neighborhood, and she will name all who live gently and do not have to worry about next month's bills. True pragmatist, she sees that to be exempt from any threat of poverty is to all intents and purposes to be rich. Her classification ignores certain niceties, but corresponds roughly to the fact, and has the merit of corresponding to government decree. Rich people, since the income tax, are officially those who pay the tax but not the surtax. Families with an income not less than four thousand dollars nor more than twenty thousand comprise the harmless, middling rich. Let us once for all admit that in the surtaxed classes there are many cases of quite harmless wealth, while in the lower level of the rich, harmful wealth will sometimes be found. Such exceptions do not invalidate the general rule that all but a negligible fraction of the rich are included in the first class of income taxpayers--on from four to twenty thousand, that most of the property here held is blamelessly held in good hands--wealth that in no fair estimate can be regarded as harmful. In terms of British currency, our category of the middling rich would include the poorer individuals of the upper classes, the richer persons of the lower middle class, and the upper middle class as a whole. This comparison is made not to apply an alien class system which holds very inadequately here in America, but simply to avow the difficulty of my task of apology. The bourgeoisie is equally suspect among radicals, reactionaries, and artists. My middling rich are nothing other than what an European essayist would quite brazenly call the _haute bourgeoisie_. It is quite a comprehensive class, made up chiefly of professional men, moderately successful merchants, manufacturers, and bankers with their more highly paid employees, but including also many artists, and teachers of all sorts. Incidentally it is an employing and borrowing class in various degrees, hence especially subject to the exactions of the labor union at one end, and of the great capitalist and the Trust at the other.