The effect of this incessant, subtle pressure upon the grown people is strong enough. But they retain some glimmerings of a sane point of view; at times they realize that there is not a little rotten nonsense in their mode of life. But think of the children! They were born into this noisome atmosphere; they are never allowed to breathe any other--for, even when they go away to school, it is to some “select,” “exclusive” institution, or to associate only with the “select” and “exclusive” in the big college. They know no more of the free and national and growing American life than a Mammoth Cave fish knows of the light and the radiant waters of the upper world. They regard Americanism as synonymous with demagoguery and anarchy. And they become sincere and, because of their wealth and display, successful missionaries of the gospel of snobbishness to all the children of the rich and the well-to-do brought into contact with them. Truly, the service is not the most important item that comes up the back stairs of the fine houses of our plutocracy. The ideas--they are the real item. English servants do not, as a rule, like to come to this country. Few of the best class, as yet, will consent to give up the splendor and assured aristocracy of England and go to live among a lot of vulgarians, hard though those vulgarians are striving to be worthy of the support of an aristocratic menialdom. Those few of the best who do condescend to exile themselves wear sad faces and show that they keenly feel the humiliation. For they cannot blind themselves to the truth that their masters and mistresses, striving hard to please and to delude, are still not really “ladies” and “gentlemen,” but just Americans. Have they titles? No. Do the common people doff the hat to them? No. Have they “ancestry”? They pretend to have, but the genealogical trees look about as much like real trees as the papier-mâché palm looks like the genuine thing; and Burke’s peerage and the Almanach de Gotha know them not. No, they are not aristocrats, and it pains the aristocratic servants to serve them much as it would pain a first gentleman of the bedchamber to King Edward to get on his knees to some “big nigger” who called himself Emperor of Ashanteeland. The commiseration of all sympathizers with sensitive souls belongs of right to these aristocrats of menialdom in exile.