presumed to have acquired incidentally to their material prosperity the
arts of playing billiards, making love, shooting game on the wing,
entertaining a house party or riding to hounds. Occasionally one of them
becomes by special favor of the sovereign a baronet; but, as a rule his
so-called social position is little affected by his business success,
and there is no reason why it should be. He may make a fortune out of a
new process, but he invites the same people to dinner, frequents the
same club and enjoys himself in just about the same way as he did
before. His newly acquired wealth is not regarded as in itself likely to
make him a more congenial dinner-table companion or any more delightful
at five-o'clock tea.

The aristocracy of England and the Continent is not an aristocracy of
achievement but of the polite art of killing time pleasantly. As such it
has a reason for existence. Yet it can at least be said for it that its
founders, however their descendants may have deteriorated, gained their
original titles and positions by virtue of their services to their king
and country.

However, with a strange perversity--due perhaps to our having the
Declaration of Independence crammed down our throats as children--we in
America seem obsessed with an ambition to create a social aristocracy,
loudly proclaimed as founded on achievement, which, in point of fact, is
based on nothing but the possession of money. The achievement that most
certainly lands one among the crowned heads of the American nobility is
admittedly the achievement of having acquired in some way or other about
five million dollars; and it is immaterial whether its possessor got it
by hard work, inheritance, marriage or the invention of a porous
plaster.