e example of all knightly virtues, had rotted down to this;
their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says, being--a perfect readiness
to fight duels.

Every Intendant, chosen by the Comptroller-General out of the lower-born
members of the Council of State; a needy young plebeian with his fortune
to make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of his greed,
ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a better man--abler, more
energetic, and often, to judge from the pages of De Tocqueville, with far
more sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantry--than was the count or
marquis in the chateau above, who looked down on him as a roturier; and
let him nevertheless become first his deputy, and then his master.

Understand me--I am not speaking against the hereditary principle of the
Ancien Regime, but against its caste principle--two widely different
elements, continually confounded nowadays.

The hereditary principle is good, because it is founded on fact and
nature. If men's minds come into the world blank sheets of paper--which
I much doubt--every other part and faculty of them comes in stamped with
hereditary tendencies and peculiarities. There are such things as
transmitted capabilities for good and for evil; and as surely as the
offspring of a good horse or dog is likely to be good, so is the
offspring of a good man, and still more of a good woman. If the parents
have any special ability, their children will probably inherit it, at
least in part; and over and above, will have it developed in them by an
education worthy of their parents and themselves. If man were--what he
is not--a healthy and normal species, a permanent hereditary caste might
go on intermarrying, and so perpetuate itself. But the same moral reason
which would make such a caste dangerous--indeed, fatal to the liberty and
development of mankind, makes it happily impossible. Crimes and follies
are certain, after a few generations, to weaken the powers of any human
caste; and unless it supplements its own weakness by mingling again with
the common stock of humanity, it must sink under that weakness, as the
ancient noblesse sank by its own vice. Of course there were exceptions.
The French Revolution brought those exceptions out into strong light; and
like every day of judgment, divided between the good and the evil. But
it lies not in exceptions to save a caste, or an institution; and a few
Richelieus, Liancourts, Rochefoucaulds, Noailles, Lafayet