Judge Joseph Hoxie, called on Mr. Astor to subscribe to the stock, telling him that it would add to the value of his real estate.  “What do I care for that?” said the shrewd old German, “I never sells, I only buys.”  “Well,” said Judge Hoxie, “your son, William, has subscribed for several shares.”  “He can do that,” was the chuckling reply, “he has got a rich father.”  It is a fair problem how many such possessors of real estate it would take to build up the prosperity of a great city.

There is one temptation to which great wealth has sometimes subjected its possessors, which demands from me a word of patriotic protest.  It is the temptation to use it for political advancement.  No fact is more patent than the painful one that some ambitious men have secured public offices, and even bought their way into legislative bodies, by the abundancies of their purses united to skill in manipulating partisan machines.  This is a most serious menace to honest popular government.  It is one of the very worst forms of a plutocracy.  I often think that if Webster and Clay and Calhoun and John Quincy Adams and Sumner and some other giants of a former era could enter the Congressional halls of our day, they might paraphrase the words of Holy Writ and exclaim:  “Take the money-changers hence, and make not the temple of a nation’s legislation a house of merchandise.”

Foreign travel is no longer the novelty that it was once, and many wealthy folk spend much of their time abroad since the Atlantic Ocean has been reduced to a ferry.  This growth of European travel has brought its increment of information and culture; but, with new ideas from abroad, have come also some new notions and usages that were better left behind.  A prohibitory tariff in that direction would “protect” some of the unostentatiousness of social life that befits a republican people.  No young man or woman, who desires to attain proficience in any department of scholarship, classical or scientific, need to betake themselves to the universities of Europe.  Those universities have come to us in the shape of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell and our other most richly endowed institutions of learning for both sexes.

Quite too much of the social life of our country is more artificial than formerly, and one result is the growing passion for publicity.  Plenty of ambitious people “make their beds in the face of the sun.”  Many things are now chronicled in the press that were formerly kept behind the closed doors of the home.  The details of a dinner or a social company at the fireside become the topics for the gossip of strangers.  I sometimes think that the young people of the present day lose much of the romance that used to belong to the halcyon period of courtship.  In the somewhat primitive days of my youth, young lovers kept their own secrets, and were startled if their heart affairs were on other people’s tongues; but now-a-days marriage engagements are matters of public announcement—­not infrequently in the columns of a newspaper!  It seems to be forgotten that an engagement to marry may not always end in a marriage.  The usage of crowned heads abroad is no warrant for the new fashion, for royalty has no privacies, and queens and empresses choose their own husbands—­a prerogative that the stoutest champion of woman’s rights has not yet had the hardihood to advocate.