“In the social history of New York it will be a lasting distinction to Mrs. Belmont that she was a conspicuous figure in good society before good society had been vulgarized. I have no quarrel with the society of to-day, which has merely followed the law of its evolution. I merely insist that the New York society of thirty years ago had all the good features of to-day, and was conspicuously free from certain faults which are now conspicuously prominent. The society which accepted the leadership of Mrs. Belmont had birth, and breeding, and culture, ample means and true refinement, and it had also that last test of a genuine aristocracy, that it held its rank by unquestioned title. It had so little fear of the security of its position that it freely admitted strangers of equal social rank. “_It was possible for a rich merchant to permit a clerk to visit at his house_, and even scholars and educated people were not considered detrimental. While it had the respect of ingenuous youth for the older aristocracies of Europe, it did not abase itself in comparison with them, and was incapable of servility before them or before anything human. _It was singularly free from scandals._” Then, thirty years ago,--that is, at the time of Abraham Lincoln’s great popularity, succeeding by two years the great uprising of the Common People, the “mudsills,” of the North and West,--a wealthy merchant of the North would receive his clerk, as a social equal, in his house. Then times have changed, and manners with them, within the last thirty years! The rich merchant of to-day has forgotten the force of the argument which resulted in the election of Abraham Lincoln,--“Americans enforce Equality.” Two years was not enough, thirty years ago, to enable the rich merchant to forget that the first man of the nation, the President of the Union, had been a laborer, rail-splitter, clerk in a grocery store, and was, while chief of the nation, still a man of the “Common People.” No, two years was not enough to bring about forgetfulness of these facts; but _thirty-two_ years was. Hence, the overturning of the aristocratic party (or that party to which the aristocrats belong) cost what it might in dollars to the “Common People.” It is not a new economic doctrine that they demand; it is a new social system. While the assumed aristocracy of thirty years ago may have had respect for the older aristocracies of Europe, it most certainly did not abase itself, and was not as servile to them, as is the sham aristocracy of to-day. Quoting from the Koran of that high priest of the “smart set,” McAllister, who utters the sentiments of the most exalted in the holy of holies in swelldom:--