Examples that come from high quarters are followed.  Those who possessed some small capital (and they were necessarily the greater number), affected the ideas and habits of the multi-millionaires, in order that they might be classed among them.  All passions which injured the increase or the preservation of wealth, were regarded as dishonourable; neither indolence, nor idleness, nor the taste for disinterested study, nor love of the arts, nor, above all, extravagance, was ever forgiven; pity was condemned as a dangerous weakness.  Whilst every inclination to licentiousness excited public reprobation, the violent and brutal satisfaction of an appetite was, on the contrary, excused; violence, in truth, was regarded as less injurious to morality, since it manifested a form of social energy.  The State was firmly based on two great public virtues:  respect for the rich and contempt for the poor.  Feeble spirits who were still moved by human suffering had no other resource than to take refuge in a hypocrisy which it was impossible to blame, since it contributed to the maintenance of order and the solidity of institutions.

Thus, among the rich, all were devoted to their social order, or seemed to be so; all gave good examples, if all did not follow them.  Some felt the gravity of their position cruelly; but they endured it either from pride or from duty.  Some attempted, in secret and by subterfuge, to escape from it for a moment.  One of these, Edward Martin, the President, of the Steel Trust, sometimes dressed himself as a poor man, went:  forth to beg his bread, and allowed himself to be jostled by the passers-by.  One day, as he asked alms on a bridge, he engaged in a quarrel with a real beggar, and filled with a fury of envy, he strangled him.

As they devoted their whole intelligence to business, they sought no intellectual pleasures.  The theatre, which had formerly been very flourishing among them, was now reduced to pantomimes and comic dances.  Even the pieces in which women acted were given up; the taste for pretty forms and brilliant toilettes had been lost; the somersaults of clowns and the music of negroes were preferred above them, and what roused enthusiasm was the sight of women upon the stage whose necks were bedizened with diamonds, or processions carrying golden bars in triumph.  Ladies of wealth were as much compelled as the men to lead a respectable life.  According to a tendency common to all civilizations, public feeling set them up as symbols; they were, by their austere magnificence, to represent both the splendour of wealth and its intangible.  The old habits of gallantry had been reformed, Tut fashionable lovers were now secretly replaced by muscular labourers or stray grooms.  Nevertheless, scandals were rare, a foreign journey concealed nearly all of them, and the Princesses of the Trusts remained objects of universal esteem.