There was another side to that question. A creature like McAllister is not a spontaneous or instantaneous creation of our great Republic. There must have existed a congenial atmosphere in his “smart set” to produce an exotic of such rare and unattractive perfume. Had it not been perfectly apparent that Ward McAllister was not the only person who imitated and aped foreign manners, and desired to create a social distinction in America, the book would have been a roaring farce. Had the people at large supposed that he was the single individual in America who approved of and earnestly desired to create a collection of idiots who should claim that “caste” could exist in our country, then the people would have regarded him much in the manner they would a buffoon on the stage of a theatre, or some idiot who, from a desire to attract attention, paints his face sky-blue. But the very advertising that this blooming flower of sham aristocracy received at the hands of the newspapers--which was done by the newspaper men in a spirit of levity, possessing, as they do, sufficient brains to find McAllister and his subject utterly absurd, in conjunction with many other well-advertised and extravagantly absurd assumptions on the part of the wealthy, made a much deeper impression upon the minds of the “Common People” than it was supposed that it would or could do. McAllister’s “smart set” in this country--and his “smart set” is not confined to New York City, but exists in some form or manner in every city, town, village, and county in the Union--this McAllister-like “smart set” in each little community, as well as in the large cities, has managed by its arrogance and assumed superiority to arouse a spirit of resentment among the “Common People” of the Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson stamp, because the masses have seen an attempt to establish something which would create an inequality between the citizens of the Republic. It was a monstrous joke that the Knights of the Pencil saw in McAllister and his “Society as I Have Found It,” and, like the keen-witted men that they are, they proceeded to hurl the javelins of their wit and sarcasm at this balloon of idiocy and impudence; but in piercing the balloon, the nauseating odor arising from its explosion pervaded the nostrils of the “Common People” with more than ordinary unsavoriness.