The Reign of Gilt

The eminent Bishop of the Episcopalian diocese of New York has spent practically his whole life among people of wealth and fashion and their associates. He has made some brief e...

You stand in front of a huge dam. Its wall rises bare and sheer. You say to yourself: “There can be little water behind it.” But even as you think this, the dam becomes a waterf...

Let us glance at our typical Mr. Multi-Millionaire’s town house. It is a palace of white marble, in Fifth avenue, near Fifty-ninth street--the view across the Park from the uppe...

The typical young men of the America of fashion and high finance, created by the multi-millionaire, fall into two classes--the born successes, sons or heirs of rich men; the can...

It is still an open and anxious question whether this fashionable society, the growth, as we have seen, of the last two or three decades, constitutes a genuine aristocracy. The...

She sat by the huge fire for ten minutes and then rang the bell. “Never mind about distributing that wood,” she said to the answering servant. “The weather seems to have moderat...

We find plutocracy’s follies in full swing not alone in the great cities, East and West, where the money-caste must have outward signs of superiority to bolster up its pretensio...

An attaché of one of the Continental Embassies to the King of England was dining at the Carlton with an American, an old friend of his. The room was filled with English and Amer...

It cannot, then, be denied that wealth, concentrated wealth--not so much the plutocrat himself as the vast masterful accumulation of which he is the appendage; one might with tr...

Ever since the first tall chimneys unfurled the sooty banners of the new, the industrial civilization, we have had the cry that the power machine is a monster whose reign means...

Education is the huge dynamo which supplies power to the American people. Not in history or in legend is there recorded such an outburst of international curiosity as that about...

Each year not far from fifty million dollars are spent in America in exploiting cures for digestion troubles; and no doubt we give the doctors and the druggists a thousand milli...

It is reasonable, and not unkind, to assume that the time will come when we shall no longer have John D. Rockefeller with us. He may not die; as a vindication and a reward he ma...

“Our ancestors who migrated hither were laborers,” wrote Jefferson. And again: “My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility is or t...

The European “hordes” continue to pour in upon us, and the agitation over, and against, the “foreign devil” increases. We shall soon be “welcoming to our shores” upwards of a mi...

The American woman is regarded both here and abroad as the strongest and subtlest enemy of the American Democracy. She is pictured in the imaginations of students of our life as...

It has often been said, and written, that we are about the most unhappy people on the face of the earth, that our unhappiness increases with our Democracy. That our unhappiness...

In Chicago, in Lincoln Park, there is a wonderful statue. A big, slouching form, loose yet powerful; ungraceful, yet splendid because it seems to be able to bear upon its Atlant...