But this rejoicing is premature. They are right in seeing that it takes a body of self-confessed peasantry to make a prince—that the prince proclaiming himself and proclaimed by hirelings and dependents only is no prince at all, but a laughing-stock. But they are wrong in seeing signs of a forming peasantry; what they see is an un-forming peasantry—a vastly different matter.
The obstinacy of the American and thoroughly Americanized “lower classes” seems incurable. And until it is cured, until a body of citizens is created that will accept the aristocratic idea not as applying to themselves and making them superior, but as applying to a fixed class of superiors to whom they themselves must be and must remain inferiors—until then, the plutocracy will sigh in vain for transformation into an aristocracy. Imported servants and our own snob graduates of snob colleges with yearnings after the “cultured and refining influences of caste” will in vain crook the pregnant hinges of the knee. The plutocracy will be haunted and humiliated by the undignifying grin of the “proletariat,” incurably and militantly democratic.
And the more excited about itself and eager to show off the plutocracy becomes, the more insistent and imperious will become the inquiry into the origin and the rightfulness of these vast fortunes that are being reaped where their owners have not sown and squandered after the proverbial manner of ill-gotten gains.
CHAPTER VI
PAUPER-MAKING
There is a story of a rich woman—an Austrian, perhaps—who was chilled through by a long drive on a bitter winter day.
“Make a huge fire in my sitting-room,” she said to a servant as she entered her country house, “and order wood distributed to the poor of the village.”
She sat by the huge fire for ten minutes and then rang the bell. “Never mind about distributing that wood,” she said to the answering servant. “The weather seems to have moderated.”
The theory back of this story is the popular one: that the great comfort of great wealth hardens the rich, makes them insensible to privation. The fact is the reverse—at least so far as America is concerned. Nowhere in the world is the value of wealth so grossly, so ludicrously over-estimated as among our plutocrats—not unnaturally, since their only title to distinction is their wealth, and a man cannot but reverence that which makes him distinguished. Nowhere, therefore, are the discomforts of poverty so exaggerated as in the palaces of our very rich. And so eager are the men as well as the women for opportunities to exercise their emotions over poverty and destitution that they are rapidly creating a huge pauper class. Demand is creating supply.
The poor give to the poor through sympathy. The rich give to the poor through pity. The sympathetic poor are many, and so their pennies and food-donations, small in the single, pile up mountainously in the total. But they are sparsely and more or less judiciously, because intelligently, distributed. The very rich are, comparatively, though not absolutely, many; and they almost all give what seems to the ordinary run of well-to-do people very large sums. They give carelessly, freely. Though warned by often-exposed abuses, they never take warning. Each new fraud finds them credulous and eager. They want to give; they want to show that they are generous and helpful; to caution them is to irritate them.