simple rank and high honour of the "gentleman,"
the representative of a long line of honourable tradition, no casual and
purse-proud upstart, but of proud race and unquestioned status, proud
because it stood for certain high ideals of honour and chivalry and
loyalty, of courtesy and breeding and compassion. All these old things
of long ago still rouse in us answering humours, and there are a few of
us who can hardly see just why they are inconsistent with liberty and
opportunity, justice, righteousness and mercy.

Somehow the last two generations, and especially the last ten years,
have revealed many things hitherto hidden, and as we envisage society as
it has come to be, estimating it by new-found standards and establishing
new comparisons through a recovery of a more just historical sense, the
question comes whether it is indeed more wholesome, more beautiful, more
normal to man as he is, than the older society that in varying forms but
always the same principle, had held throughout all history until the new
model came in, now hardly a century ago.

I do not think this wistful and bewildered looking backward is
particularly due to a new desire for beauty, that comeliness of
condition that existed then and has now given place to gross ugliness
and ill-conditioned manners and ways. Rather it seems to me it is due to
a sense of irrationality and fundamental injustice in the present order,
coupled with a new terror of the proximate issue as this already is
revealing itself amongst many peoples. We resent the high estate,
purchasable and purchased, of the cynical intriguer and the vulgar
profiteer, of the tradesman in "big business," the cheap prophet and the
pathetic progeny of "successful men" fast reverting to type. We know our
city councils and our state legislatures and our houses of congress, we
know our newspapers, their standards and the motive powers behind them,
and what they record of the character and the doings of what they call
"society men and women." Above all we know that under the ancient
regime, in spite of manifold failures, shortcomings and disloyalty,
there was such a thing as a standard of honour, a principle of chivalry,
an impulse to unselfish service, a criterion of courtesy and good
manners; we look for these things now in vain, except amongst those
little enclaves of oblivion where the old character and old breeding
still maintain a fading existence, and as we consider what we have
become we so