In this early twentieth century--which bids fair to be known as America’s century--New York, the capital of our plutocracy, blazes out a world-capital. Into it are pouring wealth and luxury, pictures, statuary and works of art of all kinds and periods; jewels and collections of rarities. In it are rising miles on miles of palaces, wonderful parks and driveways. It has begun to be a City Splendid. It has already won a place in the line of world-capitals back and back through the ages to the mighty, nameless, forgotten cities of the Valley of the Euphrates. And New York begins where the others reached their climax. CHAPTER V CASTE-COMPELLERS It is still an open and anxious question whether this fashionable society, the growth, as we have seen, of the last two or three decades, constitutes a genuine aristocracy. The society itself hopes so and tries to believe so, and struggles to forget its uncertain tenure, its sordid basis and its humble ancestry. And it is encouraged in its pretensions by many thousands of agile and aggressive climbers who would not for worlds lose their delusion that their climbing has a goal, and a goal worth achieving. But uneasy doubts refuse to down, and whenever one of the fashionables says, with a brave essay at the careless, matter-of-course tone, “We of the upper classes,” he--or she, for it is more often she--can’t refrain from a furtive glance to see whether all faces within sight are perfectly sober, self-complacent and approving. No such uncertainty, however, exists in the case of the servants of wealth and fashion. They know that they themselves are an aristocracy, and they are determined that there shall be no doubt about their being dignified, if menial, bulwarks of an aristocracy of their employers. These servants, both male and female, are not Americans. Once in a while you will find among them a naturalized American; once in a long while you will find a shamefaced, apologetic American-born. But they are essentially an immigrant aristocracy, and nine-tenths of them are from England, where the iron caste-distinctions of feudalism have come down even unto the present day, not only merely intact, but monstrously exaggerated, where snobbishness is not only part of the statute law, but deeply imbedded in the vastly more potent customary law, and is even incorporated in the divine law, is read out from the pulpit each Sunday and piously echoed by reverent congregations.