ort and spend about
one hundred thousand dollars in the course of the season. The walls of
the city will fall down flat if the golden trumpet blows but mildly. And
then, there they are--right in the middle of the champagne, clambakes
and everything else!--invited to sit with the choicest of America's
nobility on golden chairs--supplied from New York at one dollar per--and
to dance to the strains of the most expensive music amid the subdued
popping of distant corks.

In this social Arabian Nights' dream, however, you will find no sailors
or soldiers, no great actors or writers, no real poets or artists, no
genuine statesmen. The nearest you will get to any of these is the
millionaire senator, or the amateur decorators and portrait painters
who, by making capital of their acquaintance, get a living out of
society. You will find few real people among this crowd of intellectual
children.

The time has not yet come in America when a leader of smart society
dares to invite to her table men and women whose only merit is that
they have done something worth while. She is not sufficiently sure of
her own place. She must continue all her social life to be seen only
with the "right people." In England her position would be secure and she
could summon whom she would to dine with her; but in New York we have to
be careful lest, by asking to our houses some distinguished actor or
novelist, people might think we did not know we should select our
friends--not for what they are, but for what they have.

In a word, the viciousness of our social hierarchy lies in the fact that
it is based solely upon material success. We have no titles of nobility;
but we have Coal Barons, Merchant Princes and Kings of Finance. The very
catchwords of our slang tell the story. The achievement of which we
boast as the foundation of our aristocracy is indeed ignoble; but, since
there is no other, we and our sons, and their sons after them, will
doubtless continue to struggle--and perhaps steal--to prove, to the
satisfaction of ourselves and the world at large, that we are entitled
to be received into the nobility of America not by virtue of our good
deeds, but of our so-called success.

We would not have it otherwise. We should cry out against any serious
attempt, outside of the pulpit, to alter or readjust an order that
enables us to buy for money a position of which we would be otherwise
undeserving. It would be most discouraging to us to have substitut