“I suppose if he had tried to be a boss he would have failed?”

“I think so.  For it requires as unusual a combination of qualities to be a successful boss, as to be a successful merchant or banker.  Yet one cannot tell.  I myself have never been able to say what elements make a boss, except that he must be in sympathy with the men whom he tries to guide, and that he must be meeting them.  Mr. Curtis had a broad, loving nature and sympathies, and if the people had discovered them, they would have liked him.  But the reserve which comes with culture makes one largely conceal one’s true feelings.  Super-refinement puts a man out of sympathy with much that is basic in humanity, and it needs a great love, or a great sacrifice of feeling, to condone it.  It is hard work for what Watts calls a tough, and such a man, to understand and admire one another.”

“But don’t you think,” said Mrs. D’Alloi, “that the people of our class are better and finer?”

“The expression ‘noblesse oblige’ shows that,” said madame.

“My experience has led me to think otherwise,” said Peter.  “Of course there is a difference of standards, of ideals, and of education, in people, and therefore there are differences in conduct.  But for their knowledge of what is right and wrong, I do not think the so-called better classes, which should, in truth, be called the prosperous classes, live up to their own standards of right any more than do the poor.”

“Oh, I say, draw it mild.  At least exclude the criminal classes,” cried Watts.  “They know better.”

“We all know better.  But we don’t live up to our knowledge.  I crossed on one of the big Atlantic liners lately, with five hundred other saloon passengers.  They were naturally people of intelligence, and presumably of easy circumstances.  Yet at least half of those people were plotting to rob our government of money by contriving plans to avoid paying duties truly owed.  To do this all of them had to break our laws, and in most cases had, in addition, to lie deliberately.  Many of them were planning to accomplish this theft by the bribery of the custom-house inspectors, thus not merely making thieves of themselves, but bribing other men to do wrong.  In this city I can show you blocks so densely inhabited that they are election districts in themselves.  Blocks in which twenty people live and sleep in a single room, year after year; where the birth of a little life into the world means that all must eat less and be less warm; where man and woman, old and young, must shiver in winter, and stifle in summer; where there is not room to bury the people who live in the block within the ground on which they dwell.  But I cannot find you, in the poorest and vilest parts of this city, any block where the percentage of liars and thieves and bribe-givers is as large as was that among the first-class passengers of that floating palace.  Each condition of society has its own mis-doings, and I believe varies little in the percentage of wrong-doers to the whole.”