enaries, at the beck and call of a despot; and that, as M. de
Tocqueville says: "In feudal times, the Nobility were regarded pretty
much as the government is regarded in our own; the burdens they imposed
were endured in consequence of the security they afforded. The nobles
had many irksome privileges; they possessed many onerous rights: but they
maintained public order, they administered justice, they caused the law
to be executed, they came to the relief of the weak, they conducted the
business of the community. In proportion as they ceased to do these
things, the burden of their privileges appeared more oppressive, and
their existence became an anomaly in proportion as they ceased to do
these things." And the Ancien Regime may be defined as the period in
which they ceased to do these things--in which they began to play the
idlers, and expected to take their old wages without doing their old
work.

But in any case, government by a ruling caste, whether of the patriarchal
or of the feudal kind, is no ideal or permanent state of society. So far
from it, it is but the first or second step out of primeval savagery. For
the more a ruling race becomes conscious of its own duty, and not merely
of its own power--the more it learns to regard its peculiar gifts as
entrusted to it for the good of men--so much the more earnestly will it
labour to raise the masses below to its own level, by imparting to them
its own light; and so will it continually tend to abolish itself, by
producing a general equality, moral and intellectual; and fulfil that law
of self-sacrifice which is the beginning and the end of all virtue.

A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble
as themselves--that is at least a fair ideal, tending toward, though it
has not reached, the highest ideal of all.

But suppose that the very opposite tendency--inherent in the heart of
every child of man--should conquer. Suppose the ruling caste no longer
the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, but their
equals. Suppose them--shameful, but not without example--actually sunk
to be their inferiors. And that such a fall did come--nay, that it must
have come--is matter of history. And its cause, like all social causes,
was not a political nor a physical, but a moral cause. The profligacy of
the French and Italian aristocracies, in the sixteenth century, avenged
itself on them by a curse (derived from the newly-discovered