly converted to the English system, or Mademoiselle’s visiting governess, a product of ten years’ training in a New York private school for the “young ladies of the upper class,” or extra servants of all kinds that are constantly coming and going. The total monthly pay-roll is never below one thousand seven hundred dollars; often, in the height of the winter season in New York or of the summer season at Newport, it climbs up to two thousand dollars. And, putting the feeding of all these people at twenty dollars apiece a month, which is exceedingly, ridiculously low, the board-bill would be more than eight hundred dollars a month. Then, naturally, all of them are as careless and as wasteful as they dare to be, and, wherever possible, corrupt in the taking of commissions from the “tradespeople.” This means a squandering of more than their wages and board together. But it is indeed a most “modest” establishment—there are at least a thousand in this country far more imposing. Why, our hero has not even provided servants for the servants of his servants! And, as everybody knows, that is always done in a really bang-up, swell, first-class establishment. Also, his liveries, although what the “tradespeople” would call elegant, are not nearly so sumptuous as those of the neighboring establishments.

But, dissatisfied though the servants are, they do their best to keep up appearances and they fight strenuously for the caste system. They are, roughly speaking, divided into five ranks. At the top stand the private secretary, the visiting governess, and the housekeeper. They are almost “gentlefolk”; in fact, they are gentlefolk in abeyance, as it were, like cadets of a royal house which has been kicked out by its unfeeling subjects. Next come butler and coachman and chef. Each admits the right of the other two to high rank, but each feels toward the others as they fancy a marquis must feel toward an earl. Below these high haughtinesses is the main body of servants, with the lowest rank made up of stablemen, scullions, servants’ servants. Each servant fiercely insists upon his own station, and still more fiercely insists upon the lower station of those whom the code of caste has assigned there. And all the servants insist upon the aristocratic principle being enforced from top to bottom of the household. The “master” and his wife, the boy and the girl, know that if they for an instant drop the pose they will be the butt of ridicule and contempt in the servants’ hall.

The effect of this incessant, subtle pressure upon the grown people is strong enough. But they retain some glimmerings of a sane point of view; at times they realize that there is not a little rotten nonsense in their mode of life. But think of the children! They were born into this noisome atmosphere; they are never allowed to breathe any other—for, even when they go away to school, it is to some “select,” “exclusive” institution, or to associate only with the “select” and “exclusive” in the big college. They know no more of the free and national and growing American life than a Mammoth Cave fish knows of the light and the radiant waters of the upper world. They regard Americanism as synonymous with demagoguery and anarchy. And they become sincere and, because of their wealth and display, successful missionaries of the gospel of snobbishness to all the children of the rich and the well-to-do brought into contact with them.

Truly, the service is not the most important item that comes up the back stairs of the fine houses of our plutocracy. The ideas—they are the real item.

English servants do not, as a rule, like to come to this country. Few of the best class, as yet, will consent to give up the splendor and assured aristocracy of England and go to live among a lot of vulgarians, hard though those vulgarians are striving to be worthy of the support of an aristocratic menialdom. Those few of the best who do condescend to exile themselves wear sad faces and show that they keenly feel the humiliation. For they cannot blind themselves to the truth that their masters and mistresses, striving hard to please and to delude, are still not really “ladies” and “gentlemen,” but just Americans. Have they titles? No. Do the common people doff the hat to them? No. Have they “ancestry”? They pretend to have, but the genealogical trees look about as much like real trees as the papier-mâché palm looks like the genuine thing; and Burke’s peerage and the Almanach de Gotha know them not. No, they are not aristocrats, and it pains the aristocratic servants to serve them much as it would pain a first gentleman of the bedchamber to King Edward to get on his knees to some “big nigger” who called himself Emperor of Ashanteeland. The commiseration of all sympathizers with sensitive souls belongs of right to these aristocrats of menialdom in exile.

The great mass of these imported servants, excepting those who come here for the chance to become men and women and to shake off servitude, are a worthless lot, weedings from those perfect English gardens of menialdom. And a hard time their American masters have with them. Insolence, shiftlessness, drunkenness, petty thieving are tolerated to and beyond the most asinine patience; then, one furious day, the housekeeper, under orders from an outraged master or mistress, ejects the whole crew and gets in an entirely new lot. But this revolt of the downtrodden “upper classes” is rare and dangerous and often disastrous. For this servile aristocracy is a close corporation, very limited in numbers and fully awake to its own power over the plutocrats who must at any cost in money, manhood and discomfort have servility and an imitation of the English way of living. Woe, woe, woe unto the plutocrat who gets himself on the imported servants’ black-list! He may have actually to close in whole or in part his vast houses, and to cease from inviting in his hordes of rich friends to see how much more gaudily he is showing off than they are. He may have to call in colored or plain Irish or Swedish servants, mostly women, to save him and his family from the horrors of waiting on themselves. But one shrinks from pushing inquiry in so harrowing a direction.

How long will it be before we have a home-grown menial aristocracy to bolster up and make strong our fashionable aristocracy? It may be longer than one might imagine. The educated people, the lawyers, superintendents, merchants, social, political and financial hangers-on, who serve the plutocracy, fall easily into servile habits. The big corporation lawyer and his family, the fifty thousand dollars a year dummy railway president and his family, eagerly pay court to the great plutocrat, bow and scrape and mould themselves to his and his family’s humors. But the “lower classes” here remain obstinately insolent. They go into plutocratic domestic service only under stress; they act in a manner that exasperates their servility-seeking employers; they leave as soon as they can get any sort of job anywhere. Also, they rouse the soundly sleeping or stunned manhood and womanhood of the imported aristocracy-adoring servants, and so compel the constant recruiting of the ranks of the menial aristocracy by fresh importations.

