To those who believe that we are going to improve upon them it must be rather an edifying spectacle to observe the doings and sayings of that body of people in the city of New York who figure in the newspapers of the day as “the four hundred,” “the smart set,” or “the fashionable world.” After taking into full account the claims of the sensitive city of Chicago, it may be truthfully stated that the city of New York is the Paris of America. There are other municipalities which are doing their best in their several ways to rival her, but it is toward New York that all the eyes in the country are turned, and from which they take suggestion as a cat laps milk. The rest of us are in a measure provincial. Many of us profess not to approve of New York, but, though we cross ourselves piously, we take or read a New York daily paper. New York gives the cue alike to the Secretary of the Treasury and (by way of London) to the social swell. The ablest men in the country seek New York as a market for their brains, and the wealthiest people of the country move to New York to spend the patrimony which their rail-splitting fathers or grandfathers accumulated. Therefore it is perfectly just to refer to the social life of New York as representative of that element of the American people which has been most blessed with brains or fortune, and as representative of our most highly evolved civilization. It ought to be our best. The men and women who contribute to its movement and influence ought to be the pick of the country. But what do we find? We find as the ostensible leaders of New York society a set of shallow worldlings whose whole existence is given up to emulating one another in elaborate and splendid inane social fripperies. They dine and wine and dance and entertain from January to December. Their houses, whether in town or at the fashionable watering-places to which they move in summer, are as sumptuous, if not more so, than those of the French nobility in its palmiest days, and their energies are devoted to the discovery of new expensive luxuries and fresh titillating creature comforts. That such a body of people should exist in this country after little more than a century of democratic institutions is extraordinary, but much more extraordinary is the absorbing interest which a large portion of the American public takes in the doings and sayings of this fashionable rump. There is the disturbing feature of the case. Whatever these worldlings do is flashed over the entire country, and is copied into a thousand newspapers as being of vital concern to the health and home of the nation. The editors print it because it is demanded; because they have found that the free-born American citizen is keenly solicitous to know “what is going on in society,” and that he or she follows with almost feverish interest and with open-mouthed absorption the spangled and jewelled annual social circus parade which goes on in the Paris of America.