forms, which is essential to the continued health of the latter; while
the democracy, on the other hand, will gradually learn that it is just
as honorable and desirable to be a good shoemaker, for example, as a
good millionaire; that human life, in short, is a complex of countless
different uses, each one of which is as important on its own plane as
any of the others. But the intermediate period is undeniably irksome.

So my father noticed, not without a certain satisfaction, that even
beggars, in England, are not looked down upon, and that their rights,
such as they are, are recognized. In the steamboat waiting-room at
Rock Ferry, and in the boats themselves, he saw tramps and mendicants
take the best place at the fire or on the companion-way without rebuke
and without consciousness of presumption, and he saw the landlord of a
hotel, with a fortune of six hundred thousand pounds, wait at table as
deferentially as any footman in his employ. He was struck by the
contentment with which, in winter, women went barefoot in the streets,
and by the unpretentious composure with which the common herd, on
holidays, disported themselves in public, not seeking to disguise
their native vulgarity and shabbiness. At the same time, he could not
help a misgiving that the portentous inequality between rich and poor
must finally breed disaster; the secluded luxury of the rich was too
strongly contrasted with the desperate needs of the poor. This
contrast was very marked in England fifty years ago, and was
comparatively unknown in our own country--though to-day we can hardly
lay to our souls the nattering unction of such a difference. The rage
for wealth has done for us in a generation what caste did for England
in a thousand years.

My father, when opportunity offered, was always finding himself among
the poor and their dwellings; he had to be dragged to the rich, though