ace to face. Some of these great folks are really well-bred,
some of them are only purse-proud and assuming,--but they form a class,
and are named as above in the common speech.

It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when
subdivided and distributed. A million is the unit of wealth, now and
here in America. It splits into four handsome properties; each of these
into four good inheritances; these, again, into scanty competences for
four ancient maidens,--with whom it is best the family should die out,
unless it can begin again as its great-grandfather did. Now a million is
a kind of golden cheese, which represents in a compendious form the
summer's growth of a fat meadow of craft or commerce; and as this kind of
meadow rarely bears more than one crop, it is pretty certain that sons
and grandsons will not get another golden cheese out of it, whether they
milk the same cows or turn in new ones. In other words, the
millionocracy, considered in a large way, is not at all an affair of
persons and families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable human
element, which a philosopher might leave out of consideration without
falling into serious error. Of course, this trivial and, fugitive fact
of personal wealth does not create a permanent class, unless some special
means are taken to arrest the process of disintegration in the third
generation. This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that one need
not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he knew in
childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into the hands
of the country-boys who were sweeping stores and carrying parcels when
the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating their venison
over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in embossed coolers,
wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in long boots with
silken tassels.

There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call
it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to
be a caste,--not in any odious sense;--but, by the repetition of the same
influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct
organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is mere stupidity,
and not to be willing to describe would show a distrust of the
good-nature and intelligence of our readers, who like to have us see all
we can and tell all we see.

If you will look carefully at any cl