shooting a Senator,' or 'Come, now, the world is young, even if Clara
Smith is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet cold.'

But my particular reason for mentioning the matter is this. Despite my
friend's mystical remarks about the Upper Ten, he lived in an atmosphere
of something that was at least the very reverse of a respect for
persons. Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his social
compliment that smacked, strangely enough, of that egalitarian soil. In
a vaguely aristocratic country like England, people would never dream
of telling a total stranger that he was a member of the Upper Ten. For
one thing, they would be afraid that he might be. Real snobbishness is
never vulgar; for it is intended to please the refined. Nobody licks the
boots of a duke, if only because the duke does not like his boots
cleaned in that way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because it
would embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells him he is a member of
the Upper Ten, because everybody is expected to know it. But there is a
much more subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere of any
society trial in England. And the first thing that struck me was the
total absence of that atmosphere in the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hamon was
presumably a member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He was a
member of the Senate or Upper House in the American Parliament; he was a
millionaire and a pillar of the Republican party, which might be called
the respectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a possible
President. And the speeches of Clara Smith's counsel, who was known by
the delightfully Oklahomite title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough
in all conscience; but they left very little of my friend's illusion
that members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of crimes. Nero and
Borgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hamon when
Wild Bill McLean had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and
even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain tone about
English trials, which does at least begin with a certain scepticism
about people prominent in public life being abominable in private life.
People do vaguely doubt the criminality of 'a man in that position';
that is, the position of the Marquise de Brinvilliers or the Marquis de
Sade. _Prima facie_, it would be an advantage to the Marquis de Sade
that he was a marquis. But it was certainly against Hamon that