The principle applies to those less tangible but more insidious structures—those ideas that would give permanence or prominence to people because of what some one else has been, or what they have been in the past—structures existent only in the minds of comparatively few, gone daft in their love of European imitation. But we tear down too quickly for them. While the fine building of class distinctions is constructing, changes occur that knock out the foundation stones.
An old New York “aristocrat”—his grandfather came over in the steerage—glanced around the Metropolitan Opera House one night not long ago and said: “There are not a dozen families on the list of boxholders twenty years ago that are on that list to-day. All new people—and from heaven knows where.” Where were the new people from? Why, from whence this old “aristocrat’s” grandparents came, from where his grandchildren will be.
Whenever a fence is put up by any group of people around themselves one of two things happens. Either those inside grow terribly weary of their exclusiveness, and, finding that no particular benefit seems to be coming from it, voluntarily let down the fence; or the society-mad herd, seeing the fence, makes a rush for it to get in. A coarse rattling of hoofs and horns, a discovery of a loose paling, a crash, a mad scramble, and there are more inside than out.
Democracy is as much the law of our social order as gravitation is of our physical order. Those who don’t like it will, if they are wise, either leave the country or adjust themselves and their children to its conditions. For if they stay and bring up their children out of harmony with the existing and unalterable order, their children will be punished, even though they themselves, through obedience in their earlier lives, escape the worst consequences of their folly.
The part of the coming generation that is trained in Democracy is the part that will survive and prosper and progress. The part that is bred in exclusiveness and caste feeling is going to be bitterly discontented and deplorably unprogressive certainly, and in all probability, except in a few rare cases, downright unprosperous.
Why do not the plutocratic “exclusives” and aspirants to exclusiveness see these things and take warning? Because vanity is so much stronger in influence over the average human being than is reason. They pile up the millions, make safe investments, plot monopolies that will insure stability of property, and imagine that their family line will be secure. Then they educate their children to folly and superciliousness and economic helplessness or at best give them a training not in business, in useful labor, but in the truly aristocratic chicanery of high finance. Thus does Nature, abhorring permanence, craftily use them for their own undoing. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make drunk on the fumes of vanity.
The plutocracy and its imitators bring up their children in hot-houses. Some of the youngsters are ejected from the hot-house and exposed as soon as they are grown—or sooner; others remain in the hot-house and perhaps breed there. But the day of fate comes. The hot-house is emptied or destroyed.
Fortunately for the masses and their children, fortunately for the prosperity and progress of the race, few can build these hot-houses; only a few can dwell in them. And with the swift progress of Democracy in these modern days, this cruel, mocking favoritism swiftly decreases.
Manners there can be, but they must be democratic manners. Refinement, culture, there can be, but it must be democratic. Idealism there can be, but it must be true idealism, broad, deep and high, not a “class” matter, not a vanity, not a pretentious crushing down of millions to make luxurious holiday for a few.
The aristocratic idealisms in manners, education, politics, religion, mode of life, are fleeing like shades of night before the bright daylight of Democracy. Only ignorance could ever have thought them fair.