d once enjoyed in mobilised wealth,
usable after this kind. It can best be compared to the similar superiority
enjoyed in the Middle Ages by the Republic of Venice, to whose fortunes,
both good and ill, the story of modern England affords so strange a
parallel.

The second factor I have mentioned--the aristocratic constitution of the
country--though almost equally important, is somewhat more elusive, and
might be more properly challenged by a critic.

England had not, in the first years of the eighteenth century, reached
that calm and undisturbed solidity which is the mark of an aristocratic
State at its zenith. Faction was bitter, the opposition between the old
loyalty to the Crown and the new national regime was so determined as to
make civil war possible at any moment. This condition of affairs was to
last for a generation, and it was not until the middle of the eighteenth
century was passed that it disappeared.

Nevertheless, compared with the Continental States, Great Britain already
presented by 1701 that elasticity in substance and tenacity in policy
which accompany aristocratic institutions. Corruption might be rife, but
it was already growing difficult to purchase the services of a member of
the governing class against the national interests. That knowledge of
public affairs, diffused throughout a small and closely combined social
class, which is the mark of an aristocracy, was already apparent. The
power of choosing, from a narrow and well-known field, the best talents
for any particular office (which is another mark of aristocracy), was
already a power apparent in the government of this country. The solidarity
which, in the face of a common enemy, an aristocracy always displays, the
long-livedness, as of a corporate body, which an aristocracy enjoys, and
which permits it to follow with such strict continuity whatever line of
foreign policy it has undertaken, was clearly defining itself at the
moment of which I write.

In a word, the new settlement of English life upon the basis of class
government, the exclusion of the mass of the people from public affairs,
the decay (if you will) of a lively public opinion, the presence of that
hopeless disinherited class which now forms the majority of our industrial
population; the organisation of the universities, of justice, of the
legislature, of the executive, as parts of one social class; the close
grasp which that class now had upon the land and capital of the wh