Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/239

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CASTE IN AMERICAN SOCIETY.
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Americans to talk of the power of society? The power of tact, of sympathy, of native force, of real intelligence, not of idle appreciation, is the only power that American individualism will ever consent to honor. Our high schools and the minimum examinations in colleges will make it more and more possible for cultured circles to exist on small incomes; a love for scholarship, enjoyment of great works, and perception of the opportunities that the simplest forms of nature offer for original research, even to the child botanist, will make literary life less a sham, power and money less a god, until good manners and simplicity of thought and life are as universal possessions in our republic as they are in our theories. Caste in its unkindest or most exclusive forms will gradually disappear in the reality of our living, though it may always remain as an undefined aroma from unknown distances.

But society, — where is it? Everywhere.

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