Moreover, it is difficult to create a mother-country among States which have nothing in common in religion or interests, which, issuing from various sources and at various times, live on a different soil and under a different sun. What connection is there between a Frenchman of Louisiana, a Spaniard of Florida, a German of New York, an Englishman of New England, Virginia, Carolina, Georgia, who are all reckoned as Americans? One is thoughtless and a duelist; the next a Catholic, lazy and haughty; the other a Lutheran, a husbandman, with no slaves; another, an Anglican and a planter, with negroes; yet another, a Puritan and a merchant: how many centuries will be needed to make these elements homogeneous? A chrysogenous[543] aristocracy is ready to appear with the love of distinctions and the passion for titles. Men think that a general level prevails in the United States: that is a complete mistake. There are sets in their society which despise one another and refuse to mix; there are houses in which the arrogance of the master exceeds that of a German prince with sixteen quarterings. These plebeian nobles aspire to form a caste in the face of the progress in enlightenment which made them equal and free. Some of them speak of nothing but their ancestors, proud barons, bastards apparently and companions of William the Bastard. They display the knightly blazons of the Old World, enriched with the serpents, lizards, and parrots of the New. A Gascon younger son, landing on the republican shores with nothing but his nobility and his umbrella, becomes a person of consideration on the steam-boats, if he will only take care to call himself "marquis." [Sidenote: American manners.] The enormous inequality of fortunes threatens still more seriously to kill the spirit of equality. There are Americans with incomes of one or two millions a year; and already the Yankees of high society are no longer able to live as Franklin did: the true "gentleman," disgusted with his new country, goes to Europe in search of the old; one meets him at the inns, making "tours" in Italy like the English, tours marked by extravagance or spleen. These ramblers from Carolina or Virginia buy ruined abbeys in France, and lay out English gardens with American trees at Melun. Naples sends its singers and perfumers to New York, Paris its fashions and dancers, London its grooms and prize-fighters: exotic delights which do not add to the gaiety of the Union. There they amuse themselves by jumping into the Falls of Niagara, amid the applause of fifty thousand planters, semi-savages whose merriment is with difficulty aroused by the sight of death.