of the largest West Coast businesses, boasts that it started in a pushcart in the streets of San Francisco in 1870.

In Europe, on the other hand, the conservatives, at least until the present century, have rejected egalitarianism. Aristocratic values and patterns of inherited privilege and position are still upheld by much of the upper class of Great Britain, Germany, France, and many other countries. Thus the European conservative would wish to minimize the extent of social mobility. We would hazard that in much of Europe successful individuals of lower-class provenance would seek to conceal rather than publicize their origins.

In the previously cited French survey of social mobility, this motive is considered a problem affecting the very data. The author of the survey says that “it is precisely amongin all Western societies.

What then makes for the difference in political behavior? Apparently, for one thing, the differences in total income as between America and Europe and the degree to which the different classes share equally in that income, and the different definitions of the class structure. Socialism developed in countries whose dominant groups traditionally accepted rigid class differentiation as a basic social value. Marxist doctrine, with its emphasis on class differences, reflected the realities of European society; it reflected less and less of the realities of the American status system as the productivity of the American economy surged upwards. The socialists in Europe did not have to underline the large variations in rewards for different services; this was, and is, an obvious feature of most non-American societies.