These are the places my friends are all looking for—­for themselves or their children.  The small stockholder would not vote the president of his company a salary of one hundred thousand dollars a year, or the vice-president fifty thousand dollars; but the rich man who controls the stock is willing to give his brother or his nephew a soft snap.  From what I know of corporate enterprise in these United States, God save the minority stockholder!  But we and our brothers and sons and nephews must live—­on Easy Street.  We must be able to give expensive dinners and go to the theater and opera, and take our families to Europe—­and we can’t do it without money.

We must be able to keep up our end without working too hard, to be safe and warm, well fed and smartly turned out, and able to call in a specialist and a couple of trained nurses if one of the children falls ill; we want thirty-five feet of southerly exposure instead of seventeen, menservants instead of maid-servants, and a new motor every two years.

We do not object to working—­that is to say, we pride ourselves on having a job.  We like to be moderately busy.  We would not have enough to amuse us all day if we did not go to the office in the morning; but what we do is not work!  It is occupation perhaps—­but there is no labor about it, either of mind or body.  It is a sinecure—­a “cinch.”  We could stay at home and most of us would not be missed.  It is not the seventy-five-hundred-dollar-a-year vice-president but the eight-hundred-and-fifty-dollar clerk for want of whom the machine would stop if he were sick.  Our labor is a kind of masculine light housework.

We probably have private incomes, thanks to our fathers or great uncles—­not large enough to enable us to cut much of a dash, to be sure, but sufficient to give us confidence—­and the proceeds of our daily toil, such as it is, go toward the purchase of luxuries merely.  Because we are in business we are able to give bigger and more elegant dinner parties, go to Palm Beach in February, and keep saddle-horses; but we should be perfectly secure without working at all.

Hence we have a sense of independence about it.  We feel as if it were rather a favor on our part to be willing to go into an office; and we expect to be paid vastly more proportionately than the fellow who needs the place in order to live:  so we cut him out of it at a salary three times what he would have been paid had he got the job, while he keeps on grinding at the books as a subordinate.  We come down late and go home early, drop in at the club and go out to dinner, take in the opera, wear furs, ride in automobiles, and generally boss the show—­for the sole reason that we belong to the crowd who have the money.  Very likely if we had not been born with it we should die from malnutrition, or go to Ward’s Island suffering from some variety of melancholia brought on by worry over our inability to make a living.