Besides the change of view in himself, there were some actual changes in the country that were not temporary in their nature. The constitution of society had altered at home during his residence abroad, or was rapidly altering. The influence of the old colonial aristocracy was fast dying out. New men were pushing to the wall the descendants of the (p. 121) families that had flourished before the Revolution, and had sought after it to keep up distinctions and exclusiveness which the very success of the struggle in which they had been concerned doomed to an early decay. This was especially noticeable in New York. In such a city social rank must tend, in the long run, to wait upon wealth. The result may be delayed, it cannot be averted. Wealth, too, in most cases, will find its way to the hands of those carrying on great commercial undertakings. That this class would eventually become a controlling one in society, if not the controlling one, was inevitable. It was not likely that men, who were bent on the conquest of the continent, who revolved even in their dreams all forms of the adventurous and the perilous, whose enterprise stopped short only with the impossible, would be content long to submit to a fictitious superiority on the part of those whose thoughts were so taken up with the consideration of what their fathers had been or had done that they forgot to be or to do anything themselves. Yet the latter composed no small share of the class with which Cooper's early associations had lain. He naturally sympathized with them rather than with those who were displacing them. Trade began to seem to him vulgar, and it was doubtless true that many engaged in it, who had become rapidly rich, were vulgar enough. But he made no distinction. He longed for the restoration of a state of things that had gone forever by. He was disposed to feel dissatisfaction with much that was taking place, not because it came into conflict with his judgment, but because it jarred upon his tastes and prejudices.