When at college I had rooms in a neat cottage owned by an American family.The father was a butcher, as were his sons.The only daughter was exceedingly pretty.The hard-worked mother conceived high hopes for this favorite child.She was sent to a boarding-school, from which she returned entirely unsettled for life, having learned little except to be ashamed of her parents and to play on the piano.One of these instruments of torture was bought, and a room fitted up as a parlor for the daughter's use.As the family were fairly well-to-do, she was allowed to dress out of all keeping with her parents' position, and, egged on by her mother, tried her best to marry a rich "student." Failing in this, she became discontented, unhappy, and finally there was a scandal, this poor victim of a false ambition going to swell the vast tide of a city's vice.With a sensible education, based on the idea that her father's trade was honorable and that her mission in life was to aid her mother in the daily work until she might marry and go to her husband, prepared by experience to cook his dinner and keep his house clean, and finally bring up her children to be honest men and women, this girl would have found a happy future waiting for her, and have been of some good in her humble way.
It is useless to multiply illustrations.One has but to look about him in this unsettled country of ours.The other day in front of my door the perennial ditch was being dug for some gas-pipe or other.Two of the gentlemen who had consented to do this labor wore frock-coats and top hats - or what had once been those articles of attire - instead of comfortable and appropriate overalls.Why? Because, like the stable-boy, to have worn any distinctive dress would have been in their minds to stamp themselves as belonging to an inferior class, and so interfered with their chances of representing this country later at the Court of St.James, or presiding over the Senate, - positions (to judge by their criticism of the present incumbents) they feel no doubt as to their ability to fill.
The same spirit pervades every trade.The youth who shaves me is not a barber; he has only accepted this position until he has time to do something better.The waiter who brings me my chop at a down-town restaurant would resign his place if he were requested to shave his flowing mustache, and is secretly studying law.I lose all patience with my countrymen as I think over it! Surely we are not such a race of snobs as not to recognize that a good barber is more to be respected than a poor lawyer; that, as a French saying goes, IL N'Y A PAS DE SOT METIER.It is only the fool who is ashamed of his trade.
But enough of preaching.I had intended - when I took up my pen to-day - to write on quite another form of this modern folly, this eternal struggle upward into circles for which the struggler is fitted neither by his birth nor his education; the above was to have been but a preface to the matter I had in mind, viz., "social climbers," those scourges of modern society, the people whom no rebuffs will discourage and no cold shoulder chill, whose efforts have done so much to make our countrymen a byword abroad.
As many philosophers teach that trouble only is positive, happiness being merely relative; that in any case trouble is pretty equally distributed among the different conditions of mankind; that, excepting the destitute and physically afflicted, all God's creatures have a share of joy in their lives, would it not be more logical, as well as more conducive to the general good, if a little more were done to make the young contented with their lot in life, instead of constantly suggesting to a race already prone to be unsettled, that nothing short of the top is worthy of an American citizen?
