cent legislation in Washington exempting certain
industrial and agricultural classes from the operation of laws which
bear heavily on other classes, and some of the claims and pretensions of
unionized labor, tend in precisely the same direction.

It is not restoration of privilege I have in mind but rather in a sense
the prevention of this through the existence of a class or estate that
has a fixed status dependent first on character and service and then on
an assured position that is not contingent on political favour, the bulk
of votes, or the acquisition of an inordinate amount of money. Surety of
position works towards independence of thought and action and towards
strong leadership. It establishes and maintains certain high ideals of
honour, chivalry, and service as well as of courtesy and manners. If the
things for which the gentlemen, the knighthood and the nobility of
Europe during the Christian dispensation were responsible were stricken
from the record there would be comparatively little left of the history
of European culture and civilization.

After all, is it merely sentimentalism and a sense of the picturesque
that leads us to look backward with some wistfulness to the days of
which the record is still left us in legends and fairy-tales and old
romance, when ignorance and vulgarity did not sit in high places even if
arrogance and pride and tyranny sometimes did, and when the profiteer
and the oriental financier and the successful politician did not
represent the distinction and the chivalry and the courtesy and the
honour of the social organism man builds for his own habitation? The
idea of knighthood still stirs us and the deeds of chivalry and the
courtesy and the honour of the social Knights of the Round Table,
Crusaders and knights errant, the quest of the Holy Grail, rescue and
adventure, the fighting with paynims and powers of evil, still stir our
blood and arouse in our minds strange contrasts and antinomies. Princes
and fair chatelaines in their wide domains with castle and chase and
delicate pleasaunce, liege-men bound to them by more than the feudal
ties of service. All the varied honours of nobility, vitalized by
significant ritual and symbolized by splendid and beautiful costumes.
Courts of Love and troubadours and trouveres, kings who were kings
indeed, with the splendour and courtesy and beneficence of their
courts--Louis the Saint and Frederic II, Edward III and King
Charles--above all the