In Europe the “upper class” and its haughty servants are born to their lofty stations; here the “upper class” is manufactured, largely out of watered stock and bonds and stolen franchises, and its servants are imported. It is the natural instinct of small people, suddenly elevated in material wealth, to try to believe that the wealth which relieves them of the necessity for daily labor also produces a chemical change, a refining transformation, in the clay whereof their singularly human-looking bodies are composed. Against this instinct is the good old American sense of humor that recognizes in the unerasable physical and mental mint-marks of human brotherhood Nature’s mocking rebuke to the vanities of pose and pretense. But few people’s sense of humor extends to themselves; and if they get the least encouragement, off they go on a high horse. Our rich people get more than a little encouragement from certain of their fellow-citizens and from upper-class foreigners, who for obvious reasons cultivate and flatter them in the delusion that it is not their bank accounts but themselves that are superior. But the fashionable section would never have gone so fast or so far in this hallucination had it not been for this important menial aristocracy. Students of human development, in their passion for dealing only with the seemingly big, with the high-sounding, often reach conclusions ludicrously wide of the truth, often neglect those humble but mighty causes that really shape human destiny. They find in the great and burning thoughts of philosophers the explanations of revolutions which a glance at the prices of bread would more justly explain. Let us make no such mistake. In seeking the cause of our rich people’s sudden and furious craze for caste let us not be proud. Let us turn away from the bronze front doors and the magnificent drawing-room and go humbly to the area gate and the backstairs quarters, where the real cause of their curious, amusing and pitiful backsliding from the grand concepts of Democracy is to be found.