Yes, European princes and potentates are rubbing noses and back-scratching in the friendliest, most democratic fashion in the world, with such of the American people as can afford to visit Europe in royal luxury and get themselves admitted to royal inclosures. The object of these condescensions to our fellow-countrymen is to improve the relations between sundry European monarchies and the American people. A worthy object, as is any which has at bottom the promoting of peace on honorable terms. But Europe is wasting energy in misdirected effort. It assumes that these American beneficiaries have the same “rank” at home that similarly fortuned Europeans have in their countries. And, not unnaturally, it is confirmed in its false notion by many a petty success through this courtship of snobbish plutocrats and plutocratic diplomats. The American multi-millionaire and his wife and his son and his daughter--again this does not mean all Europe-visiting Americans of wealth--are directly responsible for Europe’s present opinion of the American brand of Democracy. For they--not unnaturally--wish to make themselves out the relative equals of their titled and exalted friends. They begin to “talk tall”; and, being far away from home, they soon are thinking as tall as they talk. They confirm each other in the idea that they are really the “whole show” at home. They return with retinues of caste-trained, servile domestics; they live in colonies in our own cities into which none but dollar-hunters and dollar-worshipers penetrate. The political bosses court them, give them laws and senatorships and diplomatic posts in exchange for campaign contributions. Their infatuation grows apace. Thus the American fresh from America finds London--let us confine ourselves to the one capital as typical--a strange, humorous spectacle in the fashionable season. He can hardly believe his own eyes and ears. A week or two, and so persistent are the impressions of a true American nobility visiting Europe that he almost feels that he has been asleep with Rip Van Winkle and has awakened to a new country and a new order in which there is no American Republic.