A Vulgarising Influence

I have been rooting around in Walter Bagehot's journalism again and was struck by a passage from a piece written for The Economist dated 17 May 1873. Bagehot is rehearsing (yet again one might justifiably comment) his famous diagnosis of the dignified/efficient dichotomy as explanatory of the durability of the English constitution. (And incidentallly I use the descriptor 'English' deliberately because that is what Bagehot invariably did).

We hold therefore that Mr. Bright was quite right and wise in not expressing any distaste to the abstract object of the republican working men's ambition. It is a very natural political ambition for working men to feel. They see their class much more completely shut out from the objects of political ambition than they would be in the United States, where any one of them might rise, as Abraham Lincoln did, from rail-splitter to President, and, very naturally indeed, they do not count the cost of a change. They do not see from what sort of evils the aristocracy and monarchy still protect us. They do not realise the vulgarising influence of the worship of mere wealth.  

No prize which world leader I was moved to think about. I think it's dangerously close to being an obsession with me. Oh well, it gives me something to do with my down time.