Publisher's Synopsis
I know Society. I was born in it, and have lived in it all my life, both here and in the capitals of Europe. I believe that I understand as well as any man what are the true traditions and the true conditions of American Society; and for comparison, I also know and understand the conditions and traditions of Society in other lands. My honest opinion is that American Society, for all its faults, and it has many, and for all the hideous abnormalities that in these later years have been grafted upon it, stands to-day a cleaner, saner and more normal Society than that of any other highly civilized nation in the world.In this nation, the very soul of which is the spirit of democracy, we have evolved a very elaborate and extremely complex society. Like all such organizations, in all the lands under the sun, it is an oligarchy; one might almost say a tyranny. Its rulers for the most part inherit their power and rule by hereditary right. The foundations of this society and the foundations of the power of its rulers were laid in generations now dead and gone. Time has crystallized its rules into laws and formulated its conventions into tenets.
