There are two kinds of stability--the stability of the ship rotting at its wharf; the stability of the ship, strong and steady, on its way through the midst of the sea. America is all for the latter. It abhors barnacles and rust. And it combats monopolistic tendencies most fiercely because, however adroitly disguised as “communities of interest,” they promote the stability of stagnation, blindfold the eager eyes of competition, bribe brain and muscle to sloth, hold up the heavy hands of sluggard and incompetent, and discourage individual ambition and hope. There should be no structure of any kind whatsoever, whether national or social, which, when it has clearly outlived its use, can be saved by sentiment or interest or bulwarks of brainless boodle-bags. And Democracy will have none such. Let those who tremble for our future be calmed. As for those who fancy they can in their own interest create such structures, let them read history and learn to laugh at their folly. The principle applies to those less tangible but more insidious structures--those ideas that would give permanence or prominence to people because of what some one else has been, or what they have been in the past--structures existent only in the minds of comparatively few, gone daft in their love of European imitation. But we tear down too quickly for them. While the fine building of class distinctions is constructing, changes occur that knock out the foundation stones. An old New York “aristocrat”--his grandfather came over in the steerage--glanced around the Metropolitan Opera House one night not long ago and said: “There are not a dozen families on the list of boxholders twenty years ago that are on that list to-day. All new people--and from heaven knows where.” Where were the new people from? Why, from whence this old “aristocrat’s” grandparents came, from where his grandchildren will be. Whenever a fence is put up by any group of people around themselves one of two things happens. Either those inside grow terribly weary of their exclusiveness, and, finding that no particular benefit seems to be coming from it, voluntarily let down the fence; or the society-mad herd, seeing the fence, makes a rush for it to get in. A coarse rattling of hoofs and horns, a discovery of a loose paling, a crash, a mad scramble, and there are more inside than out. Democracy is as much the law of our social order as gravitation is of our physical order. Those who don’t like it will, if they are wise, either leave the country or adjust themselves and their children to its conditions. For if they stay and bring up their children out of harmony with the existing and unalterable order, their children will be punished, even though they themselves, through obedience in their earlier lives, escape the worst consequences of their folly.