As A Chinaman Saw Us | Page 8

enabled them to "bore" into the exclusive circle. I
found that even among these people, the crême de la crême in the eyes
of the people, there were inner circles, and these were not on intimate
terms with the others. Here I met a member of the Washington and Lee
family, a descendant of Bishop Provoost, the first Episcopal bishop of
New York, and friend of Washington and Hamilton. This latter family
is notable for an ancestry running back to the massacre of St.
Bartholomew and even beyond. I astonished its charming descendant,
who very delicately informed me that she knew her ancestry as far back
as 1200 A. D., when I told her that I had my "family tree," as they call
it, without a break for thirty-two hundred years. I am confident she did
not believe me, but her "Indeed!" was delightful. In fact, I assure you I
have lost my heart to these American women. I met representatives of
the Adams, Dana, Madison, Lee, and other families identified with
American history in a most honorable way.
The continuity of the Four Hundred idea as a logical system was
broken by the quality of some of its members. Compared to the society
I have previously mentioned it was as chaff. There was a total lack of
intellectuality. Degeneracy marked some of their acts; divorce
blackened their records, and shameless affairs marked them. In this
"set," and particularly its imitators throughout the United States, the
divorce rate is appalling. Men leave their wives and obtain a divorce for
no other reason than that a woman falls in love with another woman's
husband. On a yacht we will say there is some scandal. A divorce
ensues, and afterward the parties are remarried. Or we will say a wife
succumbs to the blandishments of another man. The conjugal
arrangements are rearranged, so that, as a very merry New York club
man told me, "It is difficult to tell where you are at." In a word, the
morale of the men of this set is low, their standard high, but not always

lived up to. I believe that I am not doing the American of the middle
class wrong and the ultra-fashionable class an injustice in saying that it
is as a class immoral.
Americans make great parade of their churches. Spires rise like the
pikes of an army in every town, yet the morality of the men is low.
There are in this land 600,000 prostitutes--ruined women. But this is
not due entirely to the Four Hundred, whose irregularities appear to be
confined to inroads upon their own set. Nearly all these men are club
men; two-thirds are in business as brokers, bankers, or professional
men; and there is a large percentage of men of leisure and vast wealth.
They affect English methods, and are, as a rule, not highly intelligent,
but blasé, often effeminate, an interesting spectacle to the student,
showing that the downfall of the American Republic would come
sooner than that of Rome if the "fast set" were a dominating force,
which it is not.
In the great middle class of the American men I find much to admire;
half educated, despite their boasted school system, they put up, to quote
one of them, "a splendid bluff" of respectability and morality, yet their
statistics give the lie to it. Their divorces are phenomenal, and they are
obtained on the slightest cause. If a man or woman becomes weary of
the other they are divorced on the ground of incompatibility of temper.
A lady, a descendant of one of the oldest families, desired to marry her
friend's husband. He charged his wife with various vague acts, one of
which, according to the press, was that she did not wear "corsets"--a
sort of steel frame which the American women wear to compress the
waist. This was not accepted by the learned judge, and the wife then
left her husband and went away on a six or eight months' visit. This
enabled the husband to put in a claim of desertion, and the decree of
divorce was granted. A quicker method is to pretend to throw the
breakfast dishes at your wife, who makes a charge of "extreme
incompatibility," and a divorce is at once obtained. Certain Territories
bank on their divorce laws, and the mismated have but to go there and
live a few months to obtain a separation on almost any claim. Many of
the most distinguished statesmen have been charged with certain moral

lapses in the heat of political fights, which, in almost every instance,
are ignored by the victims, their silence being significant to some,
illogical to others; yet the fact remains that the press goes to the
greatest extremes. No family secret is considered sacred to the
American