When he went on to urge the rich “to illustrate in their habit of life simplicity of attire, inexpensiveness in the appointments and chasteness in the aspect, proportions, furniture and decorations of their dwellings,” he could have meant only that he finds the Americans whom he knows best for the most part ostentatious and extravagant in dress, prodigal and vulgar and ignorantly profuse in their dwellings. And when he charged them with having “the buying of legislatures as their highest distinction” and with “appropriating the achievements of the scholar, the inventor, the pioneer in commerce or the arts, without rewarding them for the products of their genius,” he framed an indictment not on belief but on knowledge which becomes tremendous in view of the conservative character of his mind and his training, the dignity and responsibility of his position and the unequalled opportunity that is his to know whereof he speaks. Lord Methuen, felled in a trifling engagement in the Boer war by one of those flesh wounds that are most painful but not serious, telegraphed home, “This is the bloodiest battle in history.” His point of view was rather too personal. And somewhat so must it have been with the Bishop when he concluded his survey of the encompassing plutocracy with this wild, despairing cry: “The whole people are corrupted and corrupting! Moloch is god and his shrine is in almost every household in the republic!” Fifth avenue and Wall street are not all of Manhattan Island: Manhattan Island is not all of New York City; New York City is not the only city in America; and outside the cities in every direction stretch vast areas of American soil not without its population. The plutocracy is a phase, not the whole. If the distinguished Bishop were as competent to speak of the American people as he is of the plutocracy, we might well feel that it is all over with the republic--that we Americans have bartered our birthright for a few handfuls of yellow earth and richly deserve our fate of social, political and industrial serfdom. But---- It is as exact a truth as any in chemistry or mechanics that Aristocracy is the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread ignorance, and Democracy the natural, the inevitable sequence of widespread intelligence.