If intelligent people decline to go, you justly remark, it is their own fault. Yes, but if they stay away it is very certainly their great gain. The elderly people are always neglected with us, and nothing surprises intelligent strangers more, than the tyrannical supremacy of Young America. But we are not surprised at this neglect. How can we be if we have our eyes open? When Caroline Pettitoes retreats from the floor to the sofa, and instead of a “polker” figures at parties as a matron, do you suppose that “tough old Joes” like ourselves are going to desert the young Caroline upon the floor, for Madame Pettitoes upon the sofa? If the pretty young Caroline, with youth, health, freshness, a fine, budding form, and wreathed in a semi-transparent haze of flounced and flowered gauze, is so vapid that we prefer to accost her with our eyes alone, and not with our tongues, is the same Caroline married into a Madame Pettitoes, and fanning herself upon a sofa,--no longer particularly fresh, nor young, nor pretty, and no longer budding but very fully blown,--likely to be fascinating in conversation? We cannot wonder that the whole connection of Pettitoes, when advanced to the matron state, is entirely neglected. Proper homage to age we can all pay at home, to our parents and grandparents. Proper respect for some persons is best preserved by avoiding their neighborhood. And what, think you, is the influence of this extravagant expense and senseless show upon these same young men and women? We can easily discover. It saps their noble ambition, assails their health, lowers their estimate of men and their reverence for women, cherishes an eager and aimless rivalry, weakens true feeling, wipes away the bloom of true modesty, and induces an ennui, a satiety, and a kind of dilettante misanthropy, which is only the more monstrous because it is undoubtedly real. You shall hear young men of intelligence and cultivation, to whom the unprecedented circumstances of this country offer opportunities of a great and beneficent career, complaining that they were born within this blighted circle--regretting that they were not bakers and tallow-chandlers, and under no obligation to keep up appearances--deliberately surrendering all the golden possibilities of that Future which this country, beyond all others, holds before them--sighing that they are not rich enough to marry the girls they love, and bitterly upbraiding fortune that they are not millionnaires--suffering the vigor of their years to exhale in idle wishes and pointless regrets--disgracing their manhood by lying in wait behind their “so gentlemanly” and “aristocratic” manners, until they can pounce upon a “fortune” and ensnare an heiress into matrimony: and so having dragged their gifts, their horses of the sun, into a service which shames out of them all their native pride and power, they sink in the mire, and their peers and emulators exclaim that they have “made a good thing of it.”