A short time ago a young man--a “born success”--went to a beautiful country house near New York to make a Saturday-to-Monday visit. He brought with him two huge trunks. These were taken to the almost magnificent suite of rooms which had been assigned to him. His valet unlocked the trunks and summoned the chambermaid. The two servants stripped from the bed the sheets and pillow-cases and covers; then from the trunks they took the young man’s own wonderful bed-clothing, woven especially for him by the best looms in Europe. These creations were put on the bed in place of the silk and fine linen which the owner of the country house, a very rich man, regarded as fit for a king, but which this young man thought far too coarse for contact with his delicate skin. The host was given to extravagance, was used to and in sympathy with the eccentric efforts of too-rich people to attract attention to themselves. But this insulting refinement “got” on his nerves. As his guest was a very rich man, and was therefore entitled to that reverential deference which only the rich are capable of feeling for and giving to the rich, the host let no outward sign of his state of mind appear. But he confided the insult to his other guests as a “joke,” and had them privately laughing and jeering at his young friend. This young man is one of the small advance guard of the new generation of plutocrats--the generation that has about the same knowledge of life as it is lived by the great mass of Americans that we have of the mode of life in a Hottentot kraal. We shall soon be far better acquainted with these sons and grandsons of somebodies than we are at present. Soon the wealth and industrial energy of the country will be controlled by them, or, rather, through them by a clever and unscrupulous few. Let us therefore pause for a moment upon these American “born successes,” taking at random some one of them as a type--one we will call, for convenience, Jones.