Superior People

The most disagreeable of all disagreeable people are your superior people - individuals who consider themselves a little better than the ordiuary run of mortals, and who expect to be treated witli greater deference and honor than is shown the majority of other persons. The most powerful and most common agent in the manufacture of superior people is money. He who is the owner of much property, whose name is good for large sums, who lives in a grand mansión, who wears rich garments, drives fast horses, and has many servants to do his bidding, is a very superior person indeed. He may not be wise, he may be a mere fooi in all else except the making of dollars and cents, he may not be a good man, he may be known as a raseal and cheat, still he has that which makes him a superior man, and men of talent, men of brains and learning, the honest men all envy hiin ; he is noticed everywhere ; what he says or does is generally commented upon; he is pointed out to strangers as one of the "lions" of the place, and people treat him with the deference due one of the superior beings of the earth, with the honor bestowed upon the representative of wealth wlierever found. Next we have those people who base their claims for superiority upon their birth. They are the descendant of those who made names in history for bravery, learning or genius and they seem to assume that because their great-grandfathers won the praise and respect of the world, they should, also, md that all they have to do to aecoiuplish this object is to assert their superiority over humble mortals who have no illustrious ancestor of whose deeds they can boast. That is the weakest claim for the respect of men which bases itself upon what others achieved, not what we have ourselves accomplished. Again we have people who assume a superiority for goodness. They are noted everywhere for being such very exemplary characters, that we fcannot avoid feeling, when in their presence, ;is If we were very sinf ui indeed, and deserving the worst punishment that can be meted out to the unregenerate. They are so faintly sanctified, so piously devout, so entirely free from all the small weaknesses peculiar to common human beings, so devoid of all faults of temper, so sweetly soft and mild in disposition, so forgiving and charitable, so overbearingly superior in goodness' that we regard them as only wanting a seat in paridise to make them perfect. We also have those people whose superiority consists in their learning. They are noted for the wisdom they have gained, the knowledge they have sought and found. They are learned in this and that science, they speak dead languages with more f acility than they do their mother tongue, they can talk about things that to the greater part of mankind are unexplered mysteries. They can bewilder you with hard names and dark and mysterious terms. They have studied hard and attained that perfection of education which enables them to assert the superiority of learning over ignorance. Yet it must be asserted that to sensible people the most tiresome of all superior people is the one whose superiority is that of knowing a great deal that other people don't know, and never wish to know.