Go to any fashionable restaurant, or saloon, where the would-be swells swill champagne. Ask the attendants their opinion of those who, with a supercilious air, throw them a dollar to fee them for their services. You will hear expressed, in reply to your question, opinions like this: “I feel like knocking their heads off. I am ready to work. I don’t want their money for nothing; but I am a man, and as good as they are.”
The workman was content, nor did it interest him if the rich should drive their Tally-hos. He had no desire to divide the money of the purse-proud devotee of “caste”; but when, weary from his day of labor, trudging along the road to his humble home, with tooting horn and flourish of whip the Tally-ho sweeps by him, and he has to scurry out of the road, he long remembers the derisive smile of the insolent, purse-proud occupants of the coach, and he objects—not to the coach—but to the manner and the smile of the occupants.
The heart of the shop-girl or the seamstress is not filled with envy because the fine lady (?) of fashion possesses garments of silk and laces; but the insolence and supercilious manner, when the fine lady (?) brought in contact with her, fills her soul with a sense of injured dignity. She knows she’s quite as good as a lady of fashion. Possibly her father is not a protected, petty manufacturer; and she goes to her home, resenting the assumed superiority in the manner of the fine lady, and preaches to father, brother, and lover equality and broad democracy. The fine ladies (?) of fashion have ever been most potential causes for victories by the people. No orator so eloquent as the wife, daughter, sister, or sweetheart; and her wrongs were resented November 8th.
“THE PUBLIC BE D——D!”
The New York World, of November 20th, 1892, publishes an article in connection with New York society, that, having received a place in that great Democratic journal, because of its undoubted truth, is worthy of a place in this volume. In speaking of the death of Mrs. Belmont, the World makes use of the occasion to express some remarkably forcible facts with regard to New York society. It says:—
“In the social history of New York it will be a lasting distinction to Mrs. Belmont that she was a conspicuous figure in good society before good society had been vulgarized. I have no quarrel with the society of to-day, which has merely followed the law of its evolution. I merely insist that the New York society of thirty years ago had all the good features of to-day, and was conspicuously free from certain faults which are now conspicuously prominent. The society which accepted the leadership of Mrs. Belmont had birth, and breeding, and culture, ample means and true refinement, and it had also that last test of a genuine aristocracy, that it held its rank by unquestioned title. It had so little fear of the security of its position that it freely admitted strangers of equal social rank.
“It was possible for a rich merchant to permit a clerk to visit at his house, and even scholars and educated people were not considered detrimental. While it had the respect of ingenuous youth for the older aristocracies of Europe, it did not abase itself in comparison with them, and was incapable of servility before them or before anything human. It was singularly free from scandals.”