f national character. The
daughters of dukes and princes can hardly be taken as typical English
girls, since the conditions of their life are so vastly different from
those of the huge majority of the species--conditions which deny a
really natural or normal development to all but the choicest and
strongest souls. So the daughter of a New York multimillionaire, who
has been brought up to regard a British duke or an Italian prince as
her natural partner for life, does not look out on the world through
genuinely American spectacles, but is biassed by a point of view which
may be somewhat paradoxically termed the "cosmopolitan-exclusive." As
Mr. Henry James puts it: "After all, what one sees on a Newport piazza
is not America; it is the back of Europe."

There are, however, reasons special to the United States why we should
not regard the "Newport set" as typical of American society. Illustrious
foreign visitors fall not unnaturally into this mistake; even so keen a
critic as M. Bourget leans this way, though Mr. Bryce gives another
proof of his eminent sanity and good sense by his avoidance of the
tempting error. But, as Walt Whitman says, "The pulse-beats of the nation
are never to be found in the sure-to-be-put-forward-on-such-occasions
citizens." European fashionable society, however unworthy many of its
members may be, and however relaxed its rules of admission have
become, has its roots in an honourable past; its theory is fine; not
_all_ the big names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to
strong ales or weak (Lucy) Waters. Even those who desire the abolition
of the House of Peers, or look on it, with Bagehot, as "a vapid
accumulation of torpid comfort," cannot deny that it is an institution
that has grown up naturally with the country, and that it is only now
(if even now) that it is felt with anything like universality to be an
anomaly. The American society which is typified by the four hundred of
New York, the society which marries its daughters to English peers, is
in a very different position. It is of mushroom growth even according
to American standards; it has theoretically no right to exist; it is
entirely at variance with the spirit of the country and contradictory
of its political system; it is almost solely conditioned by
wealth;[6] it is disregarded if not despised by nine-tenths of the
population; it does not really count. However seriously the little
cliques of New York, Boston, and Philadelp