Mr. Martin did not at once answer. He smiled, as if enjoying some entertaining memory. Then he started to speak, and mentioned the name of a prominent reformer. But his New England caution checked him. He said:
"No, I'd better not say anything about that. I'd rather not. I'd rather say that the things that the snobs admired and particularly embodied have lost prestige during the last twenty years.
"After 1898, after our great rise to prosperity, the captains of industry and of finance were the great men of the country. But I think these great men are less stunning now than they were then. And money is less stunning, too.
"All the business of money-making has had a great loss of prestige since 1900. People think more of other things. And the people who are thinking of other things than money-making have more of a 'punch' than they had before. The wise have more of a punch, and so have the foolish."
Again came that reminiscent smile. "Reformers can be very trying," he said. "Very trying, indeed. Did you ever read Brand Whitlock's Forty Years of It? Brand Whitlock had his own trials with the reformers. Whitlock is a sensible, generous man, and his attitude toward reformers is a good deal humorous and not at all violent. That would be Thackeray's attitude toward them, I think, if he were living to-day. He'd satirize the reformers instead of the snobs."
Mr. Martin is not inclined to condemn or to accept absolutely any of the modern reform movements. "All reform movements," he said, "run until they get a check. Then they stop. But what they have accomplished is not lost."
The society women who undertake sociological reform work find in Mr. Martin no unsympathetic critic.
"These wealthy women," he said, "take up reform work as a recourse. Society life is not very filling. They have a sense of emptiness. So they go in for reform, to fill out their lives more adequately.
"But I don't know that I'd call that kind of thing reform. I'd call it a large form of social activity. These women are attending to a great mass of people who need this attention. But the bulk of this kind of work is too small for it to be called reform.
"In New York there are very many young people who need care and leadership. The neglected and incompetent must be looked after. The old-fashioned family control has been considerably loosened, and an attempt must be made to guard those who are therefore less protected than they would have been a generation ago. Certainly these efforts to look after young people who don't have enough care taken of them by their families are directed in the right direction."