nd 1795 this old aristocracy was largely
exterminated. The Wars of the Roses, the massacres of the Reformation,
and the Civil Wars in England; the Thirty Years' War in Germany; the
Hundred Years' War, the Wars of Religion, and the Revolution in France
had decimated the families old in honour, preserving the tradition of
culture, jealous of their alliances and their breeding--the natural and
actual leaders in thought and action. England suffered badly enough as
the result of war, with the persecutions of Henry VIII, Edward VI and
Elizabeth, and the Black Death, included for full measure. France
suffered also, but Germany fared worst of all. By the end of the Thirty
Years' War the older feudal nobility had largely disappeared, while the
class of "gentlemen" had been almost exterminated. In France, until the
fall of Napoleon III, and in Germany and Great Britain up to the present
moment, the recruiting of the formal aristocracy has gone on steadily,
but on a different basis and from a different class from anything known
before. Demonstrated personal ability to gain and maintain leadership;
distinguished service to the nation in war or statecraft; courage,
honour, fealty--these, in general, had been the ground for admission to
the ranks of the aristocracy. In general, also, advancement to the ranks
of the higher nobility was from the class of "gentlemen," though the
Church, the universities, and chivalry gave, during the Middle Ages,
wide opportunity for personal merit to achieve the highest honours.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that
from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force
in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. As the
upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil
slaughter, and assassination, the pressure on the great mass of men
(peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called "lower classes")
was increasingly relaxed, and very soon the thin film of aristocracy,
further weakened by dilution, broke, and through the crumbling shell
burst to the surface those who had behind them no tradition but that of
servility, no comprehension of the ideals of chivalry and honour of the
gentleman, no stored-up results of education and culture, but only an
age-long rage against the age-long dominating class, together with the
instincts of craftiness, parsimony, and almost savage self-interest.

As a class, it was very far