of the humanities.  In America—­at least, “Out West”—­everyone practically is his own guide, and the nouveau riche spends his money strictly in accordance with his own standard of taste.  The result is often as appalling in its hideousness as it is startling in its costliness.  On the other hand I am bound to state that I have known American men of great wealth whose simplicity of type could hardly be paralleled in England (except, perchance, within the Society of Friends).  They do not feel any social pressure to imitate the establishment of My Lord or His Grace; and spend their money for what really interests them without reference to the demands of society.

It is rather interesting to observe the different forms which vulgarity is apt to take in the two countries.  In England vulgarity is stolid; in America it is smart and aggressive.  We are apt, I think, to overestimate the amount in the latter country because it is so much more in voluble evidence.  An English vulgarian is often hushed into silence by the presence of his social superior; an American vulgarian either recognises none such or tries to prove himself as good as you by being unnecessarily grob.  This has, at any rate, a manlier air than the vulgar obsequiousness of England towards the superior on the one hand or its cynical insolence to the inferior on the other.  The feeling which made a French lady of fashion in the seventeenth century dress herself in the presence of a footman with as much unconcern as if he were a piece of furniture still finds its modified analogy in England, but scarcely in America.  Almost the only field in which the Americans struck me as showing anything like servility was in their treatment of such mighty potentates as railway conductors, hotel clerks, and policemen.  Whether, until a millenial golden mean is attained, this is better than our English bullying tone in the same sphere might be an interesting question for casuists.

Americans can rarely understand the amount of social recognition given by English duchesses to such American visitors as Col.  William Cody, generally known as “Buffalo Bill.”  They do not reflect that it is just because the social gap between the two is so irretrievably vast and so universally recognised that the duchesses can afford to amuse themselves cursorily with any eccentricity that offers itself.  As Pomona’s husband put it, people in England are like types with letters at one end and can easily be sorted out of a state of “pi,” while Americans are theoretically all alike, like carpet-tacks.  Thus Americans of the best class often shun the free mixing that takes place in England, because they know that the process of redistribution will be neither easy nor popular.  The intangible sieve thus placed between the best and the not-so-good is of a fine discrimination, beside which our conventional net-works seem coarse and ineffective.