True, among the mass of our immigrants, almost all from countries where a real caste system has prevailed always, there is a tendency toward a searching after an aristocracy in this country. They miss it; they cannot believe that a land in all its physical aspects like unto the lands from which they have fled should be without what has always seemed to them a natural and necessary part of the order of the universe. But they hunt for this aristocracy not with the idea of worshipping it, but with the idea of destroying it. And hence we find that the loudest angry assertion of the existence of a true aristocracy here comes from those of our democracy-loving citizens who are foreign-born. They see this monstrous pretense rearing itself as imposingly as the true aristocracies of Europe; and they do not pause to distinguish between marble and plaster painted to look like marble. They raise a wild shriek and demand that snickersnees be drawn and that heads begin to fall. A natural mistake, and highly gratifying to our would-be aristocrats. They are not terrified by the uncouth and futile clamors; though to make the thing more realistic to themselves, they sometimes pretend to be. But they are through and through pleased at hearing themselves in seriousness called what they would fain believe themselves to be; and they say delightedly: “At last, the lower classes begin to recognize themselves, and us!”

But this rejoicing is premature. They are right in seeing that it takes a body of self-confessed peasantry to make a prince—that the prince proclaiming himself and proclaimed by hirelings and dependents only is no prince at all, but a laughing-stock. But they are wrong in seeing signs of a forming peasantry; what they see is an un-forming peasantry—a vastly different matter.

The obstinacy of the American and thoroughly Americanized “lower classes” seems incurable. And until it is cured, until a body of citizens is created that will accept the aristocratic idea not as applying to themselves and making them superior, but as applying to a fixed class of superiors to whom they themselves must be and must remain inferiors—until then, the plutocracy will sigh in vain for transformation into an aristocracy. Imported servants and our own snob graduates of snob colleges with yearnings after the “cultured and refining influences of caste” will in vain crook the pregnant hinges of the knee. The plutocracy will be haunted and humiliated by the undignifying grin of the “proletariat,” incurably and militantly democratic.

And the more excited about itself and eager to show off the plutocracy becomes, the more insistent and imperious will become the inquiry into the origin and the rightfulness of these vast fortunes that are being reaped where their owners have not sown and squandered after the proverbial manner of ill-gotten gains.

CHAPTER VI
PAUPER-MAKING

There is a story of a rich woman—an Austrian, perhaps—who was chilled through by a long drive on a bitter winter day.

“Make a huge fire in my sitting-room,” she said to a servant as she entered her country house, “and order wood distributed to the poor of the village.”

She sat by the huge fire for ten minutes and then rang the bell. “Never mind about distributing that wood,” she said to the answering servant. “The weather seems to have moderated.”

The theory back of this story is the popular one: that the great comfort of great wealth hardens the rich, makes them insensible to privation. The fact is the reverse—at least so far as America is concerned. Nowhere in the world is the value of wealth so grossly, so ludicrously over-estimated as among our plutocrats—not unnaturally, since their only title to distinction is their wealth, and a man cannot but reverence that which makes him distinguished. Nowhere, therefore, are the discomforts of poverty so exaggerated as in the palaces of our very rich. And so eager are the men as well as the women for opportunities to exercise their emotions over poverty and destitution that they are rapidly creating a huge pauper class. Demand is creating supply.

The poor give to the poor through sympathy. The rich give to the poor through pity. The sympathetic poor are many, and so their pennies and food-donations, small in the single, pile up mountainously in the total. But they are sparsely and more or less judiciously, because intelligently, distributed. The very rich are, comparatively, though not absolutely, many; and they almost all give what seems to the ordinary run of well-to-do people very large sums. They give carelessly, freely. Though warned by often-exposed abuses, they never take warning. Each new fraud finds them credulous and eager. They want to give; they want to show that they are generous and helpful; to caution them is to irritate them.

Thus pauperization is a vast and thriving industry. It is said, and there is no reason to doubt it, that there are several hundred families on Manhattan Island—enough to populate a small city—that have lived well for years wholly upon charity, no member of them ever doing any work beyond writing begging letters or patrolling begging routes. In addition there are thousands of families supported in large part by relief got from rich men and rich women. And the same state of affairs is found wherever the very rich, living exclusive and aloof lives, have built their palaces.

To play Lord or Lady Bountiful is such a self-gratifying part. It is the traditional, the conventional part of the very rich toward the very poor. Beggars are so voluble in thanks. It sounds so well to talk of “my worthy poor,” of what “I am doing for charity.” So many hours that would otherwise be boresome can be filled with receiving and patronizing cringing, slathering paupers or with nosing about tenements, receiving on every floor noisy showers of blessings in exchange for less than the price of a supper after the theatre.

The whole business lessens the vanity-disturbing doubts that sometimes will arise even among the very rich as to the validity of the distinctions in this Democracy between “upper class” and “lower classes.” In some cases the motive is higher. In many cases there is an admixture of the higher motive. But the persistence of the very rich in face of the plain showings of the harm they do makes it impossible entirely to acquit large numbers of them.

The pauperization plants of plutocracy fall into three classes—the public, the semi-public and the private.

The politicians have expanded, where they have not out and out established, the public plants. Instead of making the people realize the truth—that these plants are their property, paid for out of their wages and giving service to them not as charity, but as their hard-earned, paid-for right, the politicians turn them into favor-distributing centres, centres for the distribution of alms in exchange for political power. The semi-public plants for the manufacture of paupers are the gifts of very rich men, usually men who made their own money; after the first generation the very rich do not as a rule go in for large public gifts. It is never profitable or just to examine deep into motives; sufficient to say that, with a few exceptions, these semi-public philanthropic institutions for giving something in exchange for nothing are avoided by all but such of the poor as don’t mind thinking themselves paupers or being looked on and treated as paupers.

Finally, there are the private pauperization plants. From them might be excepted those of the rich men and the rich women who have gone into the relief business in a systematic way and operate through thoroughly organized, carefully and competently conducted bureaus. Their theory of helping is not exactly consistent with the old American idea of “root hog or die,” but neither is it wholly exploitation of their own personal vanity without any regard to the merits of applicants. They give relief, but they try to make sure that relief is, according to their very liberal notion of necessity, needed.

Probably all but a very few of the families that are famous throughout the country for wealth have organizations of this kind. But there are upward of ten thousand millionaires concentrated in a few cities, several hundred of them multi-millionaires. The overwhelming majority of these go in for philanthropy, not on the carefully organized system, but more or less haphazard giving, with never thorough investigation, often with no investigation whatever.

