The very use of the words high and low shows how completely the money standard is accepted sociologically. If you have money you are high-class, if you have not money you are low-class. Though poverty may militate against refinement, have riches anything to do with it? The two principal effects that riches exercise on character are either to weaken it into effeteness or debase it into coarseness. Our aristocracy, for instance, so long as they were occupied with fighting or with the responsibilities of government--so long, in fact, as they had some business of their own--preserved a certain distinction, and by a careful process of selection and intermarriage, avoided any coarsening of their breed. This, for a time, may have endowed them with a certain high average of refinement of manner and tastes. But when by the changes in our system of government, and later by the rise of democracy, that is the great mass of the people awakening to a consciousness of their own existence, the aristocracy became more and more cut off from national services and had recourse to leisured lives of unemployment and pleasure, the characteristics of effeteness and what the French call _fin de race_ began to show themselves. In many cases downright impoverishment overtook those who had squandered their incomes on unprofitable amusement and stupid dissipation, till at last they seem to have come to a determination to rehabilitate their position and reinforce their caste by means of commercial and American money. The plutocracy gained ground immensely by the absorption in its ranks of ancient families and long genealogies, and the aristocracy became increasingly tainted with commonness, losing its distinction and substituting for it ostentation, vulgarity, and the appreciation of money for its own sake. They derived no advantage physiologically in the shape of health and vigour which any alliance with the poorer class might have given them. So far from anything in all this indicating that money produces refinement, the exact opposite is proved. That a full competence enables a man to appreciate the refinements of life is, after all, what we are doing our best to show; but riches--that is to say, anything beyond the competence--can only act as a fatal impediment even to this.