They have simply money,- money which they are ready to spend for their own coarse pleasures; money which they are even willing to give away-for their own aggrandizement; money which they are anxious to use in every mode which will enable them to "get on" and make a figure. Besides these, who are hundreds and thousands, there are others not so prominently rich, who are tens and hundreds of thousands, that are of like origin and social history, and who all more or less affect elegance and "aristocracy," and talk of society and fashion. Most, but not absolutely all, of these, like most, but not absolutely all, of the others, are wholly, utterly lacking in any claim to distinction from the crowds that swarm to Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth, except money,-money gotten quickly, and in too many cases not honorably, although not illegally. But because of their money and their gross and selfish expenditure of it, they, or rather (it is but right and fair to say), very many of them, seem to think that they have a position in this country corresponding to that of the leaders of society in Europe; for example, the nobility and gentry of England. They keep their fathers and their mothers hidden away,-in closets upstairs, or in the waste places and remote corners of the land,-and set up for people of fashion upon fine clothes, bric-a-brac, and champagne.

Ignorance is in a great measure the cause of this pretension. The pretenders are so absolutely void of elemental knowledge of the constitution and the history of society as to assume that, because the higher classes of other countries have money and live expensively, therefore money and expensive living make higher classes-an aristocracy. The same ignorance and the same inversion of the order of reason leads them to assume that, because the movements and the entertainments of eminent people in really aristocratic societies are chronicled in the newspapers, if they can have their doings recorded in the newspapers for the mere gratification of an idle public curiosity, they become in like manner eminent. Within the last ten years

will now compare favorably with those of the business classes; though it must be added that the manners of the business classes themselves admit of no little improvement. But among a certain portion of the working class, very abundant in the city of New York, manners seem to be an unknown art, while society, in any proper sense of the term, would appear to be an impossibility." The Century," July, 1883.

it is hardly so long-the outbreak of this folly has been at once a saddening and a ridiculous symptom of our diseased social condition. The doings and the family arrangements, marriages and the like, of grandees in aristocratic countries are published, because all that relates to such people, from the monarch down, is of more or less public importance. Those people are the governing classes of those countries, and they represent, either by inheritance or some sort of succession, the people who have stood in like positions for many generations. They hold the greater part of the land; they are the chief owners of the countries in which they live. If a prince or a duke is ill, or if his son is about to marry, it is a matter of some more or less-real public interest. But if a man who has made ten millions of dollars in honest trade, or by doubtful speculation, and who has done nothing else, is ill, or has a daughter married, or gives an entertainment, of what public importance is it, or of what conceivable interest, outside of his private circle of acquaintance, except to snobs, quidnunes, gossips, and curiosity-mongers? That such doings of such people should be dignified by publication as part of the news of the day is a pitiable exhibition of pinchbeck flunkeyism, worthy only of human apes and parrots.

When Americans who have become rich by trade or speculation assume the position, and affect, to the best of their blundering ability, the customs of an aristocratic class, it must be with utter lack both of memory and of common sense. Memories, very short ones, would tell them what they themselves were only a few years ago; common sense would teach them that, what they were, some unlooked-for turn of fortune's wheel might easily make them again, making at the same time others just what they are now. While I am writing, a paragraph comes before me recording the fall, the lamentable fall, of a man who, but a few years ago, was one of the millionaires of a great western community, and as such duly "honored." He was driven to take a place as salesman in a large trading house in another city, and there, by misconduct, which showed that he must have been always without principle, ruined himself in reputation as before he had been ruined in fortune. The transitory, shifting nature of our newly gotten wealth is one of its most striking and characteristic features. It is not like that of a true aristocracy stayed upon the land, or inwrought with the

structure of the Government. The saleswoman who serves a customer who, descending from her carriage, sweeps up in a costume that cost the poor girl's yearly salary five times over, and makes her demands and gives her orders in a tone which a countess would think vulgarly uncivil, and in language which should exclude her from competitive examination for a school teacher's place, probably looks with envy, and perhaps with admiration, at the "stylish" woman of "fashion." But constituted as American society is, she is, out of all question, by right her equal; and in ninety-nine cases of one hundred she is, according to all reasonable appreciation, truly and actually her equal in every respect, except the possession, the present possession, of money. The two, in ninety-nine cases of the hundred, are alike, the same woof and web, one of no better birth or breeding or education or connection than the other.* A "corner" in lard or the striking of "ile" by the husband of the one has made her just what a "corner" in lard or the striking of "ile" by a future husband may make the other. There is no other appreciable or possibly detectable difference between them; and the poorer is not unfrequently the better mannered and the better educated of the two. Moreover, the action of like causes to those which placed the one in a position to command the services of the other may in a very short time reverse their respective attitudes. It is not thus that even the wealth of a real aristocracy is made or unmade. Not long ago, a lady in New York was astonished to find that a little

