Again, a woman gives a dinner. You go to her house and find her receiving in a magnificent dress and displaying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry. She is far and away the most gorgeously, the most expensively dressed person at her dinner. She outshines all her women guests. In a truly sensitively refined society would a hostess do this? Would she not rather dress simply, even plainly? Her dinner, and its service, should of course be the best she can provide--there she is honoring her guests. But in her own dress, in the one feature of her entertainment where invidious and humiliating comparisons could be instantly made, she would think not of gratifying her own vanity, but of putting her guests at their ease. And so she would save her best jewels and dresses for places other than her own house and eyes other than those of her own guests. The kinds of grossly bad manners of which these are fair and familiar examples would not surprise us in Europe, where the education is narrow and souls are shaped in pettiness and vulgarity by class distinctions. But they would and do surprise us in America. * * * * * There is one trait in our national character that is a veritable Gibraltar against caste tendencies. It is that passion for up-to-dateness, which is so American, which is the cause of American progress, which is the secret of the ever rising plane of the comfort and intelligence of the American masses. A European landowner or manufacturer, filled with the spirit of conservatism, the spirit of “good enough” and “it will do” and “don’t destroy old landmarks,” clings to musty and rusty antiquities, hampers himself and his associates and neighbors, drags and makes them drag at the wheels of advance. With the American, how quickly is the new building, the new machine, the new method already improved into antiquity! Away with it! Replace it by the latest and best. Better one big item in the profit and loss account than steadily decreasing profits and wages and products, and steadily increasing losses through the triumphs of competitors. The new, always the new! The new, always hopeful of the new! Give the new a trial! To-day must be better than yesterday; to-morrow will surely be better still. That is America. And this same spirit wages incessant and successful war against caste. If the new man is the best man we put him to the front. Does our “irreverence” for things ancient sometimes offend a super-æsthetic few? It is a pity they are so enraptured by European picturesqueness of the antique that they fail to note the European peasant bending and groaning under the weight of the past. Does this disrespect for hampering tradition proclaim us “new”? That is well. When did youth become a calamity and a reproach? May we ever be “new,” looking at the problems of life with hopeful young eyes, confident that better, more beautiful things lie in the future than past suns ever shone upon.