“Suddenly? What is there sudden about it? It isn’t a difficult question is it? Or doubtful? Just measure us on the only fair lines—the lines of merit—and of course you’ll admit that a journeyman chairmaker that earns his twenty dollars a week, and has had the good and genuine culture of contact with men, and care, and hardship, and failure, and success, and downs and ups and ups and downs, is just a trifle the superior of a young fellow like you, who doesn’t know how to do anything that’s valuable, can’t earn his living in any secure and steady way, hasn’t had any experience of life and its seriousness, hasn’t any culture but the artificial culture of books, which adorns but doesn’t really educate—come! if I wouldn’t scorn an earldom, what the devil right have you to do it!”
Tracy dissembled his joy, though he wanted to thank the chair-maker for that last remark. Presently a thought struck him, and he spoke up briskly and said:
“But look here, I really can’t quite get the hang of your notions—your principles, if they are principles. You are inconsistent. You are opposed to aristocracies, yet you’d take an earldom if you could. Am I to understand that you don’t blame an earl for being and remaining an earl?”
“I certainly don’t.”
“And you wouldn’t blame Tompkins, or yourself, or me, or anybody, for accepting an earldom if it was offered?”
“Indeed I wouldn’t.”
“Well, then, whom would you blame?”
“The whole nation—any bulk and mass of population anywhere, in any country, that will put up with the infamy, the outrage, the insult of a hereditary aristocracy which they can’t enter—and on absolutely free and equal terms.”
“Come, aren’t you beclouding yourself with distinctions that are not differences?”
“Indeed I am not. I am entirely clear-headed about this thing. If I could extirpate an aristocratic system by declining its honors, then I should be a rascal to accept them. And if enough of the mass would join me to make the extirpation possible, then I should be a rascal to do otherwise than help in the attempt.”