It seems impossible to make people in the habit of keeping themselves clean believe that dirt is not necessarily or even frequently a proof positive of poverty overwhelmed by adversity against which it has made an honest struggle. And the rich people who like the “Bountiful” pose refuse to believe that almost all honest destitution is relieved by its neighbors and relatives, that nine out of ten cases of destitution are fraudulent, that all the street beggars are liars, that no one need go hungry or shelterless or cold if he will apply to the public or semi-public institutions ready to relieve. So, we have Lord and Lady Bountiful relieving grown people of the necessity of “hustling,” and, worst of all, encouraging them to bring up their children as paupers and beggars.

So scandalous has this industry of pauper-making become that in every city’s highways there are now children openly begging, telling their whining lies of various more or less ingenious kinds, pretending to sell newspapers or pencils or shoe-strings to give a color of respectability to their shamelessness, or, rather, to the shamelessness of their parents.

The passing generation—the rustling, hustling, money-grabbing generation—is usually rather shrewd in its philanthropies, as well as generous. The “old man” was a car-driver, or a brakeman, or a plow-boy, or a peasant’s son. He has poverty’s sympathy with poverty, but also poverty’s suspicion of the cause of poverty. Thus, our cities have got and are getting libraries, hospitals, free dispensaries, free technical schools of various kinds, model tenements, and the like. Millions on millions are given annually by “self-made” men, most of it as wisely as giving can be.

But shrewd as these men are, they often fail to see the difference between the sympathetic, unselfish, man-to-man individual help they as poor boys got from people of their own kind in better circumstances, and this general, unequal, pitying, condescending charity which gives indiscriminatingly something that is of value only to the self-respecting, and too often takes away in exchange all, or nearly all, self-respect.

Still, though these “self-made” men give and give largely and with many mistakes, they have the fear of pauper-making ever in mind. And when they give to individuals they try to be doubly careful.

In the second generation—what used to be but is no longer the spendthrift generation—the very rich retrench in the matter of large benefactions. The family position is established. None of the members of it has ever known what it is to be hungry or cold without knowing just where to turn for food and warmth. Sympathy, which was the sentiment in the first generation, now becomes pity. Man-to-man is changed into “Bountiful” and his or her “worthy poor.” And we have the pauper-plant in full blast.

Each day every rich man or woman who is at all well known receives large numbers of begging letters—from beggars in Maine and in Texas, in Florida and in Washington, in all parts of the Union. They want loans. They want notes or mortgages paid. They want pianos and trousseaus. They want pensions for crippled sons or daughters. Or they want anything from old clothes to several thousand dollars to buy a farm or a store. The apparent effrontery of these requests disappears as the letters are read and the amazing, even pathetic, simplicity of the writers stands out.

Curiously enough, some of these requests, preposterous though they are, are granted. A skilfully written letter sent to a certain kind of rich person at just the right moment has been known to produce amazing results. No reader of this book, however, need advise a beggar of his acquaintance to try it. The two cents postage would be far more likely to bring a return if invested in stocks of the mines of the mountains in the moon. There are many of the rich who have every begging letter that is at all reasonable or plausible thoroughly investigated by a secretary—or by some local agent of a corporation in which the recipient happens to be interested. Pity for the “worthy poor” is an extremely potent force in the plutocracy.

But it is local pauper-making that has the greatest fascination for the rich man or woman who does not care to go into charity on the Carnegie or Rockefeller or Armour scale, or to take the trouble to organize a bureau that works with precision and without any advertisement of its owner. The “agony stories” cooked up by the newspapers are noted, the slums are ransacked, the parasites on “charity,” both those who honestly deceive themselves and those who deliberately “graft,” are eagerly welcomed and listened to. Thus there are a good many thousands of rich city dwellers with incomes ranging from twenty thousand to several hundred thousands a year, each of whom has his or her circle of “worthy poor,” or gives regularly to those myriad petty enterprises of misdirected or barefacedly fraudulent charity which enlist the activities of so many “workers.”

The women are the most persistent and unreasonable offenders in this respect. Partly through idleness, partly through a craving to have occupation and a sense of usefulness, partly through a profound pity for their apparently unfortunate sisters, they pour out capital for pauper-plants and search diligently for “worthy poor” to pauperize.

Among the long-very-rich there is notable shyness of the larger kinds of giving. No doubt at bottom this is due to increasing selfishness, increasing absorption in amusements of the wholly selfish kinds. It costs more and more every year to play the rich man’s part; more and more imagination is brought to bear in developing it, both by rich men eager to find new ways of showing off and by ingenious poor men inventing new ways of making a living out of the rich upon whose extravagance they thrive. The rich man, even where his income is huge, is often pinched. He hates to give—he may find that his giving has compelled him to forego a most attractive investment or has compelled him to abstain from some new expensive luxury or pleasure. He hoards, to be ready for such emergencies. Then if he has several children, he wants to leave each of them as rich as possible so that they can all live in the style to which they have been accustomed, the style in which their friends and associates live. For worship of wealth you must look among the long-very-rich. Those who pass Mammon’s statue with a nod or a half-ashamed crook of a reluctant knee will have the pleasure of seeing very, very many of the rich “old families” flat in the dust, noses plowing it, and not a bit ashamed.

Is this drying up of the charity of “philanthropy” wholly a matter for regret?

Several years ago a few young Americans from various parts of the country began to spend their summer vacations at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. They were young; they were poor; they were obscure; they were hard-worked and hard-working as well; they were profoundly indifferent to money or money gain; they were not even bothering especially about fame. They had as their common bond a passion for science. They had as their common aim the satisfying of that divine curiosity which makes the man who has it toil incessantly and unweariedly over ways more arduous and through wildernesses more dangerous than those that baffled the seekers after the Holy Grail. They longed—these earnest, poor, obscure young Americans—to penetrate to Nature’s innermost laboratory, her workshop of workshops, her temple of temples, there to surprise her supreme secret—the mystery of the origin of life.

Fifteen summers of this pursuit, free from self-seeking or sordidness or jealousy, free from fame’s flatteries, and the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole became famous wherever the human intellect is respected. Its Knights of Science have not reached their goal—their Holy Grail. But under the inspiration of the triple vow of Science for her Knights—poverty, self-immolation and obedience to truth—they have had adventures and have made discoveries so strange, so passing strange, so wonderful, that all Americans are intensely proud of this American institution, at once so small and so majestically great.

