Upon his return to New York from Europe, Barnum found that he had many new friends. “I could hardly credit my senses,” he wrote in a newspaper article at the time, “when I discovered so many wealthy men extending their hands to me and expressing their delight at seeing me again, who before I left New York would have looked down on me with disdain had I presumed to speak to them. I really forgot, until they forced the truth upon my mind, that since I left them I had accumulated a few more dirty dollars, and that now therefore we stood on equal ground! On the other hand, I met some honest friends in humble circumstances, who approached me with diffidence never before exhibited--and then again I felt ashamed of human nature. What a pitiful state of society it is which elevates a booby or a tyrant to its summit, provided he has more gold than others--while a good heart or a wise head is contemptuously disregarded if their owner happens to be poor. “This coat, I am sorry to say, will fit many of my acquaintances in New York. I beg them, for their own sakes and for mine, to wear it. I wish _them_ and all the world to know that my father was a _tailor_, and that I am ‘_a showman_’ by profession, and all _the gilding_ shall make nothing else of me....” This is the first proud public utterance of an attitude Barnum seems to have retained fervently throughout life; he was ostentatiously unpretentious. This sort of speech, and the continual parade of one’s lack of pride, was likely to appeal strongly to the great public whose motto was “I’m as good as him, and better”; it was not an attitude that could have hurt Barnum’s business, for his public was the large public, whose great pride was its mediocrity. But Barnum meant what he wrote; it was his sincere belief that all men are created equal, a misconception that he shared with some of the more distinguished and less disinterested demagogues of his period. Barnum merely failed to appreciate what he should have accepted as a commonplace: that there are levels which we cannot bridge, and which must be recognized. In simple fashion he grandly denies the existence of differences, but he himself would not have found much in common with Edgar Allan Poe, one of his most distinguished contemporaries, or, on the other hand, with the bartender across the way from the Museum. Barnum would have been at a bewildering loss to understand Poe’s melancholy outlook and cynical distrust of a world that had not trusted in his ability; and his temperance views, which will be discussed in this chapter, would have separated him to some extent from sympathetic association with a bartender. The social levels which Barnum wished to remove with one glorious gesture of democracy save most people much valuable time by relieving them of the necessity for establishing a minute and general interest in all the various specimens of mankind. But it was just that interest, curiosity, and concern in the welfare of his fellowmen