In order to explain more lucidly the peculiar social life of Mizora, I
will ask you to remember some Charity Fair you have attended, perhaps
participated in, and which had been gotten up and managed by women of
the highest social rank. If in a country where titles and social
positions were hereditary, it then represented the highest aristocracy
of blood. Grand dames there departed from the routine of their daily
lives and assumed the lowlier occupations of others. They stood behind
counters, in booths, and sold fancy articles, or dispensed ices and
lemonade, or waited upon customers at the refreshment tables; bringing
in trays of eatables, gathering up and removing empty dishes; performing
labor that, under the ordinary circumstances of life, they would not
perform in their own homes, and for their own kindred. It was all done
with the same conscious dignity and ease that characterized the
statelier duties of their every day life. One fact was apparent to all:
they were gentlewomen still. The refinement of their home education, and
the charm of nourished beauty were, perhaps, more prominent in contrast
with their assumed avocation.
The Charity Fair, with its clerks and waiter girls and flower sellers
called from the highest society, was a miniature picture of the actual
every-day social life of Mizora. The one who ordered a dinner at their
finest hotel, had it served to her by one who occupied the same social
standing. Yet there _was_ a difference; but it was the difference of
mind.
The student in Sociology discovers that in all grades of society,
congenial natures gravitate to a center. A differentiation of the
highest mental quality was the result of this law in Mizora, and its
co-ordinate part, their aristocracy.
The social organism did not need legislation to increase its benefits;
it turned to Science, and, through Science, to Nature. The Laboratory of
the Chemist was the focus that drew the attention of all minds. Mizora
might be called a great school of Nature, whose pupils studied her every
phase, and pried into her secrets with persistent activity, and obeyed
her instructions as an imperative duty. They observed Nature to be an
economist, and practiced economy with scrupulous exactness.
They had observed that in all grades of animal life, from the lowest
form to the highest, wherever sociality had produced unity a leader was
evolved, a superiority that differed in power according to the grade of
development. In the earlier histories, the leaders were chosen for their
prowess in arms. Great warriors became rulers, and soldiers were the
aristocracy of the land. As civilization progressed and learning became
more widely disseminated, the military retired before the more
intellectual aristocracy of statemanship. Politics was the grand
entrance to social eminence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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