I have just recevd yours of 20th. Yours of 16th came yesterday.

I am glad to hear that your mother is better.

I enclose cheque for $400. of which $250 for the schooling bill; the remainder on cranberry & miss. acct.

John asks leave, Mary tells me, to join a dinner of Amateur editors at the St James Hotel at a presumed cost of $4—(not including wines). This to my mind is quite on a par with the little children’s parties we heard of in the shoddy part of Fifth Ave last winter in which the girls wore chignon and diamonds and were served with champagne &c. Mary will refer him to you for decision, but I need not say how much I should disapprove of anything of the kind. I shall be glad if you can make him understand why the proposition is disgusting to me—I don’t quite know myself, but there are two sorts of reasons. It is akin to the worst form of public demoralization—that which now as in old Rome indicates a rottenness in the foundations of society—and it is the merest snobbish apeing of a sort of life which if not wholly bad is anything but worthy of being followed senselessly. Boys undertaking a monkey imitation of men in a proceeding which has its good uses rarely for men but is generally for men wicked & altogether harmful extravagance. A skilfully & artistically managed dinner, which is designed effectivly to be a feast of reason & a flow of soul, may be worth much work or money, and any such dinner where there is not a very solid assurance of much money’s worth in this way is an utterly disgusting, devilish humbug. I wish he could be made to feel this and to consider the asses who proposed such a thing, for boyish boys, with neither power nor desire to help or be helped by it intellectually, are to be cut & avoided & looked down upon—nay, to be feared & hated, more than the most degraded poor or the most brutal savages. That is, not for what they are, but what they tend to and among boys, represent; the one really dangerous class of a republic.

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If I was not so closely concerned, of course, I should see the amusing side of it. Just think of your going to Boston to attend a subscription dinner of fellows interested in marbles or kite flying, or lop eared rabbits, the year before you went to college—dinner at 7 P.M. at the Tremont Houses—price of dinner not to exceed $4_! Yet we now have the war to pay for. There must be men to do these things. Rich men may be lavish-but we must learn that it is wicked and abominable for men who are not rich to fall into rich folks’s habits, especially their less good habits. A member of the Porcean (?) Club of Harvard students told me that it was composed of the best men of each class—five from a class, I think. It is a dining club: he described its dinners. “Well but”, I said, “that must be very expensive". “Cost me $500 a year". You see how necessary it is to thoroughly establish in a boy’s mind the dissociation of wealth with respectability. Of course most of the most respectable men the “best” men really, could not afford one dinner in a lifetime with those “best” men. I believe that the Club does select men of parts & of real respectability, but of course with a limit of selection, even at Harvard, from among a very few.

I did not propose to write a letter on the subject. But I don’t want John to herd with young asses or think himself a rich man’s son, or being poor to accept dishonest tendencies.