claim, and you receive, the sympathy of the Democratic party in England
and in Europe; that of the Aristocratic party you cannot claim. You must
bear it calmly, if the aristocracies mourn over your victories and
triumph over your defeats. Do the friends of Democracy conceal their joy
when a despotism or an oligarchy bites the dust?

The members of our aristocracy bear you no personal hatred. An American
going among them even now meets with nothing but personal courtesy and
kindness. Under ordinary circumstances they are not indifferent to your
good-will, nor unconscious of the tie of blood. But to ask them entirely
to forget their order would be too much. In the success of a
commonwealth founded on social and political equality all aristocracies
must read their doom. Not by arms, but by example, you are a standing
menace to the existence of political privilege. And the thread of that
existence is frail. Feudal antiquity holds life by a precarious tenure
amidst the revolutionary tendencies of this modern world. It has gone
hard with the aristocracies throughout Europe of late years, though the
French Emperor, as the head of the Reaction, may create a mock nobility
round his upstart throne. The Roman aristocracy was an aristocracy of
arms and law. The feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages was an
aristocracy of arms and in some measure of law; it served the cause of
political progress in its hour and after its kind; it confronted
tyrannical kings when the people were as yet too weak to confront them;
it conquered at Runnymede, as well as at Hastings. But the aristocracies
of modern Europe are aristocracies neither of arms nor of law. They are
aristocracies of social and political privilege alone. They owe, and are
half conscious that they owe, their present existence only to factitious
weaknesses of human nature, and to the antiquated terrors of communities
long kept in leading-strings and afraid to walk alone. If there were
nothing but reason to dispel them, these fears might long retain their
sway over European society. But the example of a great commonwealth
flourishing here without a privileged class, and of a popular
sovereignty combining order with progress, tends, however remotely, to
break the spell. Therefore, as a class, the English nobility cannot
desire the success of your Republic. Some of the order there are who
have hearts above their coronets, as there are some kings who have
hearts above their crowns, and w