As our young man has the genius for money-getting, he gradually becomes rich. As his wealth grows he and his wife “drop” the “friends” of less income, gather about them “friends” of their own fortune, and reach out for “friends” who have fortunes greater than their own. And at last, perhaps by way of a season in London under the guidance of some impecunious woman of title, they arrive at the bliss of being able to tour the multi-millionaire’s circuit in good company all the way. And a crowd gapes at their palace doors and windows whenever they “entertain.”
Those city crowds that pause to gape whenever more than one carriage halts before a palace!
Fifteen years ago the most extravagant millionaire in New York—a great financier—spent upon his domestic establishment, everything included, eighty thousand a year. Very few people of his set spent half as much, and the most of them spent less than twenty-five thousand. To-day, for the fashionable extravagant set, eighty thousand a year would not be far from the average expenditure, taking rich and “poor” together. When that financier’s family were the leaders, the principal entertainments in fashionable society were modest affairs—though they were not then regarded as economical—and were given by association. To-day every palace has its great dining-hall and its huge ballroom. And the very rich who have not palaces give their big entertainments individually in hotels and restaurants, hiring a large part of the building for the exclusive use of their guests, and spending thirty or forty thousand dollars or more—in not a few instances far more—upon each entertainment.
To-morrow—
In this early twentieth century—which bids fair to be known as America’s century—New York, the capital of our plutocracy, blazes out a world-capital. Into it are pouring wealth and luxury, pictures, statuary and works of art of all kinds and periods; jewels and collections of rarities. In it are rising miles on miles of palaces, wonderful parks and driveways. It has begun to be a City Splendid. It has already won a place in the line of world-capitals back and back through the ages to the mighty, nameless, forgotten cities of the Valley of the Euphrates. And New York begins where the others reached their climax.
CHAPTER V
CASTE-COMPELLERS
It is still an open and anxious question whether this fashionable society, the growth, as we have seen, of the last two or three decades, constitutes a genuine aristocracy. The society itself hopes so and tries to believe so, and struggles to forget its uncertain tenure, its sordid basis and its humble ancestry. And it is encouraged in its pretensions by many thousands of agile and aggressive climbers who would not for worlds lose their delusion that their climbing has a goal, and a goal worth achieving. But uneasy doubts refuse to down, and whenever one of the fashionables says, with a brave essay at the careless, matter-of-course tone, “We of the upper classes,” he—or she, for it is more often she—can’t refrain from a furtive glance to see whether all faces within sight are perfectly sober, self-complacent and approving.
No such uncertainty, however, exists in the case of the servants of wealth and fashion. They know that they themselves are an aristocracy, and they are determined that there shall be no doubt about their being dignified, if menial, bulwarks of an aristocracy of their employers. These servants, both male and female, are not Americans. Once in a while you will find among them a naturalized American; once in a long while you will find a shamefaced, apologetic American-born. But they are essentially an immigrant aristocracy, and nine-tenths of them are from England, where the iron caste-distinctions of feudalism have come down even unto the present day, not only merely intact, but monstrously exaggerated, where snobbishness is not only part of the statute law, but deeply imbedded in the vastly more potent customary law, and is even incorporated in the divine law, is read out from the pulpit each Sunday and piously echoed by reverent congregations.
In Europe the “upper class” and its haughty servants are born to their lofty stations; here the “upper class” is manufactured, largely out of watered stock and bonds and stolen franchises, and its servants are imported. It is the natural instinct of small people, suddenly elevated in material wealth, to try to believe that the wealth which relieves them of the necessity for daily labor also produces a chemical change, a refining transformation, in the clay whereof their singularly human-looking bodies are composed. Against this instinct is the good old American sense of humor that recognizes in the unerasable physical and mental mint-marks of human brotherhood Nature’s mocking rebuke to the vanities of pose and pretense. But few people’s sense of humor extends to themselves; and if they get the least encouragement, off they go on a high horse. Our rich people get more than a little encouragement from certain of their fellow-citizens and from upper-class foreigners, who for obvious reasons cultivate and flatter them in the delusion that it is not their bank accounts but themselves that are superior. But the fashionable section would never have gone so fast or so far in this hallucination had it not been for this important menial aristocracy. Students of human development, in their passion for dealing only with the seemingly big, with the high-sounding, often reach conclusions ludicrously wide of the truth, often neglect those humble but mighty causes that really shape human destiny. They find in the great and burning thoughts of philosophers the explanations of revolutions which a glance at the prices of bread would more justly explain. Let us make no such mistake. In seeking the cause of our rich people’s sudden and furious craze for caste let us not be proud. Let us turn away from the bronze front doors and the magnificent drawing-room and go humbly to the area gate and the backstairs quarters, where the real cause of their curious, amusing and pitiful backsliding from the grand concepts of Democracy is to be found.