Hereditary titles, sometimes imagined to be a counterpoise to the ascendency of wealth, are really, in our time at least, a support and sanction to it, giving it an official standing and permanence it cannot have in democracy. We understand that in England wealth—with tact, patience and maybe political services—will procure a title, which, unlike anything one can get for money in America, is indestructible by vice and folly, and can be used over and over to buy wealth in marriage. “Nothing works better in America than the promptness with which the degenerate scions of honored parents drop out of sight.”[125] Rank is not an offset but a reward and bribe to wealth; perhaps the only merit that can be claimed for it in this connection being that the desire and deference for it imposes a certain discipline on the arrogance of newly acquired riches. The English idea that those in high offices should have a magnificent style of living, “becoming to their station,” is also one that goes with caste feeling. It makes it hardly decent for the poor to hold such offices, and is almost absent here, where, if riches are important to political success, the condition is one of which the people do not approve and would gladly dispense with. I doubt whether the whole conception which imputes merit to wealth and seeks at least the appearance of the latter in modes of dress, attendance and the like, is not stronger everywhere in Europe than in the United States. FOOTNOTES: [123] The American Commonwealth, Chapter 94. [124] Andrew Carnegie. [125] T. W. Higginson, Book and Heart, 145. CHAPTER XXV THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ILL-PAID CLASSES THE NEED OF CLASS ORGANIZATION—USES AND DANGERS OF UNIONS—GENERAL DISPOSITION OF THE HAND-WORKING CLASSES. It is not the purpose of this book to add anything to the merely controversial literature of the time; and in treating the present topic I intend no more than to state a few simple and perhaps obvious principles designed to connect it with our general line of thought. It is quite apparent that an organized and intelligent class-consciousness in the hand-working people is one of the primary needs of a democratic society. In so far as this part of the people is lacking in a knowledge of its situation and in the practice of orderly self-assertion, a real freedom will also be lacking, and we shall have some kind of subjection in its place; freedom being impossible without group organization. That industrial classes exist—in the sense already explained[126]—cannot well be denied, and existing they ought to be conscious and self-directing.