don't honor any kind of work any more than any other people. If a fellow
gets up, the papers make a great ado over his having been a woodchopper or
a bobbin-boy, or something of that kind, but I doubt if the fellow himself
likes it; he doesn't if he's got any sense. The rest of us feel that it's
_infra dig._, and hope nobody will find out that we ever worked with our
hands for a living. I'll go further," said the banker, with the effect of
whistling prudence down the wind, "and I will challenge any of you to
gainsay me from his own experience or observation. How does esteem usually
express itself? When we wish, to honor a man, what do we do?"

"Ask him to dinner," said the lawyer.

"Exactly. We offer him some sort of social recognition. Well, as soon as a
fellow gets up, if he gets up high enough, we offer him some sort of
social recognition; in fact, all sorts; but upon condition that he has
left off working with his hands for a living. We forgive all you please to
his past on account of the present. But there isn't a working-man, I
venture to say, in any city or town, or even large village, in the whole
length and breadth of the United States who has any social recognition, if
he is still working at his trade. I don't mean, merely, that he is
excluded from rich and fashionable society, but from the society of the
average educated and cultivated people. I'm not saying he is fit for it;
but I don't care how intelligent and agreeable he might be--and some of
them are astonishingly intelligent, and so agreeable in their tone of mind
and their original way of looking at things that I like nothing better
than to talk with them--all of our invisible fences are up against him."

The minister said: "I wonder if that sort of exclusiveness is quite
natural? Children seem to feel no sort of social difference among
themselves."