tation of the ways and ideas current in good society; and
consequently to learn to play on the piano and to have nothing in
particular to do will be the goal of aspiration among colored girls
and woman, and to do housework will seem to them intolerable drudgery,
simply because it is so among the fair models to whom they look up in
humble admiration. You see, my dear, what it is to live in a
democracy. It deprives us of the vantage-ground on which we cultivated
people can stand and say to our neighbor,--'The cream is for me, and
the skim-milk for you; the white bread for me, and the brown for you.
I am born to amuse myself and have a good time, and you are born to do
everything that is tiresome and disagreeable to me.' The 'My Lady
Ludlows' of the Old World can stand on their platform and lecture the
lower classes from the Church Catechism, to 'order themselves lowly
and reverently to all their betters;' and they can base their
exhortations on the old established law of society by which some are
born to inherit the earth, and live a life of ease and pleasure, and
others to toil without pleasure or amusement, for their support and
aggrandizement. An aristocracy, as I take it, is a combination of
human beings to divide life into two parts, one of which shall
comprise all social and moral advantages, refinement, elegance,
leisure, ease, pleasure, and amusement,--and the other, incessant
toil, with the absence of every privilege and blessing of human
existence. Life thus divided, we aristocrats keep the good for
ourselves and our children, and distribute the evil as the lot of the
general mass of mankind. The desire to monopolize and to dominate is
the most rooted form of human selfishness; it is the hydra with many
heads, and, cut off in one place, it puts out in another.

"Nominally, the great aristocratic arrangement of American society has
just been destroyed; but really, I take it, the essential _animus_ of
the slave system still exists, and pervades the community, North as
well as South. Everybody is wanting to get the work done by somebody
else, and to take the money himself; the grinding between employers
and employed is going on all the time, and the field of controversy
has only been made wider by bringing in a whole new class of laborers.
The Irish have now the opportunity to sustain their aristocracy over
the negro. Shall they not have somebody to look down upon?

"All through free society, employers and employe