To see America—the America that was, and is, and shall be—we must leave the neighborhood of the palaces of the plutocracy with its servile parasites and imitators, its fawning menials and shopkeepers; we must also leave the neighboring slums, where the American is so sadly caricatured—not more sadly, in truth, than where the plutocracy flaunts. We must go to the smaller cities and the towns and villages and the farms, where in ten thousand homes a sane and sober life is led by a sane and sober people. And we find there no tendencies toward the development of caste, far-reaching though the poisonous influence of the plutocracy is.
For our hopeful, yes, convincing comparisons, we need not bring forward the early days of the republic, when the surviving silly old Colonial aristocracy was strong enough to restrict the suffrage, to enforce rigid class distinctions, to threaten us with an official aristocracy of “birth.” We only need compare forty years ago with to-day to see the substantial progress of true Democracy. Proportionately, are there not vastly fewer people to-day lacking that high sense of self-respect which caused so much open, profuse and shamefaced apologies for electing to the Presidency a man of such “low origin” as Lincoln? At the time of the Civil War, and even thereafter, the rich men in every community had great political influence simply because they were rich, and property, as property, claimed and was conceded a right to a more potent voice in the public affairs. Is it so to-day? Is not the property influence exercised only in secrecy and stealth? Is the rich man a favorite for elective office, or are the people, roused by the frequent coincidence of wealth and corruption, jealously suspicious of the rich man in politics?
Outside the umbra and penumbra of plutocracy we find the American with the inborn sense of equality, the American that rejoices in humble origin as proof of the personal worth of him who has risen. We are still a nation of working men and women, the sons and daughters of working people. And just as soon as one of us becomes ashamed of his birth or of his own past, becomes infected with the cheap and silly vulgarisms that Europe is always thrusting upon us, just so soon does he or she begin to fall behind in the procession. Influential relatives will not long save him or her, nor inherited property; misused opportunity to better education will only hasten the downfall.
Never was country made up of more kinds of people than the United States; but we have no classes. There is no condition to which one is born from which one may not escape. Class means such a condition. Now, were caste altogether a matter to be determined by the rich, by those “on top,” we might well tremble for the future of our social state. The rich of a thousand localities would not be slow to take advantage of the chance were it offered them. But fortunately caste is made by those who look up, not by those who look down.
However many Americans there may be who would like to look down, there are few, there are ever fewer, with the quaint fancy for looking up. It is true that in our so-called “foreign element” there seems to lie the possibility of a dangerous influence. This vast mass of foreigners, coming from lands where class distinctions are centuries old, is regarded with hope, consciously and unconsciously, by our plutocratic with caste aspirations. But let us recall the facts about that other flood of immigration, the Irish and the Germans who came in the middle part of the last century—proportionately a greater flood than the one which has been sweeping in upon us for the last twenty years. In the fifties of the last century, as to-day, it was confidently predicted that the downfall of Democracy had already begun. The slavocracy of the South struck hands with the then existing manufacturing plutocracy of the North, and the basis of the Northern plutocracy was the hordes of ignorant immigrants. What happened? The war? More than that. Democracy absorbed away the basis of the rising Northern aristocracy just as the war swept away the basis of slavocracy. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants became the most strenuous of Americans.
Our “foreign element” does not remain foreign. It comes here to become American, and it sets about the accomplishment of its purpose with an energy and a resolution that are unconquerable. When our plutocracy of to-day leans upon the “foreign element” it leans upon a breaking reed. And the more heavily it leans the worse will be the fall.
In manners more easily than any other way can we see Democracy in progress. There should be no confusing that respectful consideration for others, which in an honest way most of us have, with the European idea of deference. Whether at home or abroad, the big asset of the American is his lack of deference, his freedom from that which angered Walt Whitman into crying out haughtily:
“By heaven, there has been about enough of doffing and deprecating. I find no sweeter fat than that which clings to my own bones.”
Manners bespeak mental attitude; and mental attitude is the man. Americans should be careful how they permit themselves to trifle with their manners. We are hearing a great deal about “growing distinctions between class and mass” now-a-days. Many are “viewing with alarm” and “deeply deploring” such evidences of it as, to use the most often cited instance, the increasing tendency of well-to-do parents to send their children to private schools instead of, as formerly, to the public school.