*Not long ago, one afternoon, I entered a Broadway car and took my seat opposite a woman brilliant in beauty and elegant in person and in costume, who was, before me, the only passenger. Her appearance was so dainty, and her costume so combined richness with sober good taste, that I was a little at a loss why so very exquisite a dame should honor such an humble conveyance as a street-car with her presence. As we neared Madison Square, two middleaged ladies entered of very different eye. Nothing possible more respectable, but little imaginable more unlovely. The dust of very rustic recesses clung to their flabby satchels, and their costumes showed a vain, though painful, study of "Harper's Bazar" and use of Demorest's patterns. After a moment or two, they began to regard their fair and splendid predecessor with great interest, and to interchange words and glances which soon attracted her attention. She looked at them a moment, and then stretching out her mousquetairegloved hand, exclaimed, in a whining snarl which, coming from such lips, was like hartshorn fuming from a rose: "The land! Deoo tell, ef 'taint yeoo!” Notwithstanding the fine feathers, the bird had been hatched in the same nest and sung the same note.

shop at which she dealt, and where she was served over the counter by the principals, was kept by the own cousins, bearing the name, of a moneyed grandee of great social eminence, whose wife could not rattle her tea-cups and saucers without an echo under "Circles of Fashion." It is not thus that a real aristocracy, even of bourgeoisie, is constituted.

Verily, bats and moles and owls might see that exclusive pretensions and attempts at class distinction in a society based upon wealth acquired by trade or speculation within the memory of living men are too essentially foolish to be worth a moment's respectful consideration. Such pretensions in the United States of to-day are so monstrous, so incongruous, so preposterously absurd, that, if they are continued, some modern Rabelais or Cervantes, looking down upon them from the throne of common sense, and compelled by temptation and material, will dip his pen in ridicule and shake the world with laughter.

Because, however, political or municipal equality is the absolute and unalterable law of the United States of America, now and forever, and because our new "merchant princes" are ridiculous, not as merchants, but as princes, to conclude that we are without a social aristocracy, not unrecognized and not unprized, would show an ignorance worthy of the average European critic of our society. What it is has been hinted in the earlier pages of this article. The several circles which form it in the several centers of society are at once the most reserved and the least pretentious that we have; † but access to them is sought and

* This phrase "merchant prince" is used with a perversion of its right meaning, which is preposterous, in the true sense of that word. It is applied to almost every man who becomes very rich in trade; quite inappropriately and ignorantly. Its origin is the passage in Isaiah in which it is said of Tyre, that her "merchants are princes," meaning not that a Tyrian became a prince when he had made a great deal of money by buying and selling, but that in Tyre (the most powerful of the commercial communities of antiquity) even princes engaged in commerce. Clear enough this, merely from the complete passage, which is rarely or never heard: "Whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth."

Once on a time when, in a town not five hundred miles from Boston, a great entertainment was to be given which set "society" and "circles of fashion" agog, a man, whose forefathers were gentlemen and scholars before the United States existed, entered a costumer's shop, and was about to speak, when the female boss broke out: "I can't take another order, sir; not one; I'm so put about with this A. ball that I'm almost crazy." "Oh, never mind," was the reply: "I'm only a common man, and I don't know the A.'s; but I'd like a yard of gold lace if you'd be kind enough to sell it." About the

valued by those who are well enough informed in social matters to be aware of their existence. They are confined, of course, to our older commonwealths; for such well-rooted growths do not spring up, even in a republic, in one generation, nor yet in two; and these people were of well-known character and culture and social consideration when even the western part of New York was a savage-haunted wilderness. Some of them have been for a time longer than the age of the United States moderately wealthy, and all of them have been able to command that leisure without which education and social culture are impossible. But wealthy or not, they had such character and such breeding that they were highly considered by their neighbors, who recognized their social superiority, looked up to them as leaders, and sent them as their representatives to the colonial legislatures; and they were judges, ministers, and clergymen (of the Church of England). Of these people some are now rich, but others are poor (that is, among rich people); but the higher classes, and also the lower, of aristocratic societies detect their quality at once, and are often puzzled by the incongruity of manners and position. "Strange!" said one of these; "you have senators and governors, or men who are both, living like dukes and with as much influence, and who yet are pompous, low-bred, and uneducated; and men of the best birth and breeding among you are auctioneers, or journalists, or physicians, or even stock-brokers." As I am writing, a paragraph comes before me recording the death of a representative of this class in a small town in Connecticut. It may be fitly reproduced here:

"Mrs. Nancy (Coit) Learned, widow of the late Edward Learned, who died on Wednesday at her family house in New London, Conn., was one of the oldest and most honored inhabitants of that city. She outlived her hus

same time a lady, in whose family on both sides were colonial governors and holders of manors, but who is notably quiet in dress and reserved in manner, was in a hotel "elevator" in the Fifth Avenue, where the bearing of a very richly dressed female passenger was so assuming and aggressive that finally, as she brushed out with a great flourish of rudeness, the other asked in wonder, "Pray, who is that lady?" "Mrs. Z.," was the reply. Now, the whole kin of the Z.'s, in the only previous generation in which the existence of Z.'s was known, had been cartmen and marketmen, in which capacity this gorgeous and explosive female's father had not improbably served the father of her before whom she had blown herself up so largely; but now they live, the reporters say, in a "palatial mansion," with the Z. arms carved upon their mantel-piece! and they flout people (when they don't suspect who they are) who seem to have little money and who have gentle manners.