mocratic institutions, and forget that
free trade is one of the first proofs of a free people, and that
protected industries are the feudalism of manufacture. We sneer at the
corruption of a Jeffreys or a Marlborough in the past, and concede
that bribery riots in our capital, and that the infernal political
grist-mill in New York has to-day almost as much nefarious grinding to
get through with annually as it had when Tweed and Sweeny stood the
boss millers that fed its voracious maw. And after all, the
abominations of New York's politics are only a few degrees more
repellent than the cruelties and pusillanimities of her self-styled
patrician horde. The highest duty of rich people is to be charitable;
in New York the rich people make for themselves two highest duties, to
be fashionable and to be richer--if they can. Charity of a certain
sort does exist among them, and it would be unfair to say that it is
all of the pompous public sort. Much of it, indeed, is private, and
when incomes, as in a few individual cases, reach enormous figures,
the unpretentious donations are of no slight weight. But charity is a
virtue that counts for nothing unless meekness, philanthropy,
altruism, is each its acolyte. How can we expect that beings who busy
themselves with affairs of such poignant importance as whether they
shall give Jones a full nod or Brown a quarter of a nod when they next
meet him; as whether the Moneypennys are really quite _lances_ enough
for them to encounter the great Gilt-edges or no, at a prospective
dinner-party; as whether the latest Parisian tidings about bonnets are
really authentic or the contrary; as whether His Royal Highness has or
has not actually appeared at one of his imperial mamma's drawing-rooms
in a Newmarket cutaway,--how, it is asked, can we expect that beings
of this bent may properly heed those ghastly and incessant wants which
are forever making of humanity the forlorn tragi-comedy it is? The
yawp of socialism is excusably despised by plutocracy. Socialism is
not merely a cry of pain; if it were only that its plaints might have
proved more effectual. It is a cry of avarice, of jealousy, and very
often of extreme laziness as well. Every socialistic theory that we
have yet heard of is self-damning. Each real thinker, whether he be
Croesus or pauper, comprehends that to empower the executive with
greater responsibility than it already possesses would mean to tempt
national ruin, and that until manki