"I'm sure I can't say," returned the banker. "A man does not care much to
get into society until he has something to eat, and how to get that is
always the first question with the working-man."

"But you wouldn't like it yourself?"

"No, certainly, I shouldn't like it myself. I shouldn't complain of not
being asked to people's houses, and the working-men don't; you can't do
that; but I should feel it an incalculable loss. We may laugh at the
emptiness of society, or pretend to be sick of it, but there is no doubt
that society is the flower of civilization, and to be shut out from it is
to be denied the best privilege of a civilized man. There are society
women--we have all met them--whose graciousness and refinement of presence
are something of incomparable value; it is more than a liberal education
to have been admitted to it, but it is as inaccessible to the working-man
as--what shall I say? The thing is too grotesquely impossible for any sort
of comparison. Merely to conceive of its possibility is something that
passes a joke; it is a kind of offence."

Again we were silent.

"I don't know," the banker continued, "how the notion of our social
equality originated, but I think it has been fostered mainly by the
expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality.
As a matter of fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most
primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West and among the
gold-hunters of California. It was not dreamed of in our colonial society,
either in Virginia or Pennsylvania or New York or Massachusetts; and the
fathers of the republic, who were mostly slave-holders, were practically