The main rock of offence in American society is, perhaps, its tendency to attach undue importance to materialistic effects.  Plain living with high thinking is not so much of an American formula as one would wish.  In the smart set of New York, and in other places mutatis mutandis, this shows itself in an appallingly vulgar and ostentatious display of mere purchase power.  We are expected to find something grand in the fact that an entertainment costs so much; there is little recognition of the truth that a man who spends $100 where $10 would meet all the demands of good taste is not only a bad economist, but essentially bourgeois and torne in soul.  Even roses are vulgarised, if that be possible, by production in the almost obtrusively handsome variety known as the “American Beauty,” and by being heaped up like hay-stacks in the reception rooms.  At a recent fashionable marriage in New York no fewer than 20,000 sprays of lily of the valley are reported to have been used.  A short time ago a wedding party travelled from Chicago to Burlington (Iowa) on a specially constructed train which cost L100,000 to build; the fortunes of the heads of the few families represented aggregated L100,000,000.  The private drawing-room cars of millionaires are too handsome; they do not indicate so much a necessity of taste as a craving to spend.  Many of the best hotels are characterised by a tasteless magnificence which annoys rather than attracts the artistic sense.  At one hotel I stayed at in a fashionable watering-place the cheapest bedroom cost L1 a night; but I did not find that its costly tapestry hangings, huge Japanese vases, and elaborately carved furniture helped me to woo sweet slumber any more successfully than the simple equipments of an English village inn.  Indeed, they rather suggested insomnia, just as the ominous name of “Macbeth,” affixed to one of the bedrooms in the Shakespeare Hotel at Stratford-on-Avon, immediately suggested the line “Macbeth doth murder sleep.”

This materialistic tendency, however, which its defenders call a higher standard of comfort, is not confined to the circles of the millionaires; it crops out more or less at all the different levels.  Americans seem a little more dependent on bodily comforts than Englishmen, a little more apt to coddle themselves, a little less hardy.  They are more susceptible to variations of temperature, and hence the prevalent over-heating of their houses, hotels, and railway-cars.  A very slight shower will send an American into his overshoes.[7] There is more of a self-conscious effort in the encouragement of manly sports.  Americans seldom walk when they can ride.  The girls are apt to be annoyed if a pleasure-party be not carried out so as to provide in the fullest way for their personal comfort.