bility and prime manliness, besides those associations of sentiment
and imagination which, if there must be an aristocracy, lend it an
artistic consistency. But here, where everybody says that all men are
equal, and everybody is afraid they _will_ be; where there are no
adamantine barriers of birth and caste; people are anxiously exclusive.
And though the forms of aristocracy flourish more gorgeously in their
native soil, the genuine _virus_ can be found in New York almost as
readily as in London, or Vienna. And the virus breaks out in the most
absurd shapes of liveries and titles. And these forms of aspiration are
not only absurd because they are inconsistent, but because they
illustrate no real ground of precedence. They are superficial and
uncertain. They do not pertain to the man but to his accidents. He gains
by them no intrinsic glory, no permanent good. To employ the language of
the text, by these he strives for masteries; but he does not strive
lawfully, and so he is not crowned. And this leads me to say something
respecting what is false, and what is legitimate, in that strife for
Precedence which is so amply illustrated in the life of the City.

Let us, then, consider some of the forms which this struggle assumes in
the streets and the dwellings around us. I remark, in the first place,
that it inspires much of the effort for _wealth_. I believe there are
but few, comparatively, who are anxious to make money merely for the
sake of piling it up, and counting it out. There may be a mania of this
kind, in which men become enamored of Mammon for his own sake, and hug
him to their breasts, and kiss his golden lips, with all the ardor of
lovers. Still, I suspect that the genuine miser--that is, one who loves
money for itself alone--is an exceptional man. But every man who is not
absolutely inactive and useless in the world, is moved by some kind of
passion. For, it is not correct to speak of _outliving_ our passions. We
may outlive the passion of young, fresh love, that makes the world a
May-time of blossoms and of roses. We may outlive the passion for
selfish fame, because some transcendent claim of duty snatches us up to
a sublimer level. We may change these earlier forms for the passion of
philanthropy, the passion for truth, the passion of holy conviction. But
so long as we live at all, we do not outlive passion. And with many the
most persistent desire is for that precedence which attends the
possession of wealth