It is probably safe to say that if the United States had such a social counterweight as is furnished in England by the throne and the recognised aristocracy, the growth of what is called "trust-power" would be viewed to-day with comparative unconcern. At all events England is able to view with something like unconcern the conditions, as they exist in England, worse than, as has been said, the trust power is humanly capable of imposing on the American people in another half-century of unhindered growth. Which, American readers will please understand, is not a suggestion that the United States would be benefited, even commercially, by the institution of a monarchy. Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Englishmen long ago acquired the idea that American business methods in what may be called large affairs were too often unscrupulous; and of such methods, there were certainly examples. I have explained why the temptations to, and the opportunities for, dishonesty were very great in the earlier days and it would be impossible to find language too severe to characterise many of the things which were done--not once, but again and again--in the manipulation of railways, the stealing of public lands, and the plundering of the public treasury. The dog deserved as bad a name as he received. But that dog died. The Americans themselves stoned him to death--with precisely the same ferocity as they have recently exhibited when they discovered, as they feared, some of his litter in the Chicago packing houses--or a year before in the offices of certain insurance companies. The present generation of Americans may not be any better men than their fathers (let us hope that they are, if only for the reputation of the vast immigration of Englishmen and Scotchmen which has poured into the country) but at least they are much less tempted. They live under a new social code. They have nothing like the same opportunity for successful dishonesty and immeasurably greater chance of punishment, whether visited on them by the law or by the opinion of their fellows, if unsuccessful or found out. It is not fair that the new dog should be damned to drag around the old dog's name. There is an excellent analogy in which the relations of the two peoples are reversed. * * * * * Americans are largely of the opinion that the British aristocracy is a disreputable class. They gave that dog its name too; and there have been individual scandals enough in the past to justify it. It is useless for an Englishman living in America to endeavour to modify this opinion in even a small circle, for it is only a question of time--probably of a very short time--before some peer turns up in the divorce court and the Englishmen's friends will send him newspaper clippings containing the Court Report and will hail him on street corners and at the club with: "How about your British aristocracy now?"