“You are popular,” went on the diplomat, “and very unpopular. You were never so popular nor so unpopular.”
“You mean we are unpopular because of the American trade invasion?”
“Not at all. That is a trifling matter. It concerns only the politicians and a few manufacturers and the farmers, and does not concern them very deeply. No—let me explain. Formerly we—and when I say ‘we’ I mean the upper classes of Europe, those which still rule, despite all this talk about the progress of Democracy—formerly we feared you; we pretended to despise you, but in fact we were afraid. You were the great experiment in Democracy, that is, in anarchy—in the rule of the masses, the mob. Your success meant serious trouble for us, if not the handwriting on the wall, because our masses were always thinking of you.”
Here the diplomat smiled peculiarly and glanced round the room.
“Now all that has been changed,” he went on. “Europe and America are better acquainted. We no longer fear you. Why should we?”
And again he paused to let his glance travel round the room, finally to rest with good-humored satire upon the American’s face.
“Yes—we understand you better. Our fears have been proved groundless, our suspicions have been justified. Your new path, after making a wide bend, has returned into the old historic highway of caste. And so our upper class, which hated you, now—well, it neither loves nor admires you, but it honors and courts you. It laughs a little at your pretensions to birth. But it respects the solid foundation of your aristocracy—wealth. For, no matter what we may pretend, not blood, but money, wealth, is the essence of aristocracy. As for our masses, that once looked up to you as their ideal——” He shrugged his shoulders.
“They no longer look up to us?”
“They look down upon you. They see that you, too, have your dominating class just as they have. And they prefer their own kind of upper class as less sordid, less vulgar, the embodiment of a more inspiring ideal. So long as they knew you only by report they believed in you; and that belief still makes them restless under us. But now that they have seen you, now that you are constantly in evidence, they see that their hopes—at least so far as they were based upon you—were a foolish dream. They prefer their own princes to ‘bosses’ and upstart newly-rich.”
“But suppose these Americans whom you see over here and whom you read most about are not representative?”