In civilization no man can live wholly to or for himself, and whoever would achieve power, influence, or success must cater to the tastes and whims of those who have the granting of these things in their hands. In a democracy, speaking broadly, those who have the power to grant are the whole people; and the minds and manners of the people[Pg 202] as a whole are of necessity below those of the chosen few who have risen above the average level by gifts of nature or happy opportunity. Every social class everywhere has always had its own standards of morals, manners, and culture. When such classes are separated by wide social or economic chasms, the only influences they exert upon one another are apt to be negative. Each lives in a world of its own, supported by the only public opinion for which it cares, that of its own class. Each also tends to react against the manners or morals of the other. The aristocrats of an earlier day looked down upon the common people and were more than ever satisfied with their own codes. The common people, in turn, feeling themselves despised, bolstered up their egos by despising the manners and morals of the class which looked down upon them. Much of the Puritan movement in England and elsewhere has here its roots. By no possibility could an ordinary laborer attain to the manners, social ease, or knowledge of the world of a duke. Ergo, the laborer, by unconscious mental processes well understood by modern psychology, asserted his own worth by denying worth to the qualities of the classes above him. He could not have the manners of a duke; therefore, those manners were undesirable anyway. He could not travel and he could not gain the most valuable sort of education, that of association with great or cultivated men; therefore, such things were of no importance. So long as the classes remain separated, as I said above, their influence upon one another is largely negative, but when class distinctions disappear in a democracy the mutual influences of members of those former classes or their vestiges in later generations become as complex[Pg 203] in their action as the currents where tide and river meet. The effects of democracy in America have been emphasized by three factors not present in any of the great democracies of Europe. In the first place, the Americans started almost wholly fresh. Here were no thousand-year-old institutions and forms of government and society to be reckoned with as impediments. America was a clean slate. The settlers did indeed bring with them habits, information, and memories gained in the Old World, but they brought them to a wilderness.