the many who
influence the few, but the few who influence the many.

So aristocracies, in the true sense, are formed.

But the higher calling is soon forgotten. The purer light is soon
darkened in pride and selfishness, luxury and lust; as in Genesis, the
sons of God see the daughters of men, that they are fair; and they take
them wives of all that they choose. And so a mixed race springs up and
increases, without detriment at first to the commonwealth. For, by a
well-known law of heredity, the cross between two races, probably far
apart, produces at first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas!
probably the vices of both. And when the sons of God go in to the
daughters of men, there are giants in the earth in those days, men of
renown. The Roman Empire, remember, was never stronger than when the old
Patrician blood had mingled itself with that of every nation round the
Mediterranean.

But it does not last. Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread from above,
as well as from below. The just aristocracy of virtue and wisdom becomes
an unjust one of mere power and privilege; that again, one of mere wealth
corrupting and corrupt; and is destroyed, not by the people from below,
but by the monarch from above. The hereditary bondsmen may know

Who would be free,
Himself must strike the blow.

But they dare not, know not how. The king must do it for them. He must
become the State. "Better one tyrant," as Voltaire said, "than many."
Better stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many wolves, each in
the nearest wood. And so arise those truly monstrous Eastern despotisms,
of which modern Persia is, thank God, the only remaining specimen; for
Turkey and Egypt are too amenable of late years to the influence of the
free nations to be counted as despotisms pure and simple--despotisms in
which men, instead of worshipping a God-man, worship the hideous
counterfeit, a Man-god--a poor human being endowed by public opinion with
the powers of deity, while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of
humanity. But such, as an historic fact, has been the last stage of
every civilisation--even that of Rome, which ripened itself upon this
earth the last in ancient times, and, I had almost said, until this very
day, except among the men who speak Teutonic tongues, and who have
preserved through all temptations, and reasserted through all dangers,
the free ideas which have been our sacred heritage ever since Taci