When rich Americans first began to go abroad the servility of English servants offended. But custom soon changed that. Servility is insidious. The Americans, longing to feel themselves the equals of the complacent and secure upper class in England, and realizing that they could never hope to get deferential respect from their fellow-countrymen--even from those willing to go into domestic service--began to import servants. “The English servants are so much better, you know; understand their business and their place.” But the English servant’s “place” in the social hierarchy is dependent upon his master’s place. Whoever seeks to lower the master in the social scale seeks to lower the servant. On the other hand, whatever raises the master socially raises the servant. Your Englishman who is a servant born and bred is even more incapable of understanding and warming up to Democracy than his king would be. He loathes Democracy--does it not lower him in the social scale by putting all men on the same level; does it not take away his dear gods of rank and birth and leave him godless and adrift? He wants none of it. It may be good enough for foreigners, but not for an Englishman. Once the imported members of the servile aristocracy were among us in considerable numbers they began to plot and to compel an aristocracy above them. The general theory is that these rich Americans who have gone crazy about themselves were infected by associating with the aristocracies of the Old World, and no doubt that association is partly responsible. But the main cause of the malady is that every American family living ostentatiously, or even at all luxuriously, soon found established within its gates an aristocracy of caste that compelled the family to seem to put on airs. And any American family that assembles a household staff of these aristocrats will soon be strutting and posing, however hard it may strive to remain sensible. The servants simply won’t have “under-bred” Democracy; they would despise themselves if they found themselves working for men and women not their superiors. And it isn’t in human nature, weakened by the example of all around it, to resist the subtle and insinuating compulsion of the “well-bred” hints and innuendos of “well-bred” servants. A man and a woman are no longer master and mistress of themselves, not to speak of their house, when they have given way to the luxury and vanity of a real high-class English butler backed up by half a dozen English footmen, an English coachman and three or four English grooms. He and she will begin to cut pigeon-wings like a colored gentleman on the first warm day of Spring. He and she will do it because the servants expect it, because the servants have convinced them that it is the correct form, because the servants will not tolerate any departure from the pose of “my lord” and “my lady”--and because such posings are so titillating to the vanity.