It may be asked why, in a modern industrial world in which everyone must have money to live, and in which most people are engaged in making it in one way or another, is America any more of a business man’s civilization than that of any other country? The answer is to be found in a wide variety of social, economic, historic, geographic, and other factors. Let us, for example, contrast it with England, the country which I know best outside of my own, and where I happen to be writing at the moment. England has always been a great commercial and, for the last century, a great manufacturing country, the “nation of shopkeepers” in the eyes of European continentals. Business and trade are foundation stones of England’s prosperity and power,[Pg 11] yet English civilization, whatever it may one day become, is not as yet a business man’s civilization in the same sense as is America’s. The reason is that the influence of the business man here upon society has been limited by the presence of other and very powerful influences stemming from sources other than business and having nothing to do with it. In the first place, there is that relic of feudalism, the aristocracy, including in its numbers, of course, many men and fortunes made by trade, but exerting its influence through a long tradition. It may be that “every Englishman loves a Lord”—though it is quite certain he does not worship him as do many American women—but it is true that the aristocracy exerts an influence upon the social manners and customs of the people at large which is incomparably greater than that exerted by the probably wealthier, but far less picturesque, untitled bankers, shipping merchants, iron manufacturers, and what not. In the country—still the best source of English life, though fast passing—aristocracy and landed gentry possess so great an influence that if a nouveau riche wishes to become somebody, he does not take a great house and give costly entertainments in London but buys an estate somewhere in the “counties” and painfully tries to make his way among families that may have but a fraction of his own wealth.