their wives, daughters, or near relations:
THEREFORE the Party of the First Part hereby agrees to decline
to give any credence whatsoever to any story, remark, or
reflection to the discredit of the general honesty of the
American commercial classes or public men, but agrees that he
will hereafter assume them to be trustworthy and truthful
whether individually or in the mass, except in such cases as
shall have been publicly proven to the contrary, and that he
will always understand and declare that such isolated cases
are purely sporadic and not in any way to be taken as
evidences either of an epidemic or of a general low state of
public morality, but that on the contrary the said American
commercial classes do, whether in the mass or individually,
hate and despise an occasional scoundrel among them as
heartily as would the Party of the First Part hate and despise
such a scoundrel if found among his own people--as, he
confesses, does occasionally occur."

Nonsense? Of course it is nonsense. But the desirable thing is that
Englishmen should be brought to understand that after all it is but an
inconsiderable portion of the American business community that is
permanently employed in the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, in selling
canned horrors for food, or in watering railway shares, and that
Americans should believe that there are quite a large number of men of
high birth in England who are only infrequently engaged in either
beating their own wives or running away with those of other men.

The brief confessional clause at the conclusion of the above draft I
take to be an important portion of the document. It is not necessary
that a similar confession should be incorporated in the behalf of the
Party of the Second Part, not because there are no family scandals in
America, but because, in the absence of a peerage, it is not easy to
tell when a divorce or other scandal occurs among the aristocracy.
"Scandal in High Life" is such a tempting heading to a column that the
American newspapers are generous in their interpretation of the term and
many a man and woman, on getting into trouble, must have been surprised
to learn for the first time that their ambitions had been realised,
unknown to themselves, and that they did indeed belong to that class
which they had for so long yearned to enter.

This fact also is worth considering, namely, that wher