in which the power resides in wealth, in which a man might have
whatever he could buy, in which the rights, interests, and feelings of
those who could not pay would be overridden.

There is a plain tendency of all civilized governments toward
plutocracy. The power of wealth in the English House of Commons has
steadily increased for fifty years. The history of the present French
Republic has shown an extraordinary development of plutocratic spirit
and measures. In the United States many plutocratic doctrines have a
currency which is not granted them anywhere else; that is, a man's
right to have almost anything which he can pay for is more popularly
recognized here than elsewhere. So far the most successful limitation
on plutocracy has come from aristocracy, for the prestige of rank is
still great wherever it exists. The social sanctions of aristocracy
tell with great force on the plutocrats, more especially on their wives
and daughters. It has already resulted that a class of wealthy men is
growing up in regard to whom the old sarcasms of the novels and the
stage about _parvenus_ are entirely thrown away. They are men who have
no superiors, by whatever standard one chooses to measure them. Such an
interplay of social forces would, indeed, be a great and happy solution
of a new social problem, if the aristocratic forces were strong enough
for the magnitude of the task. If the feudal aristocracy, or its modern
representative--which is, in reality, not at all feudal--could carry
down into the new era and transmit to the new masters of society the
grace, elegance, breeding, and culture of the past, society would
certainly gain by that course of things, as compared with any such
rupture between past and present as occurred in the French Revolution.
The dogmatic radicals who assail "on principle" the inherited social
notions and distinctions are not serving civilization. Society can do
without patricians, but it cannot do without patrician virtues.