Then came the proposal to endow this little laboratory with part of the Carnegie millions and to erect it into a rich and aristocratic palace of science. At first glance the proposal seemed as admirable as the purpose that prompted it. And yet——

This is a day when the numerous newcomers among our multi-millionaires are so pouring out the millions that it looks as if presently the necessity for struggle, the incentive to struggle, in the development of brain power, would be almost wholly removed. In the progress of the race, wealth in possession has played a very small part—has more often interfered to blight than to bless. Wealth possessed means ease and power without effort, and a sense that the goal has been reached. It means the mind at rest, tending to sloth and slumber, with life’s greatest fears and greatest incentives removed. Above all, it means an atmosphere of self-complacency and satiety and languor that insensibly relaxes the strongest fibre.

Carnegie millions may help to keep a-burning the light in that plain little temple of science at Woods Hole—may, if judiciously used. But not if they stifle the splendid, self-sacrificing, self-unconscious enthusiasm which set that light a-blazing. The lesson is wider than the instance—far wider. It was wealth and patronage that rotted the splendid intellect of Greece; wealth again, and patronage, that brought the Renaissance to an abrupt, inglorious end. And how much the English intellect in its long period of most brilliant achievement owed to the contempt of the English dominant classes—that of birth and that of commerce—for scientists, writers and “those kinds of cattle!”

CHAPTER VII
THE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE

We find plutocracy’s follies in full swing not alone in the great cities, East and West, where the money-caste must have outward signs of superiority to bolster up its pretensions, but in our national capital as well—in what ought to be the high-set citadel of democratic dignity.

Few Americans have any adequate idea of the system of etiquette which has grown up there. The other day a newly appointed high officer of the Government said:

“My daughter went to lunch with the daughter of Secretary —— yesterday. She did not come home until long after she was expected, and her mother asked her what was the matter.

“‘Oh,’ she explained, ‘Secretary ——’s daughter was there, and none of us could go until she left, and we thought she never would go.’ And I find that precedent is carried out in the strictest possible way all through Washington society in all its sets, down to the very children.”

If there are any persons in official life in Washington who do not attach importance to precedence, do not resent being seated out of rank at table, or being in all other ways given their exact official amount of deference, those persons keep extremely quiet. In Washington one ceases to be surprised at hearing men of national reputation complaining fiercely because they have been subjected to some trivial slight in this matter of precedence. It irritates a Cabinet officer to be put a shade out of his rank just as much as it irritates a Congressman from nowhere or a Government clerk.

Precedence is killing Washington as a place of residence for sensible people. It is destroying its chief charm. If one thinks of going there to live it is because he expects to meet in the easy circumstance of social intercourse those who are interesting or amusing or curious. That sort of social intercourse is becoming practically impossible. No one giving any sort of entertainment, however informal, dares to arrange his or her guests according to congeniality. The same people must always be put next each other. The same man must take the same woman in to dinner. The same youth must dance with the same girl. And as official life expands the blight of precedence spreads.

It is difficult for an outsider to listen without laughing or showing irritation as the Washingtonians discuss precedence and relate incidents of national and international catastrophes almost brought about by violation of it. But as some of the persons who most strenuously insist upon it are otherwise high above the human average, it would be well, before utterly condemning the Washingtonians, to reflect whether the craze for precedence is not a universal human weakness, latent—happily latent—in most of us because it has no chance to show itself.

There is a certain officer who, in the official lists, is called Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds. In fact he is “Lord Great Chamberlain” to the President. Perhaps there was once a Lord Great Chamberlain who was merely Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds at the lower end of Pennsylvania avenue. But that was a long time ago.

For many years the Major of Engineers assigned to that title with the rank and pay of Colonel has been actually the chief officer of the President’s court, the manager of what might be called his public household. Whenever the President entertains on a grand scale he is obviously in command, directing the ceremonials, superintending the evolutions of his staff of dancing and small-talk army men, overseeing the assiduities of the court retinue of servants. When a new ambassador or other eminent personage, domestic or foreign, arrives, he is the functionary who puts on a gorgeous uniform, drives in state in the President’s carriage to the visitor’s lodgings, escorts him to the President, introduces him, takes him away and escorts him back to his lodgings. Also, he in large measure directs the expenditures from the White House privy purse.

The Constitution and the Statute Book make no provision for a Lord Great Chamberlain. But constitutions and institutions are vastly different. Part of the President’s time is given to matters contained or supposed to be contained in the written laws, the larger part to matters set down in the unwritten laws and nowhere else. When we broke away from Europe and European political and social ideas, we did not get rid of those customs for high executive officers which had been established among us by royal colonial governors, although they were simple compared with the growing dimensions of our present-day ceremonial.

Thus the unwritten laws say that the President must have a court like a king or other royal reigning person. It must be disguised and modified, but it must be “the real thing” in its essence. A court involves a place to hold it, officers to conduct it, an etiquette to guide it, and money to keep it going. The written laws provide for a Presidential residence—they permit the President to sit rent-free. That provision readily stretches to cover a place to hold the court.

Again, the written laws permit the President to detach certain public officers for rather indefinite purposes. There you have a Lord Great Chamberlain and a Lord High Steward, and so forth, provided with comparative ease.

As for etiquette, that part of the unwritten law need not be reconciled to written law, because etiquette costs nothing but headaches and heart-burnings—and the only reason for attempting to reconcile written law and unwritten is, of course, the matter of money expense. Finally, the written laws provide, or can be stretched to provide, the money for all the bigger items of court expenses—furnishings and repairs and alterations, linen, china, flowers, cooks, scullions, butlers, coachmen, footmen, door-openers and door-closers, card-carriers, light, heat, everything except what is eaten and drunk. As yet no way has been found to stretch the written law or the good nature of Congress to cover the court appetite. It must be appeased out of the President’s salary.

The most important, though by no means the most expensive, item in the court budget charged against the public, is the Lord Great Chamberlain who conducts the court and executes, either directly or indirectly, all that pertains to the social side of life at the White House. He is always an officer of engineers. He must be a person of knowledge, of tact, of good appearance.

