tes were but the
storks among the cranes involved in the wholesale doom due not to each
individual, but to a system and a class.

Profligacy, pride, idleness--these are the vices which we have to lay to
the charge of the Teutonic Nobility of the Ancien Regime in France
especially; and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the whole
continent of Europe. But below them, and perhaps the cause of them all,
lay another and deeper vice--godlessness--atheism.

I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal unbelief. I mean want
of belief in duty, in responsibility. Want of belief that there was a
living God governing the universe, who had set them their work, and would
judge them according to their work. And therefore, want of belief, yea,
utter unconsciousness, that they were set in their places to make the
masses below them better men; to impart to them their own civilisation,
to raise them to their own level. They would have shrunk from that which
I just now defined as the true duty of an aristocracy, just because it
would have seemed to them madness to abolish themselves. But the process
of abolition went on, nevertheless, only now from without instead of from
within. So it must always be, in such a case. If a ruling class will
not try to raise the masses to their own level, the masses will try to
drag them down to theirs. That sense of justice which allowed
privileges, when they were as strictly official privileges as the salary
of a judge, or the immunity of a member of the House of Commons; when
they were earned, as in the Middle Age, by severe education, earnest
labour, and life and death responsibility in peace and war, will demand
the abolition of those privileges, when no work is done in return for
them, with a voice which must be heard, for it is the voice of truth and
justice.

But with that righteous voice will mingle another, most wicked, and yet,
alas! most flattering to poor humanity--the voice of envy, simple and
undisguised; of envy, which moralists hold to be one of the basest of
human passions; which can never be justified, however hateful or unworthy
be the envied man. And when a whole people, or even a majority thereof,
shall be possessed by that, what is there that they will not do?

Some are surprised and puzzled when they find, in the French Revolution
of 1793, the noblest and the foulest characters labouring in concert, and
side by side--often, too, paradoxical as it may seem, united