It is generally recognised in this country that an acquaintance more or less familiar with the Great, that is, with the very wealthy, and preferably with those who have been wealthy for at least one generation, is the proper entry into any form of public service.

I am in a position to advance for the benefit of younger men of my own social rank, certain views which I think will not be unprofitable to them in this matter.

I will suppose my reader to be still upon the right side of thirty; to be the son of some professional man; to have been kept, at the expense of some anxiety to his parents, for five years or so at a public school, and to have proceeded to the University upon a loan.

With such a start he cannot fail, if he is in[Pg 199] any way lively or amiable, to have made the acquaintance by the age of twenty-two of a whole group of men whose fathers may properly be called "The Great," and who themselves will inherit a similar distinction, unless they die prematurely of hard living or hereditary disease.

After such a beginning, common to many of my readers, the friendship and patronage of these people would seem to be secure; and yet we know from only too many fatal instances that it is nothing of the kind, and that of twenty young men who have scraped up acquaintance with their betters at Winchester or Magdalen (to take two names at random) not two are to be found at the age of forty still familiarly entering those London houses, which are rated at over £1000 a year.

The root cause of such failures is obvious enough.

The advantage of acquaintance with wealthy or important people would, so far as general opportunities go, be lost if one did not [Pg 200]advertise it; and here comes in a difficulty which has wrecked innumerable lives. For by a pretty paradox with which we are all of us only too well acquainted, the wealthy and important are particularly averse to the recitation of acquaintance with themselves.

Formerly—about seventy years ago—your man who would succeed recited upon the slightest grounds, in public and with emphasis, his friendship with the Great. It was one of Disraeli's methods of advancement. The Great discovered the crude method, denounced it, vilified it, and towards the year 1860 it had already become impossible. William tells me he remembers his dear father warning me of this.

Those who would advance in the next generation were compelled to abandon methods so simple and to take refuge in allusion. Thus a young fellow in the late sixties, the seventies, and the very early eighties was helped in his career by professing a profound dislike for such and such a notability and swearing that he[Pg 201] would not meet him. For to profess dislike was to profess familiarity with the world in which that notability moved.

Or, again, to analyse rather curiously, and, on the whole, unfavourably, the character of some exceedingly wealthy man, was a method that succeeded well enough in hands of average ability. While a third way was to use Christian names, and yet to use them with a tone of indifference, as though they belonged to acquaintances rather than friends.

But the Great are ever on the alert, and this habit of allusion was in its turn tracked down by their unfailing noses; so that in our own time it has been necessary to invent another. I do not promise it any long survival, I write only for the moment, and for the fashions of my time, but I think a young man is well advised in this second decade of the twentieth century to assume towards the Great an attitude of silent and sometimes weary familiarity, and very often to pretend to know them less well than he does.

[Pg 202]

Thus three men will be in a smoking room together. The one, let us say, will be the Master of the King's Billiard Room, an aged Jew who has lent money to some Cabinet Minister; the second a local squire, well-to-do and about fifty years of age; the third is my young reader, whose father, let us say, was a successful dentist. The Master of the King's Billiard Room will say that he likes "Puffy." The squire will say he doesn't like him m............