Lord Great Chamberlain has ever been a distinguished office. It was never so distinguished as now. And, unless there is some sort of extraordinary convulsion and revulsion, it is destined to become almost eminent. For the White House has entered a new and dazzling period of social splendor which may presently make it as little different from the residence of a monarch as is the Elysée Palace, where lives the President of France’s imperial Democracy.

The newly evolved notion of the Presidential office is that it is the centre of political, intellectual and sociological authority and also of social honor. Not only must the democratic—or plutocratic—overlord, anointed with the new kind of divine oil, be the embodiment and exponent of the popular will; he must also be the source of honor, the recognizer of merit.

Does one sing well? Does one paint well? Does one write well? Does one lead in education or literature or law or sociology or finance or commerce or trade—or fashion? Is one in the forefront in any line of activity not definitely declared criminal? Then the President of the American people must entertain him, must take his hand in that hand which is a sort of composite of eighty million right hands of fellowship. The approving accents of that voice which is now conceived to be the composite of eighty million approving voices must tickle his ravished ears; he must, at the Presidential board, eat and drink the composite hospitalities of the eighty millions’ dinner or luncheon tables.

In a real plain-as-an-old-coat Democracy the President would be a business person only, keeping his official life and his social life separate and distinct. The one would be public, the other private. He would have no more to do privately with those with whom he is officially brought into contact than would the head of a big business with his assistants, employés and customers. Social life is in a democratic society altogether of and by the family; and theoretically the President’s wife and children, the wives and children of the other public officials, are left in private life when the man of the family takes office. Practically, however, they are all elected, and if the written law provides no honors for wife and children and other relatives of the successful candidate, unwritten law must be created to repair the grave, the intolerable omission.

Hence the elaborate, the complex, the awe-inspiring system of precedence. Every one from the President and his family and their remotest connection visiting Washington, down through all the branches of official life to grand-niece of the scrubwoman who sees to the basement steps of the smallest public building, has his or her exactly defined and jealously guarded station in the social hierarchy.

Naturally, the most interesting part of the imposing structure that descends tier on tier from the august and exalted Chief Magistrate, is the court—the President, his Cabinet (Cabinet “ministers,” to give them the fanciful title they love best), the ambassadors and ministers and staffs of the various embassies and legations, the families of all these, and this means the White House and the Lord Great Chamberlain—the White House, the stage; the Lord Great Chamberlain, the stage manager.

The White House was always inadequate—it would have been inadequate only for carrying out the purely democratic idea of the Presidential office, the idea set forth in the written laws. For the splendid, imperial, democratic concept of the plutocracy, the White House was ridiculous. Many a previous President and his wife, conscious of the social possibilities of the Presidential office, and yearning to develop them, have sighed over and moaned over and hinted about the petty proportions of the “Executive Mansion.” But political timidity restrained them from insisting upon expansion and elaboration. Mr. Roosevelt, confident that the people understood and approved him, and full of enthusiasm for his exalted concept of a new Presidency to suit a new era of the republic, boldly ventured where other Presidents had shrunk back. He demanded adequate quarters for the imperial-democratic court. The result is a new White House, a fit theatre for plutocratic social activities, a fit field for the operations of an energetic and sympathetic Lord Great Chamberlain.

The present President entertains, not occasionally but constantly, not exclusively but as democratically as an emperor, not meagrely but lavishly, not a score of guests, but hundreds and thousands. He has a multitude of guests to lunch, a multitude to dine, a multitude to hear music or to take part in various kinds of “drawing-rooms” and levees, a multitude to stay the night under his roof—not a multitude all at one time, but a multitude in the aggregate. Rich and poor, snob and democrat, plutocrat and proletarian, black and white, American and foreigner, Maine woods guide, Western scout, fashionable and frowzy—all equally welcome, all equal at his court. Morgan and Jacob Riis, Countess de Castellane and Booker Washington, Wild Bill and Bishop Potter, Duse and Rough Rider Rob, Alfred Henry Lewis and a New York cotillon leader.

Not long ago when some one said in his hearing, “There’s no first-class hotel in Washington,” he replied, “You forget the White House.” He has made it indeed a national hotel, or rather a great national assembling place. And he is ever unsatisfied, ever reaching out for more “doers,” for more and more people of interest or importance. He wishes all people of mark to bask in the Presidential sunshine, to give him the benefit of their intellect or character, or whatever they may have that is worth seeing or hearing. For he wishes to receive as well as to give. And he is determined that his court shall be entirely and completely representative. The world has seen nothing like it in recent centuries; the Emperor of Germany, broad though his sympathies are, is a snob in comparison. For a parallel we must go back to the courts of the emperor-presidents of Rome, in the days when Rome thought itself a republic. And the exigencies of plutocratic politics and the new social conditions have combined to attract the leaders of plutocracy’s fashion in plutocracy’s capitals, New York and Chicago, to favor Washington more and more each winter with their presence and their patronage.

The new White House, which is thus in a fair way to become the social centre of the republic, is in one sense the first step toward an entirely new Washington. In every street at all fit for Presidential purposes great houses are going up for the leisurely rich, and smaller but attractive houses for the leisurely well-to-do. It is obvious to the most casual observer that to-morrow will see a brilliant and numerous society seated at Washington, a society devoted to luxury and entertaining and revolving round the President, and dazzling and dominating the servants of the people. Of all the bribes, which is so seductive, so insidiously corrupting as the social bribe?

At the Congressional Library are exhibited models of the Washington the public administration purposes to build, has already begun to build. It will be a city of magnificent boulevards and parks and drives, and public buildings and national monuments. It will be probably the most splendid and most beautiful city in the world. It will probably be the one great city on earth where all who are not servants and tradespeople think and talk chiefly politics, literature, art, science—when they are not talking gossip and envying each other’s rank or looks or clothes or establishments.

The made-over White House, astounding though it is as a sudden development, is but the crude inaugural of this Washington of to-morrow. But it is a beginning—a most audacious move on the part of one of the most audacious men who ever rose to first place in the republic. It is indeed audacious to be a democratic President with the ceremonial of a king—“a ceremonial more rigid than that of the court of the Czar,” according to the wife of one of the ambassadors.

