“It is well to be in with the nobs who are born to their position, but the support of the swells is more advantageous--for society is sustained and carried on by the swells, the nobs looking quietly on and accepting the position, feeling that they are there by divine right; but they do not make fashionable society, nor carry it on.” The “nobs,” then, of this temple of “caste,” feel that they occupy the high places by “divine right.” The phrase, “divine right,” sounds queer to Anglo-Saxon ears, to us, the descendants of a race who elevated Charles Stuart to the scaffold as a result of a “divine right.” It sounds strangely in the ears of a nation that furnished the example of Liberty and Equality to the world, and which, when followed by the Frenchmen, caused Louis XVI. to kiss the guillotine by reason of his “divine right.” The meaningless, senseless sentences in “Society as I Have Found It,” would be entitled to not the slightest attention, were it not for the fact that they give words to the sentiments of the “smart set,” who have allied themselves--or rather stuck themselves on, as a piece of mud on a marble column--to the Republican party, and, hence, in the minds of equality-loving Americans, the Republican party became besmirched by that mud. Quoting further from the New York _World_, and believing that the writer of the article knew whereof he wrote, the following is inserted:-- “I am writing about a period now thirty years gone by, and, consequently, beyond the personal knowledge of the great majority of my readers. But New York society of to-day is known to all readers of Sunday papers. They know it as an institution in which the prevalence of gigantic fortunes has made its atmosphere uncongenial for all who are not conspicuously rich. And while the valid claims of birth and breeding and culture have thus been crowded out at one gate of the social arena, the influences which have forced an entry at the other end in company with the mere millions, have all been vulgarizing influences. Society is no longer certain that it is the genuine article. If it were, it would not swagger so much, nor give so much thought to the effect it produces on the outer world. It is insolent, but not courageous; ostentatious, but not brilliant; it splurges, but does not shine; no glimmer of intelligence relieves the dullness of its boredom. It abases itself before the peerage of Great Britain, and the taint of corrupt living is unpleasantly frequent on its gilded exterior. Measured by the tests of a true aristocracy, it is below the standard of thirty years ago.”