A life of cars and country clubs will not suffice—especially for the women, who are almost always more ambitious than the men. There is a demand for careers by those who do not necessarily demand pay, a demand for greater interest. The Astors have found admirable scope in British politics. Such success as Lady Astor has attained is doubtless open to a few more. Americans range in surprising numbers behind successful British politicians, delighting in entertaining them when they can. Various very good looking and capable Americans hold, as it were, advanced posts in English society life. The competition to be presented at Court is greater each year, though greater numbers are actually received. The American Embassy is broadened out to an extensive social platform crowded with people whose estate and position in American life is such that they can hardly be ignored.
The diplomatic service generally in Europe is greatly used by the leisured Americans, and there come people with academic missions, advisory people of various kinds, who for one reason or another obtain interviews with distinguished men and then arrange dinner parties and talk, obtain impressions, get inside, have a finger in the pie.
That same force drives in American politics at home, by intrigue and by lobbying, trying to find a way of life, a larger interest, for the leisured. The American Republic, the old United States, affords little scope for the new ever-increasing class. But America as an Empire, America with a great Army and a great Fleet, America with a deep foreign policy which kept foreign powers all speculating on her next move, America as a world power, would give scope.
Most abhorrent to the leisured class is the primitive State; most desired is the State in its highest development. For a leisured class is not compatible with pure democracy. The present commercial system, however, is producing a leisured class in ever greater numbers. Does it not, therefore, follow that the commercial system itself is incompatible with pure democracy?
5
But of course it is not the four hundred of New York who are New York, but, as O. Henry briefly and brilliantly suggested in his book of stories, it is the four million—and no upper four thousand or upper forty thousand can be America.
Indeed, in many vital matters, the forty thousand have been thwarted by the hundred million. The forty thousand did not want Prohibition and they were not eager for the enfranchisement of women. The forty thousand at least professed themselves in favor of the Versailles Treaty and ready to help Europe to peace. The "representative" American in Europe nearly always treats Prohibition as a joke, or blames it on the women's vote, and as regards our European tangle is all optimism and happy encouragement.
English celebrities visiting America are usually entertained by one of the forty thousand who make a display of liquor, warming the vitals of our said celebrities who come back to England with an idea of a new drunken America.
You would not think that America was a pious, God-fearing country with some millions of people leading sober and righteous lives and yearning for the establishment of the Kingdom. The moral passion of the American masses is kept out of sight as if it were something pitiful or disgraceful. The forty thousand would not care to see America defined as—the nation which voted itself dry. It would rather define America as—the nation which built the Panama Canal. There is in a way a conflict between the claims of moral achievement and material achievement. Thus again in some minds America is the nation which won the war, but in many more she is the nation which fed starving Europe. To many she is the nation of Roosevelt, but to many more she is the nation of Abraham Lincoln.