The White House demand upon Congress for running expenses has leaped from the former twenty-five thousand dollars to sixty thousand dollars. As the President’s salary is just under a thousand dollars a week, and as he evidently believes the people expect the President to spend his salary upon the embellishment of the position, it appears that the new White House, the new court, is now on the average costing in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars a week, half from the pocket of the people, the other half from the President’s private pocket.

As the heavy expense is crowded into five months of the year—December to April, inclusive—the probabilities are that the new White House is costing during the season not far from three thousand dollars a week. This means that the new departure has certainly doubled, and perhaps trebled, the cost of the White House court, for most Presidents have contributed about half their salary toward holding court and have called on Congress for a supplementary appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.

A few years ago such imposing figures as these would have caused a great outcry. In every part of the land, in city as well as country, hands would have been thrown up, and “we, the people,” would have ejaculated: “Three thousand dollars a week! Mercy on us! The fellow must be crazy. What are we coming to?”

But we think in large sums these days, and the establishments of our multi-millionaires have accustomed us to big expenditures for what were less than half a generation ago universally regarded as prodigalities. Scores of millionaires spend several times two thousand dollars a week in “maintaining their dignity.” There were some faint, shamefaced mutterings in Congress against the alterations in the White House and the lively leap of the public share in the expenses. But these mutterings died away instead of growing stronger, and the project for raising the Presidential salary to one hundred thousand dollars a year has all but passed Congress.

In the competition of display, of “splurge,” shall “we, the people” be distanced by private persons? Is not “blowing it in” the great test of dignity and worth, the test established by our most “successful” citizens? Yet a few years and the President will be getting one hundred thousand dollars in salary and will think himself moderate in calling upon the nation for twice sixty thousand a year to be spent in maintaining the Presidential dignity. Less than that will seem shabby in the new Washington under the spell of the new concept of the Presidency as a social font. Simplicity and quiet as a measure of dignity will belong to the past. It still remains true, as when Burke said it, that “the public is poor.” True, the nation has riches, but only a few have wealth. True, wages have not actually increased over what they were thirty years ago. True, the incomes of the great mass of Americans are just about where they used to be; true, taxation is to them still a burden, and “making the ends meet” is still an anxious problem. But our plutocrats and the representatives of kings and other tax-eaters and people-plunderers must feel at home when they honor our White House with their presence.

There is not the slightest surface indication that the Lord Great Chamberlain will preside over a diminished office. Public business in the narrow, strictly legal, old-fashioned democratic sense has now for the first time wholly withdrawn from the White House and is seated in what is derisively and not inaptly called the “Executive Hen-coop”—a temporary office building near by. The White House has been definitely and apparently permanently transformed into a place devoted to that part of the Presidential office which is not recognized in written law and which has hitherto been kept in the background.

And so rapidly is the White House developing that no one need be astonished if it almost immediately becomes the social Mecca of the whole American people. Any one who has studied the effect of social life upon political life, of social customs upon politics, will appreciate that that transformation might be of profound and far-reaching importance. It might be significant of a new kind of republic, of a fallen Democracy on this American continent. It might well mean that the dream of all aggressive, self-aggrandizing office-holders had at last been realized; that for the people-ruled public administration contemplated by the fathers and embodied in the Constitution had been substituted a real, a people-ruling government.

For, more powerful than any written laws, are the unwritten laws that bind men in the slowly, noiselessly forged chains of Habit.

And what a busy, big man the Lord Great Chamberlain would be then!

But he would still be called Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds, and the Most Puissant Over-lord of the Imperial Plutocracy would still be called President of the United States. And so nobody would in the least mind. If the waffle is named “Hot Waffle,” only a carping, croaking pessimist notes that it is stone cold.

Such are the surface indications. But surface indications are not infallible; they have been known to be unimportant and wholly misleading.

CHAPTER VIII
AND EUROPE LAUGHS

An attaché of one of the Continental Embassies to the King of England was dining at the Carlton with an American, an old friend of his. The room was filled with English and Americans. Almost all the English were men and women of title or rank, or both. Almost all the Americans were well known both at home and abroad because of their wealth, their fondness for display, and their intimacies and relationships by marriage with the aristocratic caste of Europe.

“You Americans are popular here,” said the diplomat.

“Yes,” assented the American.

“And on the Continent also,” said the diplomat.

“Yes,” replied the American. “How the German Emperor does love us—he is almost as enthusiastic about us as is King Edward.”

“You are popular,” went on the diplomat, “and very unpopular. You were never so popular nor so unpopular.”

“You mean we are unpopular because of the American trade invasion?”

“Not at all. That is a trifling matter. It concerns only the politicians and a few manufacturers and the farmers, and does not concern them very deeply. No—let me explain. Formerly we—and when I say ‘we’ I mean the upper classes of Europe, those which still rule, despite all this talk about the progress of Democracy—formerly we feared you; we pretended to despise you, but in fact we were afraid. You were the great experiment in Democracy, that is, in anarchy—in the rule of the masses, the mob. Your success meant serious trouble for us, if not the handwriting on the wall, because our masses were always thinking of you.”

Here the diplomat smiled peculiarly and glanced round the room.

“Now all that has been changed,” he went on. “Europe and America are better acquainted. We no longer fear you. Why should we?”

And again he paused to let his glance travel round the room, finally to rest with good-humored satire upon the American’s face.

“Yes—we understand you better. Our fears have been proved groundless, our suspicions have been justified. Your new path, after making a wide bend, has returned into the old historic highway of caste. And so our upper class, which hated you, now—well, it neither loves nor admires you, but it honors and courts you. It laughs a little at your pretensions to birth. But it respects the solid foundation of your aristocracy—wealth. For, no matter what we may pretend, not blood, but money, wealth, is the essence of aristocracy. As for our masses, that once looked up to you as their ideal——” He shrugged his shoulders.

“They no longer look up to us?”

“They look down upon you. They see that you, too, have your dominating class just as they have. And they prefer their own kind of upper class as less sordid, less vulgar, the embodiment of a more inspiring ideal. So long as they knew you only by report they believed in you; and that belief still makes them restless under us. But now that they have seen you, now that you are constantly in evidence, they see that their hopes—at least so far as they were based upon you—were a foolish dream. They prefer their own princes to ‘bosses’ and upstart newly-rich.”

