cratic instinct will doubtless preserve a plane of equality where man may always meet man on a common footing, so that whatever our upper class may prove itself, it is not probable that it will have either legislated privileges or titular distinctions. European social rank is a decided variation from the more ancient caste of the Brahman; the American may be expected to be a variation from and an improvement upon the European. While it is true that shrewdness, perseverance, and vigor—the qualities that won ages ago in the Old World—are at work shaping destiny here, it must be seen that here these qualities are directed to the securing of higher objects. Assuming that our civilization is still in its childhood, and comparing it with the like early stages of older systems, the differences will all be seen to lie in our favor. Money-getting, with all its dishonest practices, is a higher form of brutality than the wholesale plundering and slaughtering of the defenceless; political trickery is less objectionable than assassination; impure legislation is better than feudal tyranny; and trial by jury, however corrupt the panel, is preferable to the old appeal to sorcery to settle a matter of guilt or innocence. With such a start ahead of the beginnings of older civilizations, would it not be strange indeed if the United States did not develop tests of superiority finer than any to-day applied to mankind?—strange and contrary to reason if, in the coming culture, moral courage and high character—rarest of rare qualities—do not do for the man what cunning, bloodthirstiness, and strength of limb did for him of old,—noble achievements in science, statesmanship, art, literature, and beneficence constituting the nobility of the nobleman?
That the struggle that will bring about this high social and moral state of society will be long and severe no one can doubt who notes the equipment of the masses for it. When, therefore, it is taken for granted that only the few will reach the top, we cannot escape looking at the grim other side of the picture, in which the many fail more or less hopelessly. In other words, we see men and women with aspirations half realized and work half achieved crowded out of favorite pursuits by men and women more eminently fitted for those pursuits, the latter having been acted upon in the same manner by persons of yet higher qualifications. For the law of fitness holds nothing too sacred for removal in the interest of that which is a little better.
In the treatment of our subject so far, passive submission to the law of national development has been kept in view. We cannot check the multitude in its headlong pursuit of the prizes of life, and I have endeavored to show that it would not be best to do so were it possible, and that for the troubles of the kitchen no one in particular is responsible; but that we can do absolutely nothing to ameliorate the existing
