But this much I will permit myself to say. Do not imagine that because at this moment certain classes of American workmen are buying bathtubs and Ford cars, and investing in building societies and the like the money that they formerly spent in the saloons, that America is doing as well as can be expected. If you were at this moment a miner’s wife in South Wales you would be half starving; but the wife of a Colorado miner might think you very lucky in having nothing more violent than half starving to endure. The sweated women workers in the tenements of your big cities are told that in America anyone can make a fortune who wants to. Here we spare them that mockery, at least. You must take it from me, without driving me to comparisons that between nations wound as personalities do between individuals, that Capitalism is the same everywhere, and that if you look for its evils at home you will miss nothing of them except perhaps some of the socialistic defences which European States have been forced to set up against their worst extremities. In truth it is odd that this book should not have been written by an American. Its thesis is the hopelessness of our attempts to build up a stable civilization with units of unequal income; and it was in America that this inequality first became monstrous not only in money but in its complete and avowed dissociation from character, rank, and the public responsibility traditionally attached to rank. On the eastern shores of the Atlantic the money makers formed a middle class between the proletariat, or manual working class, and the aristocracy, or governing class. Thus labor was provided for; business was provided for; and government was provided for; and it was possible to allow and even encourage the middle class to make money without regard to public interests, as these were the business of the aristocracy.