“But suppose these Americans whom you see over here and whom you read most about are not representative?”

The diplomat smiled. “I have heard that before,” said he. “But, my dear friend, they are representative. Your country has changed and you do not realize it. You are deceived, not we. You are like the Romans who thought they had a republic when, in fact, the republic had been dead five hundred years. Think a moment. What sort of men did you formerly send to us as diplomats? And what sort of men do you send now? What has become of the old horror of court dress and rank and precedence which they used to exhibit? You cannot deny that your diplomats are representative. And are they not of the same class as these ladies and gentlemen about us here, so obviously delighted with themselves and their aristocratic company, with themselves because of their company?”

There is much truth in the diplomat’s comments on the state of European public sentiment toward America. And the change is, as he said, due to better acquaintance. Europe thinks it has discovered that as soon as an American rises in prosperity above the mass of his fellow-citizens, he enters an actual ruling class that dictates and disdains the laws, uses them for enriching himself and for exploiting the mass of his fellow-countrymen. Europe thinks that as soon as he reaches this stage he turns his eyes longingly toward the Old World monarchies and begins to plan to become as nearly like the aristocrats as possible. He may not flaunt his power—he must respect republican forms. But he may, and does, flaunt his wealth. And in Europe he can get open recognition of his superior rank when such recognition as it gets at home is indirect and more or less secret.

Thousands of Americans live in Europe. Every considerable city on the Continent has its American colony, and year by year these colonies grow apace. Americans—chiefly the women—have intermarried everywhere into the European nobility. Nearly all these expatriated Americans are people of means; many of them are rich. They lead lives of industrious idleness. Many of them frankly express their contempt for the country from which they draw their incomes, the country but for which they would be miserable peasants, sweating for the amusement of some European land-holder.

It is fortunate that their dislike of their native land has been strong enough to take them away and to keep them away; it is a pity that the migrating impulse does not seize upon more of their kind. The world has room for idlers—it has room for all sorts of people. But America has no room for them. That great workshop wants no idlers obstructing the aisles and hindering the toilers at their tasks. That would be a sorry day for us when our rapidly growing leisure class should “civilize” and “refine” America into an agreeable place of residence for “ladies” and “gentlemen” of the European pattern.

These Americans who have “outgrown” their country serve to confirm Europe in the suspicions raised by the news that has reached it of stupendous aristocratic changes in the American people, of rotten political machines ruled by the rich, of toll-gates set up on every highway of American trade and commerce for the tax-gatherers of plutocracy, of a people fatuously imagining that it is free because it can go to the polls and freely choose which of two sets of candidates shielded by the plutocracy shall make and execute the laws. This brings up the whole subject of our relations with “abroad”—and the social and political meaning and tendency of those relations.

A few years ago Paris was the paradise of Americans, especially of the Americans of wealth. It is so no longer. It is now for them a mere stopping-place for buying clothes—a pause en route to the true, fashionable, American Mecca, London. A few years ago Americans, except those of the ordinary sight-seeing, mind-improving kind, loathed London. They knew few people there—and, like Vienna, London is an impossible place for the stranger in search of amusement; if he does not know natives, is not invited to their houses, a soundless desert is a cheerful, companionable place in comparison. Further, such English as the rich, fashionable, amusement-hunting American knew—that is, such Englishmen “of the right sort”—were about as friendly and sociable as they are to their servants. But that was before the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance.”

The change came with the British discovery that the American multi-millionaire and the American heiress were not, as had been supposed, rarities found only occasionally after long search through trackless and vast wildernesses of “unspeakable bounders,” but were deposited in “the States” in quantities, were easily accessible, were yearning for high society, for aristocracy, for titled friends, for titled alliances. This was tidings of great joy to the English aristocracy. For an aristocrat may not work; and no matter how heavily “endowed” a title may be, values will shrink as time passes—not to speak of those savage “death duties” which the rascally Liberals enacted to the infuriating of the upper classes, who yet dare not repeal them.

The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” began forthwith. Scores of English upper-class families opened their hearts and their hearths to their “cousins across the sea.” The more American friends one accumulated the more likely was one to find an American multi-millionaire or so among them, or at least to be by way of getting into touch with American multi-millionaires or within “touching” distance of them.

To realize to what an extent the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” was and is based upon this notion, one must realize how all-powerful the upper class is in England, and how inarticulate, how socially, politically and in every public way insignificant, are the English masses, including the bulk of the middle classes. When you speak of English public sentiment you mean the sentiment of the London drawing-rooms. They are filled with the governing class, which constitutes parliaments and ministries; they dominate the journalists, who are either of the upper class or desperately struggling to get into it; they also dominate the masses who have been trained by centuries of unbroken custom to bow before rank and title.

There were excellent reasons in international politics for England’s turning favorable, friendly, even enthusiastic eyes upon America. But there could not have been this present passionate, personal love, this daily and hourly working of that toothless old saw, “blood is thicker than water,” had there not existed a reason which appealed directly to the personal and family self-interest of every member of nearly every upper-class family in England.

And soon the German Emperor and those about him, all of a high and impoverishing nobility, began to work the same trusty, but never now-a-days rusty, old saw about the thickness of blood and water—are we not “Germanic,” we Americans? But the motive which is the less with the King and the upper classes of England is the stronger with our tempestuous German suitor—the motive of political, or, rather, industrial friendship. He feels that in dining and wining and treating, “just as if they were equals,” American owners of yachts and multi-millionaires, he is endearing himself to the American people. For, like practically the whole of Europe to-day, he thinks America is no longer a Democracy, but a thinly disguised plutocracy. And the more he reads and hears of the power and prestige of American multi-millionaires at home, the more firmly is he convinced that when he is tickling the vanity of these “dollar-swollen upstarts,” he is sending delicious thrills up and down the spine of the American eagle.

