An ugly and very un-American phrase has for some time recurred frequently in the Anglo-American papers, the phrase the "better classes."

What such papers as the Tribune, Times and Evening Journal understand by the "better classes", or the "respectable tax payers" is nothing else but largely the native capitalists ("Geldmenschen"O who have become rich less through productive labor than through "Schacher", and frequently through the most odoriferous speculations... In a court in London a witness once was asked what he meant by the term "gentleman." His answer was:" a man who maintains a carriage and horses." That about corresponds to the sense in which our English papers speak of the "better classes." Only that here something more than coach and horses is needed for respectability. One also needs for it a beautiful house in the Southern part of Michigan or Wabash Avenue, in Calumet, Prairie or Kankakee Avenue; and one needs for it fine clothes, diamonds, and an expensive seat in a fashionable church. He who has all that is a highly respectable "gentleman" even if he has made his money by renting houses for brothels. Because in this respect our" high-minded" Republicans hold it with the Emperor Vespasian who cold-bloodedly said about money tainted with blood and sweat: "Non olet"-Money carries no smell...

When a small clique of money bags who are just making ready to hoodwink the government and to sell to it a plot for $600,000.00 for which they earlier tried in vain to get $450,000.00- when such a clique decides to forbid to thousands of poor plot-owners to build such houses as they could pay- that is to say to steal from them half of what they have- then papers like the Tribune, and Times assure us that the "better classes" i. e. the people, are agreed, and that all those who object are wretches, brawlers, bums, demagogues and the rabble who must be put down by force of arms or through the law courts. As, in order to equal fully their European prototypes they seek help from the clergy to browbeat the "rabble" that dares to resist the "better classes."

The use of the word "better classes", in the sense in which it is being used by our American newspapers, is a far more serious insult against the American Republic than the display in a procession of a black-red-golden or a black-red-white (sic!) flag can possibly be. Because this flag indicates only a community of race or language- that nefarious word on the other hand announces the existence of Junkerish appetites of a type much more repulsive than those of the Prussian Junkers because they spring not from an imagined superiority of birth, but from basest money pride.