Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/238

ants are parasites on society, which adores literary mediocrity.

Common-sense can never grant that only a few know what society means, though willing to confess that a few alone understand the laws of conventionality. Republican common-sense cares to adapt the means to the end, and if it can have a jolly time in its own parlors, — if it can think and read and write papers and dance and sing, it is not going to be told that it is not — society. Each one is worth the whole of himself; it was thus with his ancestors, and will be so with his descendants; every true democrat will create a little world around himself by virtue of his own being, whilst the old aristocrat will appeal to inheritance and land. When our presidents are often the unknown third man, brought from comparative obscurity to retire again into mellowed light; when presidents' wives cannot banish wine from the tables nor frizzles from the brows of the women, — are