Yes, European princes and potentates are rubbing noses and back-scratching in the friendliest, most democratic fashion in the world, with such of the American people as can afford to visit Europe in royal luxury and get themselves admitted to royal inclosures. The object of these condescensions to our fellow-countrymen is to improve the relations between sundry European monarchies and the American people. A worthy object, as is any which has at bottom the promoting of peace on honorable terms. But Europe is wasting energy in misdirected effort. It assumes that these American beneficiaries have the same “rank” at home that similarly fortuned Europeans have in their countries. And, not unnaturally, it is confirmed in its false notion by many a petty success through this courtship of snobbish plutocrats and plutocratic diplomats.

The American multi-millionaire and his wife and his son and his daughter—again this does not mean all Europe-visiting Americans of wealth—are directly responsible for Europe’s present opinion of the American brand of Democracy. For they—not unnaturally—wish to make themselves out the relative equals of their titled and exalted friends. They begin to “talk tall”; and, being far away from home, they soon are thinking as tall as they talk. They confirm each other in the idea that they are really the “whole show” at home. They return with retinues of caste-trained, servile domestics; they live in colonies in our own cities into which none but dollar-hunters and dollar-worshipers penetrate. The political bosses court them, give them laws and senatorships and diplomatic posts in exchange for campaign contributions. Their infatuation grows apace.

Thus the American fresh from America finds London—let us confine ourselves to the one capital as typical—a strange, humorous spectacle in the fashionable season. He can hardly believe his own eyes and ears. A week or two, and so persistent are the impressions of a true American nobility visiting Europe that he almost feels that he has been asleep with Rip Van Winkle and has awakened to a new country and a new order in which there is no American Republic.

And we are only at the beginning. The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” between the English upper class and the American aspirants to be thought “upper class,” the dragging in of the rich American pilgrim out of the fog to the cheeriest corner of the English fire, these are matters of yesterday. And already Paris gets but a glance from the rich Americans, and the most foresighted of Paris shopkeepers are establishing London branches for the “Anglo-Saxon” American who no longer can spare the time from his or her English social duties to make the outfitting trip across the English Channel. To-morrow—The English hearth is large; there is room on it for every presentable or hope-inspiring American who can afford to cross the Atlantic; and the news of the jollity of the London season and of the round of English house parties is spreading in America and is attracting the pretentious society of all the large American cities. The “Alliance” is indeed booming.

It is not through English aversion to the Atlantic voyage that, though we are the sought, we go to the home of the seeker to be sought. The English upper classes would come to us if we insisted upon it, although the item of expense looks larger to them than to us. But we do not insist upon it. Our “leisure class” is made far more comfortable in England than it is at home. America has no such facilities as has England for amusing sheer idleness in ways that are not undisguisedly inane. Through several centuries, the filling in of the idle hours of professional idlers has been a study there; the houses, the streets, the theatres, the restaurants, the whole social system is adapted to it.

Further, the American can feel so “tall,” can believe so thoroughly in his own aristocracy and aloofness above the general run of mankind when there are three thousand miles of barren water between him in his grandeur and the shop where he worked as a “clark,” or the cabin where his father was born, or the back yard where his mother, in gingham, hung out the wash. Thus, the Americans in search of “the high life” for which they yearn prefer to go to it rather than to have it brought to them.

“As I study your countrymen here and get their views,” said an Englishman, famous as a lifelong admirer of America and of the democratic idea, “I become convinced against my will that your Democracy is dying. It seems the ideal of Democracy is too high to survive prosperity; apparently it can exist only in what one of your countrymen, writing in your simple days, called the atmosphere of plain living and high thinking. As soon as a man becomes prosperous he begins to ‘put on airs,’ as you Americans say. And the pity of it is that the less prosperous concede his superiority, and so make his ‘airs’ significant where they would otherwise be ridiculous. The reason our monarchies, that is, our monarchical governments and our aristocratic classes, are becoming friendly to you, is that you are becoming like them. They concede something; but you—you concede your principles. They get something—cash dividends on their condescensions. But I’m blest if I can see what you get.”

To the stay-at-home American, or, for the matter of that, to the travelling American who retains his sense of proportion, the exaggerating of bumptious American “diplomats” and “dollarcrats” into a national phenomenon of peril, and the gloomy croakings or sardonic rejoicings in Europe over the decay of the American Republic may seem preposterous—as preposterous as an ambassador’s fancying that his ecstasies when a king claps him on the shoulder are the ecstasies of the entire American people. But it is a phenomenon that should not, that cannot wisely, be left out of account. Steam and electricity have bridged the chasm across which our ancestors fled to establish here a system based upon sanity, simplicity and justice. And at a peculiarly trying time there are crossing over to us European ideas and ideals that so dangerously disguise snobbishness and plundering and injustice under pretentious culture and such plausible frauds as the “natural leadership of the classes that have demonstrated their superiority by success.”

The problem is often stated cart before the horse. “What will our plutocracy do with us?” men say in all seriousness. The question, in fact, is, “What shall we do with our plutocracy?” It has descended upon us swift as a cyclone, insidious as a plague. We had no adequate warning. We have not yet, as a people, grasped the situation in its fullness. Of all the cure-alls so confidently proposed by our political and sociological quacks, which one does not show on its very surface to any careful mind utter futility at best, disaster in the application as a highly probable event?

The plutocracy itself shares in the delusion of so many of our “publicists.” “What shall we do with America?” it insolently says in effect.

A little patience; a little time for our eighty millions, surcharged with Democracy, to weigh and measure and judge. Be sure, the dog will not be wagged by the tail. And before many decades European caste will see such a handwriting upon the western sky as has not terrified it since our Declaration of Independence.

PART II.—DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER IX
“WE, THE PEOPLE”

It cannot, then, be denied that wealth, concentrated wealth—not so much the plutocrat himself as the vast masterful accumulation of which he is the appendage; one might with truth say, the victim—is not only the most conspicuous factor in American life to-day, but also one of the most potent factors. The plutocracy in politics, the plutocracy in business, the plutocracy in society, the plutocracy in the home—in its own homes—that is our “peril.”

A great monster indeed, fully up to the harrowing descriptions of our radical orators and writers. But why does the average, common-sense American refuse to be terrified? Because he does not see it? Hardly that. No; the real reason is that the American is fundamentally incapable of those caste and class feelings, without which a plutocracy can never hope to erect itself into an aristocracy, and therefore a real “peril.”