And soon the German Emperor and those about him, all of a high and impoverishing nobility, began to work the same trusty, but never now-a-days rusty, old saw about the thickness of blood and water—are we not “Germanic,” we Americans? But the motive which is the less with the King and the upper classes of England is the stronger with our tempestuous German suitor—the motive of political, or, rather, industrial friendship. He feels that in dining and wining and treating, “just as if they were equals,” American owners of yachts and multi-millionaires, he is endearing himself to the American people. For, like practically the whole of Europe to-day, he thinks America is no longer a Democracy, but a thinly disguised plutocracy. And the more he reads and hears of the power and prestige of American multi-millionaires at home, the more firmly is he convinced that when he is tickling the vanity of these “dollar-swollen upstarts,” he is sending delicious thrills up and down the spine of the American eagle.
Yes, European princes and potentates are rubbing noses and back-scratching in the friendliest, most democratic fashion in the world, with such of the American people as can afford to visit Europe in royal luxury and get themselves admitted to royal inclosures. The object of these condescensions to our fellow-countrymen is to improve the relations between sundry European monarchies and the American people. A worthy object, as is any which has at bottom the promoting of peace on honorable terms. But Europe is wasting energy in misdirected effort. It assumes that these American beneficiaries have the same “rank” at home that similarly fortuned Europeans have in their countries. And, not unnaturally, it is confirmed in its false notion by many a petty success through this courtship of snobbish plutocrats and plutocratic diplomats.
The American multi-millionaire and his wife and his son and his daughter—again this does not mean all Europe-visiting Americans of wealth—are directly responsible for Europe’s present opinion of the American brand of Democracy. For they—not unnaturally—wish to make themselves out the relative equals of their titled and exalted friends. They begin to “talk tall”; and, being far away from home, they soon are thinking as tall as they talk. They confirm each other in the idea that they are really the “whole show” at home. They return with retinues of caste-trained, servile domestics; they live in colonies in our own cities into which none but dollar-hunters and dollar-worshipers penetrate. The political bosses court them, give them laws and senatorships and diplomatic posts in exchange for campaign contributions. Their infatuation grows apace.
Thus the American fresh from America finds London—let us confine ourselves to the one capital as typical—a strange, humorous spectacle in the fashionable season. He can hardly believe his own eyes and ears. A week or two, and so persistent are the impressions of a true American nobility visiting Europe that he almost feels that he has been asleep with Rip Van Winkle and has awakened to a new country and a new order in which there is no American Republic.
And we are only at the beginning. The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” between the English upper class and the American aspirants to be thought “upper class,” the dragging in of the rich American pilgrim out of the fog to the cheeriest corner of the English fire, these are matters of yesterday. And already Paris gets but a glance from the rich Americans, and the most foresighted of Paris shopkeepers are establishing London branches for the “Anglo-Saxon” American who no longer can spare the time from his or her English social duties to make the outfitting trip across the English Channel. To-morrow—The English hearth is large; there is room on it for every presentable or hope-inspiring American who can afford to cross the Atlantic; and the news of the jollity of the London season and of the round of English house parties is spreading in America and is attracting the pretentious society of all the large American cities. The “Alliance” is indeed booming.
It is not through English aversion to the Atlantic voyage that, though we are the sought, we go to the home of the seeker to be sought. The English upper classes would come to us if we insisted upon it, although the item of expense looks larger to them than to us. But we do not insist upon it. Our “leisure class” is made far more comfortable in England than it is at home. America has no such facilities as has England for amusing sheer idleness in ways that are not undisguisedly inane. Through several centuries, the filling in of the idle hours of professional idlers has been a study there; the houses, the streets, the theatres, the restaurants, the whole social system is adapted to it.
Further, the American can feel so “tall,” can believe so thoroughly in his own aristocracy and aloofness above the general run of mankind when there are three thousand miles of barren water between him in his grandeur and the shop where he worked as a “clark,” or the cabin where his father was born, or the back yard where his mother, in gingham, hung out the wash. Thus, the Americans in search of “the high life” for which they yearn prefer to go to it rather than to have it brought to them.
“As I study your countrymen here and get their views,” said an Englishman, famous as a lifelong admirer of America and of the democratic idea, “I become convinced against my will that your Democracy is dying. It seems the ideal of Democracy is too high to survive prosperity; apparently it can exist only in what one of your countrymen, writing in your simple days, called the atmosphere of plain living and high thinking. As soon as a man becomes prosperous he begins to ‘put on airs,’ as you Americans say. And the pity of it is that the less prosperous concede his superiority, and so make his ‘airs’ significant where they would otherwise be ridiculous. The reason our monarchies, that is, our monarchical governments and our aristocratic classes, are becoming friendly to you, is that you are becoming like them. They concede something; but you—you concede your principles. They get something—cash dividends on their condescensions. But I’m blest if I can see what you get.”
To the stay-at-home American, or, for the matter of that, to the travelling American who retains his sense of proportion, the exaggerating of bumptious American “diplomats” and “dollarcrats” into a national phenomenon of peril, and the gloomy croakings or sardonic rejoicings in Europe over the decay of the American Republic may seem preposterous—as preposterous as an ambassador’s fancying that his ecstasies when a king claps him on the shoulder are the ecstasies of the entire American people. But it is a phenomenon that should not, that cannot wisely, be left out of account. Steam and electricity have bridged the chasm across which our ancestors fled to establish here a system based upon sanity, simplicity and justice. And at a peculiarly trying time there are crossing over to us European ideas and ideals that so dangerously disguise snobbishness and plundering and injustice under pretentious culture and such plausible frauds as the “natural leadership of the classes that have demonstrated their superiority by success.”
The problem is often stated cart before the horse. “What will our plutocracy do with us?” men say in all seriousness. The question, in fact, is, “What shall we do with our plutocracy?” It has descended upon us swift as a cyclone, insidious as a plague. We had no adequate warning. We have not yet, as a people, grasped the situation in its fullness. Of all the cure-alls so confidently proposed by our political and sociological quacks, which one does not show on its very surface to any careful mind utter futility at best, disaster in the application as a highly probable event?