“As I study your countrymen here and get their views,” said an Englishman, famous as a lifelong admirer of America and of the democratic idea, “I become convinced against my will that your Democracy is dying. It seems the ideal of Democracy is too high to survive prosperity; apparently it can exist only in what one of your countrymen, writing in your simple days, called the atmosphere of plain living and high thinking. As soon as a man becomes prosperous he begins to ‘put on airs,’ as you Americans say. And the pity of it is that the less prosperous concede his superiority, and so make his ‘airs’ significant where they would otherwise be ridiculous. The reason our monarchies, that is, our monarchical governments and our aristocratic classes, are becoming friendly to you, is that you are becoming like them. They concede something; but you--you concede your principles. They get something--cash dividends on their condescensions. But I’m blest if I can see what _you_ get.” To the stay-at-home American, or, for the matter of that, to the travelling American who retains his sense of proportion, the exaggerating of bumptious American “diplomats” and “dollarcrats” into a national phenomenon of peril, and the gloomy croakings or sardonic rejoicings in Europe over the decay of the American Republic may seem preposterous--as preposterous as an ambassador’s fancying that his ecstasies when a king claps him on the shoulder are the ecstasies of the entire American people. But it is a phenomenon that should not, that cannot wisely, be left out of account. Steam and electricity have bridged the chasm across which our ancestors fled to establish here a system based upon sanity, simplicity and justice. And at a peculiarly trying time there are crossing over to us European ideas and ideals that so dangerously disguise snobbishness and plundering and injustice under pretentious culture and such plausible frauds as the “natural leadership of the classes that have demonstrated their superiority by success.” The problem is often stated cart before the horse. “What will our plutocracy do with us?” men say in all seriousness. The question, in fact, is, “What shall we do with our plutocracy?” It has descended upon us swift as a cyclone, insidious as a plague. We had no adequate warning. We have not yet, as a people, grasped the situation in its fullness. Of all the cure-alls so confidently proposed by our political and sociological quacks, which one does not show on its very surface to any careful mind utter futility at best, disaster in the application as a highly probable event? The plutocracy itself shares in the delusion of so many of our “publicists.” “What shall we do with America?” it insolently says in effect.