We can prate as we like about the idealism of America, but it is only money success which really counts. What are ideals or culture or charming manners as compared with business? What in the last presidential campaign did two leaders of opinion tell us, one from the Pacific and the other from the Atlantic coast? Mr. Hoover, in his address replying to the welcome given him by the people of San Francisco, told them that the most precious possession of their great city was—what?—their foreign trade! In New York, the Sun in its editorial explaining its intention to support the Republican party, admitted that the Prohibition question was “a live campaign topic,” and that present conditions might be “intolerable” and “a morass of lawbreaking,” but asked whether it was well to risk loss of prosperity for the possible reform of those conditions. In America to-day business life is not the basis for a rational social life, but social life is manipulated as the basis for an irrational business one. One makes acquaintances and tries for popularity in order to get ahead downtown. To an unprecedented extent the people who have money in all lines of business are newcomers from far down in the social scale, men with no culture and no background, and often no manners. We may note our new class of multi-millionaire landlords who have built fortunes out of shoe-strings since the War. Two of our now greatest industries have been wholly evolved in the last two decades, and one certainly does not look for culture among the kings in the motor and moving-picture trades. The “people” who came into political power under Jackson made a huge grab at economic power under Grant, but it has been reserved for the present to “make the world safe for democracy.” The old class which had inherited manners[Pg 217] and culture as essential to an ordered life has abdicated mainly for mere lack of funds. In business for the last decade it has been for the most part the conservatives, who had much to lose, who have lost, and the reckless who have won. Business may explain the mucker pose, but it may be asked whether those who adopt it are not traitors to all that is best in the world and which has been so hardly built up. An impoverished aristocrat may sell his title in marriage for one generation to rehabilitate his house, but Americans who sell their culture and their breeding to truckle to the unbred in business, who shed these things of the spirit for motor cars and all the rest of the things of the body, are taking refuge in a yet more ignominious surrender. They may thus pick up some of the golden drippings from the muckers’ tables, but they do not gain the respect of the muckers whom they imitate, and may yet awake to the fact that they have properly forfeited even their own. [Pg 219] CHAPTER X MAY I ASK? [Pg 221] MAY I ASK?