It is not my desire, in writing about Society, to describe in detail its practices, to dwell upon its rules and regulations, to dilate upon its normal condition or its duties. Rather, I intend to dwell upon a phase of its existence that does not traditionally belong to it, and that is not normally a part of it. This phase or condition I choose to describe in the phrase “The Idle Rich.” If, in the writer’s license of generality, I seem at times to deal too harshly with the world of which I am a part, let the reader put himself for a moment in my place. Let him imagine himself a member of a class judged and condemned according to a distorted popular conception based upon a semi-knowledge of the acts, habits, morals and ethics of the very worst of the class; nay, even of men and women who, while aping to the best of their poor ability the fashions, the habits, and the customs of that class, ignore every one of its best traditions, forget every one of its laws, and break every one of its commandments. It is hard for me to write with patience of the small class that has done so much to disgrace and discredit the spirit of American Society. For I know that it is true that in the mind of an enormous number of our people, and of the people of other civilized countries, American Society is brought to shame and ridicule by the extraordinary excesses that have been brought within its gates and grafted into its system by the idle rich. Yet there are excuses. This is the most rapid age in history. In the progress of this nation we have ignored and turned our back upon that process which Tennyson so well described in the happy phrase, “slow broadening down from precedent to precedent.” We laugh at precedent. We choose instead to tumble riotously down from step to step of progress, marking swift epochs with every bump. Naturally I am a conservative, and I deplore the process by which we sweep away the precedents of the nations. I prefer orderly evolution to disorderly revolution, either in business, in politics, or in the making of a social world; but I cannot change the things that I deplore. The fact, in the face of my protests, is as unblinking as the Sphinx in the roar of Napoleon’s cannon. And that fact is that in the making of our social world, as in the making of everything else that goes to make America, we have ignored the traditions of our fathers.