But he will make a mistake if he attributes these things to the growth of an aristocratic sentiment.  They are a part of an evolution that is thoroughly democratic.  The distinctive thing in an aristocracy is not the fact that certain people enjoy privileges.  It lies in the fact that these privileged people form a class that is looked upon as superior.  An aristocratic class must not only take itself seriously; it must be taken seriously by others.

In America there are groups of persons more successful than the average.  They are objects of curiosity, and, if they are well-behaved, of respect.  Their comings and goings are chronicled in the newspapers, and their names are familiar.  But it does not occur to the average man that they are anything more than fortunate persons who emerged from the crowd, and who by and by may be lost in the crowd again.  What they have done, others may do when their time comes.  The inequalities are inequalities of circumstance and not of nature.

The commonplace American follows unworthy leaders and has admiration for cheap success.  But he cherishes no illusions in regard to the objects of his admiration.  They have done what he would like to do, and what he hopes to be able to do sometime.  He thinks of the successful men as being of the same kind with himself.  They are more fortunate, that is all.

IV

The same temperamental quality is seen in the American idealist.  His attitude toward his spiritual leaders is seldom that of meek discipleship.  It is rather that of frank, outspoken comradeship.  No mysterious barrier separates the great man from the common man.  One has more, the other has less, that is all.

The men who have cherished the finest ideals have insisted that these should be shared by the multitude.  In a newspaper of sixty years ago there is this contemporary character sketch:  “Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most erratic and capricious man in America.  He is emphatically a democrat of the world, and believes that what Plato thought, another man may think.  What Shakespeare sang, another man may know as well.  As for emperors, kings, queens, princes, or presidents, he looks upon them as children in masquerade.  He has no patience with the chicken-hearted who refer to mouldy records or old almanacs to ascertain if they may say that their souls are their own.  Mr. Emerson is a strange compound of contradictions.  Always right in practice, and sometimes in theory.  He is a sociable, accessible, republican sort of man, and a great admirer of nature.”

Could any better description be given of the kind of man whom Americans delight to honor?  This “sociable, accessible, republican sort of man” happened to be endowed with gifts denied in such full measure to his countrymen.  But they were gifts which they understood and appreciated.  He was one of them, and expressed and interpreted their habitual thought.  Luther used to declare that no one who had never had trials and temptations could understand the Holy Scriptures.  And one might say that no one who had never taken part in a town meeting, or listened to the talk of neighbors at the country store, or traveled in an “accommodation train” in the Middle West, can fully understand Emerson.