However many Americans there may be who would like to look _down_, there are few, there are ever fewer, with the quaint fancy for looking _up_. It is true that in our so-called “foreign element” there seems to lie the possibility of a dangerous influence. This vast mass of foreigners, coming from lands where class distinctions are centuries old, is regarded with hope, consciously and unconsciously, by our plutocratic with caste aspirations. But let us recall the facts about that other flood of immigration, the Irish and the Germans who came in the middle part of the last century--proportionately a greater flood than the one which has been sweeping in upon us for the last twenty years. In the fifties of the last century, as to-day, it was confidently predicted that the downfall of Democracy had already begun. The slavocracy of the South struck hands with the then existing manufacturing plutocracy of the North, and the basis of the Northern plutocracy was the hordes of ignorant immigrants. What happened? The war? More than that. Democracy absorbed away the basis of the rising Northern aristocracy just as the war swept away the basis of slavocracy. The children and grandchildren of the immigrants became the most strenuous of Americans. Our “foreign element” does not remain foreign. It comes here to become American, and it sets about the accomplishment of its purpose with an energy and a resolution that are unconquerable. When our plutocracy of to-day leans upon the “foreign element” it leans upon a breaking reed. And the more heavily it leans the worse will be the fall. * * * * * In manners more easily than any other way can we see Democracy in progress. There should be no confusing that respectful consideration for others, which in an honest way most of us have, with the European idea of deference. Whether at home or abroad, the big asset of the American is his lack of deference, his freedom from that which angered Walt Whitman into crying out haughtily: “By heaven, there has been about enough of doffing and deprecating. I find no sweeter fat than that which clings to my own bones.” Manners bespeak mental attitude; and mental attitude is the man. Americans should be careful how they permit themselves to trifle with their manners. We are hearing a great deal about “growing distinctions between class and mass” now-a-days. Many are “viewing with alarm” and “deeply deploring” such evidences of it as, to use the most often cited instance, the increasing tendency of well-to-do parents to send their children to private schools instead of, as formerly, to the public school.