THE SMOTHERED SON.
“She was a Williamistic widow—the relict of the late Samuel Butters.
“She was also a Shrimpstone, of Kalamazoo. My friend, why do you sit there in cold indifference when I mention a fact so inspiring?”
“Who were the Shrimpstones?” I inquired.
“The Shrimpstones! Jiminy crickets! Is it possible that you are not familiar with the fame of Joshua Shrimpstone?”
“I have to plead guilty,” was my answer.
“To tell you the truth, so do I,” he went on, “but my own ignorance never surprises me. There is so much of it that a little more or less does not matter. It is the ignorance of so many of my fellow countrymen regarding this important subject that fills me with pity and astonishment. I have never met a man who could give me the slightest information regarding the Shrimpstones.
“It would seem that Mrs. Butters enjoys an arrogant and heartless monopoly of all knowledge about them. One does not feel like asking her to dispel his ignorance when she speaks the word 'Shrimpstone' as if it opened vistas of incomparable splendor and inspiration. No, there are things which even a lawyer can not do. There is a special look in her eye and a lyrical note in her voice when she says 'my grandfather, the late Joshua Shrimpstone.' I imagine that Bill Hohenzollern looks like that when he says: 'My grandfather, Frederick the Great' But I imagine, too, that Bill's manner is a bit more casual.
“I had done some business for Mrs. Butters now and then, and one day she came to get my advice on a strictly personal matter. Her son, John Shrimpstone Butters, was just out of college. She had expected Butters & Bronson, of the great corset factory, in which she had a considerable interest, to take him into the firm and give him a commanding position in the office. As they had not come forward with an invitation, she had asked them for that favor. They had refused—actually and firmly refused—and what do you think they had offered John—a great grandson of Joshua Shrimpstone? Why, they had offered him a place as errand boy at five dollars a week. They actually expected him to begin at the bottom of the ladder and work his way up as if he were nothing more than the ambitious son of a ditch digger. Mrs. Butters lost her self-control and sobbed as she confided the distressing fact to me.
“I told her that I would have a talk with Bill Bronson, the head of the firm, and see what could be done about it, and she left me.
“In my talk with him, Bill said:
“'We should like to do anything we can for Mrs. Butters's boy but all we can do is to give him a chance—the same chance that my own boy will have. He can begin at the bottom and we will push him along from one department to another as rapidly as he can master its details. He must learn every process from the making to the delivery of the goods. Above all, he must learn to be a good salesman. After a few years he might become the Butters of Butters & Bronson if he were willing to work hard.'
“I wired Mrs. Butters to call again at my office. She called. I told her what Bill Bronson had said to me.
“'What!' she exclaimed. 'He expects my son to become a common drummer and travel around selling goods to little shopkeepers! Impossible!'
“'Why?' I asked.
“'Because he does not have to. My grandfather, the late Joshua Shrimp-stone, left us enough so that we do not have to do that kind of thing. Besides. I do not think it is necessary. My son has intelligence enough to learn those menial pursuits without having to do them.'
“'You are wrong,' I said. 'The American way is to begin at the bottom. It's a very good way—the only way by which one may be thoroughly prepared for management. In that way he gets hold of the sense that is common in the rank and file of his army, and knowing that, he will know what to do in every emergency.'
“'If that is true, John might as well have been born poor. Does his position and the fact that I have five thousand shares of stock count for nothing?'
“'Well, you get dividends on the stock. If you expect to get dividends also on the position that you got from your grandfather you are wrong. In this country we have no crown princes who begin at the top. Inherited superiority is an amusing thing to look at but a poor foundation for credit. In this country we bank on demonstrated superiority.'
“Mrs. Butters rose and haughtily withdrew from my office with the pride of the Shrimpstones glittering in her eye.
“Now, John Butters was a good fellow. He was over-mothered. Indeed, the word for it is smothered. He was like a man cast into the sea with a Shrimpstone tied around his neck. He would have done well with half a chance. I never saw a man so badly in need of poverty, so damned with affectionate, gilded, comfortable female despotism. She bought one business after another for him and put him in at the top. He has failed in all these undertakings. His way is littered with broken crowns and the wreckage of little kingdoms.
“Now his youth is gone and he is the same useless, ineffective good fellow that he was in the beginning. For years he and his mother have been sitting on that high horse of hers and galloping around to the amusement of all beholders. He has got tired of it and jumped off and settled down as the clerk of a wife who takes him lightly.
“He is the victim of assumed superiority which is nothing more or less than Williamism.”
CHAPTER IV.—WHICH HANDS OUT SOME SOME COMMON TO THE SUPERERS IN AMERICA
The Honorable Socrates Potter went to the typewriter and got some oil and a cloth and began to clean the gun of his great grandfather as he talked.
“You see, William says: To hell with the common man. Let him do the work and the fighting. We'll take the product of toil and the loot of war and enjoy ourselves. We will not have a thing to do but super. If we glut the officers of the army and our leading citizens with, the product and the loot, they'll stand by us.
“Is it not significant that the number of plutocrats in Germany has doubled since the war began? William proposes to make human slaughter a business. He is running a giant butcher shop.
“Every idler, every superer is an ally of William and an enemy of Democracy.”
“But they seem to get the best of it—these superers,” I suggested. “They have a lot of fun.”
“They seem to, but, soon or late, they learn it hasn't paid. They come to grief or insanity—these slackers in the game of life. Let me tell you the little story of