True, among the mass of our immigrants, almost all from countries where a real caste system has prevailed always, there is a tendency toward a searching after an aristocracy in this country. They miss it; they cannot believe that a land in all its physical aspects like unto the lands from which they have fled should be without what has always seemed to them a natural and necessary part of the order of the universe. But they hunt for this aristocracy not with the idea of worshipping it, but with the idea of destroying it. And hence we find that the loudest angry assertion of the existence of a true aristocracy here comes from those of our democracy-loving citizens who are foreign-born. They see this monstrous pretense rearing itself as imposingly as the true aristocracies of Europe; and they do not pause to distinguish between marble and plaster painted to look like marble. They raise a wild shriek and demand that snickersnees be drawn and that heads begin to fall. A natural mistake, and highly gratifying to our would-be aristocrats. They are not terrified by the uncouth and futile clamors; though to make the thing more realistic to themselves, they sometimes pretend to be. But they are through and through pleased at hearing themselves in seriousness called what they would fain believe themselves to be; and they say delightedly: “At last, the lower classes begin to recognize themselves, and us!” But this rejoicing is premature. They are right in seeing that it takes a body of self-confessed peasantry to make a prince--that the prince proclaiming himself and proclaimed by hirelings and dependents only is no prince at all, but a laughing-stock. But they are wrong in seeing signs of a forming peasantry; what they see is an un-forming peasantry--a vastly different matter. The obstinacy of the American and thoroughly Americanized “lower classes” seems incurable. And until it is cured, until a body of citizens is created that will accept the aristocratic idea not as applying to themselves and making them superior, but as applying to a fixed class of superiors to whom they themselves must be and must remain inferiors--until then, the plutocracy will sigh in vain for transformation into an aristocracy. Imported servants and our own snob graduates of snob colleges with yearnings after the “cultured and refining influences of caste” will in vain crook the pregnant hinges of the knee. The plutocracy will be haunted and humiliated by the undignifying grin of the “proletariat,” incurably and militantly democratic. And the more excited about itself and eager to show off the plutocracy becomes, the more insistent and imperious will become the inquiry into the origin and the rightfulness of these vast fortunes that are being reaped where their owners have not sown and squandered after the proverbial manner of ill-gotten gains. CHAPTER VI PAUPER-MAKING