“The prices brought to-day by old Madeiras and Sherries do not represent their real values.  One has but to look at the compound interest of savings banks to realize that these wines should be selling at four times the price they are; but unfortunately, since the advent of Scotch whisky in the American market, the American palate seems to have deteriorated, and if the wines were listed at the price they ought to bring, we could not sell them.  As it is, the demand for the very rare old wines is irregular and infrequent.  We keep them principally to preserve our reputation; not for the money there is in it.”

CHAPTER XXIX

HISTORY AND ARISTOCRACY

    The cool shade of aristocracy....

    —­SIR W.F.P.  NAPIER.

Just now, when we are being unpleasantly awakened to the fact that our vaunted American melting-pot has not been doing its work; when some of us are perhaps wondering whether the quality of metal produced by the crucible will ever be of the best; it is comforting to reflect that a city whose history, traditions and great names are so completely involved with Americanism in its highest forms, a city we think of as ultra-American, is peculiarly a melting-pot product.

The original Charleston colonists were English and Irish, sent out under Colonel Sayle, in 1669, by the Lords Proprietors, to whom Charles II had granted a tract of land in the New World, embracing the present States of Georgia and North and South Carolina.  These colonists touched at Port Royal—­where the Marine Barracks now are (and ought not to be)—­but settled on the west side of the Ashley River, across from where Charleston stands.  It was not until 1680 that they transferred their settlement to the present site of the city, naming the place Charles Town in honor of the King.  In 1671 the colony contained 263 men able to bear arms, 69 women and 59 children.  In 1674, when New York was taken by the English from the Dutch, a number of the latter moved down to the Carolina colony.  French Protestants had, at that time, already begun to arrive, and more came after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685.  In 1680 Germans came.  By 1684 there were four Huguenot settlements in Carolina.  In 1696 a Quaker was governor for a short time, and in the same year a body of New Englanders arrived from Dorchester, Massachusetts, establishing a town which they called Dorchester, near the present town of Summerville, a few miles from Charleston.  At that time a number of Scottish immigrants had already arrived, though more came in 1715 and 1745, after the defeat of the Highlanders.  From 1730 to 1750 new colonists came from Switzerland, Holland and Germany.  As early as 1740 there were several Jewish families in Charleston, and some of the oldest and most respected Jewish families in the United States still reside there.  Also, when the English drove the Acadians