The argument so far as it relates to special privileges may now be summed up as follows: Special privileges are not necessarily corrupt; they may be in the public interest and recognised as such. They exist in the United States, but are much more common in England and Germany. We, however, have chosen to regard all of them with suspicion and to attack many of them vigorously, charging them not only with corruption but with every other political crime in the calendar. Abroad they enjoy greater security and respectability. Even when they are assailed by English and continental publicists more deferential methods of attack are employed than we are used to in America. Rude words such as “graft” are avoided.[111] Hence in part the greater appearance of corruption which we present to Europe, and which we seem to confirm by the criminations and recriminations which issue from our own mouths. Mr. Frederic C. Howe is therefore right in maintaining the probability that “it is not so much in the badness, as in our knowledge of the badness, that America differs from the rest of the world.” Without underestimating the enormous power of the forms of special privilege which exist among us, and the difficulty of restraining and regulating them,[112] European nations may nevertheless find it a far more trying task to adjust the claims of their own widespread and deeply rooted forms of privilege when they come into conflict with the rising tide of democratic and socialistic sentiment. So far as privilege in autocratic, aristocratic, and clerical forms, is concerned we have every reason to be grateful that the fathers of the Republic long ago made away with it. They left the awful heritage of slavery, but privilege resting upon that basis has also been wiped out. We ourselves must face the power of the political machine and massed wealth, and we are facing it. Momentous as is the issue, we have, at least, the satisfaction of being able to rejoice, in the trenchant and essentially true words of Mr. William Allen White, that the United States is “a country where you can buy men only with money.”[113]