AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
October, 1909 
Monthly Comment 
The Aristocracy of the Soil 
: s7) ELL-INTENDED persons, accustomed to 
the reposefulness of the average city flat 
or even the proud occupants of a single 
house of a row, who move out into the sub- 
urbs or the country are bound, sooner or 
later, to discover wholly new types of 
human nature. These types may rapidly 
classify themselves into two general sorts, entertaining and 
solemn. Both will be strange enough, but the solemnest of 
all are the aristocrats of the soil, the choice persons who 
were born and bred up on rich mother earth, and whose 
ancestors, for many generations, have been similarly favored. 
THE aristocracy of the soil is one of the most persistent 
products of the countryside. It is not based’on wealth, either 
inherited or acquired. It is not based on personal achieve- 
ment or personal distinction. It is not based on the excel- 
lency of one’s own deeds, nor of those of one’s ancestors. It 
is not based on acreage nor estimated by tons of hay. It has 
nothing to do with personal culture and may be absolutely 
divorced from good manners. It rests on nothing at all but 
continuous, uninterrupted adherence to one spot, to a par- 
ticular piece of soil, to which the aristocrat is as firmly rooted 
as the old oak in the forest or the ancient hemlock that has, 
apparently, always been exactly where it is found. 
OBVIOUSLY it would seem that an aristocracy that is based 
on immovableness should itself be immovable and sum up, 
personify, express and absorb every quality of immovable- 
ness that so fixed a body might be expected to acquire and 
take to itself. For being itself the most splendid example 
and illustration of inertia now visible anywhere to the naked 
eye, how could it continue to be an aristocracy if it or any of 
its members were removed from the particular place in which 
their aristocracy had its origin? Clearly this is impossible; 
and so, although the aristocrat of the soil may lose his acres 
or sell them, he may be depended upon to retain just enough 
ground to enable him to flaunt his magnificent pretensions 
in the faces of the newcomer who has been bold enough or 
rich enough to intrude into a region where, before him, all 
were aristocrats, and of the soil, soily. 
THE poor newcomer! He looks over the rural fields and 
woods and sees the same grass growing on the land as he has 
seen everywhere. ‘The same kind of trees are in the woods 
and forests, the same sort of water in the streams and ponds, 
the same shrubs and flowers in the gardens as he has known 
and seen constantly. ‘They flourish, too, as he has seen them 
flourish elsewhere, and Nature seems serene and smiling every- 
where. Why should not he flourish here, if he could but 
purchase a plot or farm suitable to his needs and his means? 
Why not, indeed? Yet he forgets, as most of us are apt to 
do, the hidden danger in the water, the venomous snakes in 
the stones of the hillside, the noxious weeds that hide their 
poison in the flowers of the fields and forests. Of the aris- 
tocracy of the soil he knows nothing at all. He has not 
heard of the sacred caste of the countryside, that practises 
a self-cult more rigid in its applications and more difficult to 
understand than any high-caste Hindoo ever dreamed or 
thought of. Born and bred in the sound American doctrine 
that all men are equal, it has never occurred to him that 
these simple folk, whom he has looked upon as typically 
American, are,as a matter of fact, the visible exponents of the 
most highly developed aristocracy on the American continent. 
HENCE the line of cleavage that cuts the newcomer apart 
from the old-timer. The new ones may be as aristocratic as 
you please and as proud as Lucifer before his fall, but so 
long as the aristocrats of the soil have any land, or remain, 
like oysters, fixed on the spot of their birth, there will be 
a separation between the two groups as mighty as any ravine 
in myth and legend. And it is a bridgeless depth which 
neither party can cross. For if, by any chance, the new 
people should absorb the old there will be no aristocracy at 
all that can even be so much as talked of; while it is quite 
unthinkable that the old aristocrats should make any ad- 
vances to the new residents. It is unthinkable because no in- 
stances of the sort are known or recognized in the sacred 
traditions of the aristocracy of the soil. 
AND so the green fields and gentle woods of our country- 
side harbor and support a mighty social conflict, not bloody, 
it is true, and perhaps quite supportable on both sides, but 
still strangely un-American, and, one should imagine, foreign 
to our soil. But facts will out, and one has but to settle 
among a lot of old-timers to ascertain how true this situation 
is and how singular aic its manifestations. The aristocrats 
of the soil are thoroughly alive to their own merits. If 
they do not now own as much land as they or their ancestors 
once did, they make up, in a prodigious social and political 
activity, any shortcomings i in acreage. Only real aristocrats 
are admitted to the lofty public offices; boards of education 
are dominated by the same proud class; public activity thrusts 
them into the boards of health; even the courts, when pos. 
sible, are presided over and officered by fine old products of 
the fields and farms. So completely do they dominate their 
home districts that they regard the air and the roads as their 
very own, and when little aristocratlets come into the world 
the glad tidings are conveyed to the entire populace by heralds 
scurrying along the public highways, awakening a sleeping 
population with glad tidings that “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a 
girl!” Quite royal, indeed, are the ways of these old folk, 
who need but the salvos of cannon to complete their resem- 
blance to actual royalty when a new mayor or descendant of 
some former mayor comes onto earth. ‘Thus the circle of 
soil-aristocracy is rounded out, completed and perpetuated. 
¢ is a merry jest, and the merrier because the beneficiaries 
of the system take it so ponderously and so much to heart. 
Tue history of humanity is a history of change and 
progress, and one need not be a trained scientific observer to 
foresee that the end of the aristocracy of the soil is at hand. 
For many, many years there has been no prouder monarch of 
the forest than the chestnut tree, whose lofty height and rich 
fruit have excited the admiration of young and old alike. But 
of late an insidious disease has sapped the strength of these 
splendid trees and is rapidly killing them off. No one can 
look joyfully to the sudden end of the aristocracy of the soil, 
for it would mean the extinction of one of the weirdest types 
of Americans; but there is, perhaps, a simile between the 
fate of the chestnuts and the fate that must, sooner or later, 
befall the aristocrats of the countryside. The newcomers 
are yearly making greater and greater inroads upon the 
domain these good folk once dominated. It is only a ques- 
tion of time when they will be bought out and voted out. 
They will not like it, but the end is certain. Once deprived | 
of public office their doom is sealed, for they will then become 
unimportant and inconsequential. The newcomer must wait, 
but he is bound to come into his own in due course. 
