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She and her husband had been intimate friends of Hermon's father, who had served under the old general as hipparch, and through him had become well acquainted with his wealthy brother Archias and his relatives.
The furniture in the rooms, the books in the cases, the gilded clocks and grand mirrors about the house, all the implements of wealthy care about the gardens, the corn in the granaries and the ricks in the hay-yard, the horses in the stable, and the cows lowing in the fields they were all hers. She had performed her part of the bargain, and now the price was paid to her into her hands.
Several planters thereabouts had attempted it on a commercial scale, in former years, with greater or less success; but like most Southern industries, it had felt the blight of war and had fallen into desuetude. I went several times to look at a place that I thought might suit me. It was a plantation of considerable extent, that had formerly belonged to a wealthy man by the name of McAdoo.
But I also know many very wealthy old frontiersmen whose half-breed children are now being educated, generally at convent schools, while in the Northwestern cities I could point out some very charming men and women, in the best society, with a strain of Indian blood in their veins.
We leave all political power in the hands of the wealthy landholders, where it was before. We leave the poorer whites unemancipated, for we leave labor still at the mercy of capital, and with its old stigma of degradation.
I know families of five, six, and seven persons, who formerly were wealthy, and now have for a scanty subsistence an income of twelve or eighteen hundred livres per year, with which they are obliged to live as they can, being deprived of all the resource that elsewhere labour offers to the industrious, and all the succours compassion bestows on the necessitous.
There were more socials and concerts and literary evenings than devotional meetings. Most of the members belonged to old, wealthy families, and had always been accustomed to leisure and pocket-money. Alec soon realized the bounds that were set to his social privileges.
Nor did he find himself disappointed in that expectation, sanguine as it was. He soon found means to be introduced to the house of a wealthy bourgeois, where every individual was charmed with his easy air and extraordinary qualifications.
It will be obvious that the interest of this speculation, at any rate, centres upon this great intermediate mass of people who are neither passively wealthy, the sleeping partners of change, nor helplessly thrust out of the process.
"Perhaps," he says, "of all the branches of a wealthy nobleman's expenditure, that which will be condemned with most unanimity, and defended with most difficulty, is the number of ostentatious and unnecessary servants it is customary to maintain. For this practice I have not a word to say. It is directly and indirectly bad. It is bad for all parties.
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