“There are two kinds of superiority—real and assumed. Real superiority is largely unconscious of itself. It can never be inherited—there's the important fact about it. You will recall that there are only three cases on record of a great father begetting a great son. The son is apt to have a sense of inherited superiority. It destroys everything worth while in him.
“Of all the defects that flesh is heir to, a sense of inherited superiority is the most deplorable. It is worse than insanity or idiocy or curvature of the spine. There are millions of acres of land in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority; there are millions of hands and intellects in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority, while billions of wealth have been devoted to its service and embellishment. A man who has even a small amount of it needs a force of porters and footmen to help him tote it around, and a guard to keep watch for fear that some one will grab his superiority and run off with it when his back is turned.
“A full equipment of inherited superiority, decorated with a title, a special dialect, a lot of old armor and university junk, stuck out so that there wasn't room for more than one outfit in a township. Most of the bloodshed has been caused by the blunders or the hoggishness of inherited superiority. It is the nursing bottle of insanity and the Mellin's Food of crime.
“Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's greatest consumers of hot air; enough to put him into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation.
“There are two kinds of sense in men—common and preferred, plain and fancy. The common has become the great asset of mankind; the preferred its great liability. Our forefathers had large holdings of the common, certain kings and their favorites of the preferred. The preferred represented an immense bulk of inherited superiority and an alleged pipe line leading from the king's throne to Paradise, and connected with the fount of every blessing by the best religious plumbers. It always drew dividends, whether the common got anything or not. The preferred holders ran the plant and insisted that they held a first mortgage on it. When they tried to foreclose with military power to back them, some of our forefathers got out.
“We, their sons, are now crossing the seas to take up that ancient issue between sense common and preferred and to determine the rights of each. We are fighting for the foundations of Democracy—the dictates of common sense.
“For the sake of saving time, I hope you will grant me license to resort to the economy of slang. A man might do worse these days. There is one great destroyer of common sense. It is hot air. I remember how scared of it the Yankees used to be. They were most economical with their praise. I never heard a word of it in my youth. It came to me after some travel now and then—never to my face. They knew the deadly power of it—those Yankees.
