….All the professions in America would be materially improved in dignity and usefulness if they became more snobbish–that is, if they were less accessible to novices from the sub-professional classes. There is no impediment in this grand and puissant Republic to the rise of any family from the lowest economic depths to the heights of learning, power and honor, and no reflective man would have it otherwise; but nothing, I submit, is accomplished by speeding the process unduly, or by attempting to short-circuit it. A family ought to seek economic security before it aspires higher; its first business should be to get the means to pay its way. This is surely not a difficult enterprise, for it is accomplished every day by thousands of persons of very modest capacities. We all hear so much about the millionaires that we overlook the much more numerous fellows, obscure Babbitts, most of them, who succeed less gaudily but, every bit as surely - the hundreds of thousands of Americans who accumulate enough to keep the wolf from the door and to give their children good starts in life. The children of the millionaires are often crushed beneath their money, and the children of the poor are crippled and ruined by the lack of it. But the children of the Babbitts have the world before them. They can do whatever they want to do–and that freedom is of immense value to them in whatever they undertake.
H.L. Mencken
On Getting a Living
Baltimore Evening Sun, May 12, 1924
