that had led him from a printer’s case to a premier position in American letters, or, more concretely, he received a domestic dispensation to cab it home in good conscience, though many were waiting in chilly discomfort for their gift of yesterday’s bread.  The why so and why not of this incident are my real subject.  For Mr. Howells is merely a particularly conspicuous instance of the kind of prosperity I have in mind.  We are all too much dazzled by the rare great fortunes.  The newly rich have spectacular ways with them.  By dint of frequently passing us in notorious circumstances, they give the impression of a throng.  They are much in the papers, their steam yachts loom large on the waters, they divorce quickly and often, they buy the most egregious, old masters.  By such more or less innocent ostentations, a handful stretches into a procession, much as a dozen sprightly supernumeraries will keep up an endless defile of Macduff’s army on the tragic stage.  Let us admit that some of the great wealth is more or less foolishly and harmfully spent; my subject is not bank accounts, but people; and very wealthy people constitute an almost negligible minority of the race.  Their influence too is much less potent than is supposed.  A slightly vulgarizing tendency proceeds from them, but in waves of decreasing intensity.  Their vogue is chiefly a succes de scandale.  Sensible people will gape at the spectacle without admiration, and even the reader of the society column in the sensational newspapers keeps more critical detachment than he is usually credited with.  In any case neither the boisterous nor the shrinking multimillionaire has any representative standing.  He is not what a poor person means by a rich person.  Ask your laundress who is rich in your neighborhood, and she will name all who live gently and do not have to worry about next month’s bills.  True pragmatist, she sees that to be exempt from any threat of poverty is to all intents and purposes to be rich.  Her classification ignores certain niceties, but corresponds roughly to the fact, and has the merit of corresponding to government decree.  Rich people, since the income tax, are officially those who pay the tax but not the surtax.  Families with an income not less than four thousand dollars nor more than twenty thousand comprise the harmless, middling rich.  Let us once for all admit that in the surtaxed classes there are many cases of quite harmless wealth, while in the lower level of the rich, harmful wealth will sometimes be found.  Such exceptions do not invalidate the general rule that all but a negligible fraction of the rich are included in the first class of income taxpayers—­on from four to twenty thousand, that most of the property here held is blamelessly held in good hands—­wealth that in no fair estimate can be regarded as harmful.  In terms of British currency, our category of the middling rich would include the poorer individuals of the upper classes, the richer persons of the lower middle class,