Merely to conceive of its possibility is something that
passes a joke; it is a kind of offence."
Again we were silent.
"I don't know," the banker continued, "how the notion of our social
equality originated, but I think it has been fostered mainly by the
expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality.
As a matter of fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most
primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West and among the
gold-hunters of California. It was not dreamed of in our colonial society,
either in Virginia or Pennsylvania or New York or Massachusetts; and the
fathers of the republic, who were mostly slave-holders, were practically
as stiff-necked aristocrats as any people of their day. We have not a
political aristocracy, that is all; but there is as absolute a division
between the orders of men and as little love, in this country as in any
country on the globe. The severance of the man who works for his living
with his hands from the man who does not work for his living with his
hands is so complete, and apparently so final, that nobody even imagines
anything else, not even in fiction.
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