



Produced by David Widger





THE GILDED AGE

A Tale of Today

by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

1873


Part 1.


PREFACE.

This book was not written for private circulation among friends; it was
not written to cheer and instruct a diseased relative of the author's;
it was not thrown off during intervals of wearing labor to amuse an idle
hour.  It was not written for any of these reasons, and therefore it is
submitted without the usual apologies.

It will be seen that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society;
and the chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the
imagination has been the want of illustrative examples.  In a State where
there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth,
where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all
honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity
and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic,
there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have
constructed out of an ideal commonwealth.

No apology is needed for following the learned custom of placing
attractive scraps of literature at the heads of our chapters.  It has
been truly observed by Wagner that such headings, with their vague
suggestions of the matter which is to follow them, pleasantly inflame the