onspicuously than in the present. The
Normans who came over to England with William the Conqueror and
constituted the proud English nobility were simply a miscellaneous set
of adventurers, professional fighting men, of unknown, and no doubt for
the most part undistinguished, lineage. William the Conqueror himself
was the son of a woman of the people. The Catholic Church founded no
families, but its democratic constitution opened a career to men of all
classes, and the most brilliant sons of the Church were often of the
lowliest social rank. We should not, therefore, say that the bad stocks
are replacing the good stocks. There is not the slightest evidence for
any such theory. All that we are entitled to say is that when in the
upward progression of a community the vanishing point of culture and
refinement is attained the bearers of that culture and refinement die
off as naturally and inevitably as flowers in autumn, and from their
roots spring up new and more vigorous shoots to replace them and to pass
in their turn through the same stages, with that perpetual slight
novelty in which lies the secret of life, as well as of art. An
aristocracy which is merely an aristocracy because it is "old"--whether
it is an aristocracy of families, or of races, or of species--has
already ceased to be an aristocracy in any sound meaning of the term. We
need not regret its disappearance.

Do not, therefore, let us waste our time in crying over the dead roses
of the summer that is past. There is something morbid in the perpetual
groaning over that inevitable decay which is itself a part of all life.
Such a perpetual narrow insistence on one aspect of life is scarcely
sane. One suspects that these people are themselves of those stocks over
whose fate they grieve. Let us, therefore, mercifully leave them to
manure their dead roses in peace. They will soon be forgotten. The world
is for ever dying. The world is also for ever bursting with life. The
spring song of _Sursum corda_ easily overwhelms the dying autumnal wails
of the _Dies Irae_.

It would thus appear that, even apart from any deliberate restraint from
procreation, as a family attains the highest culture and refinement
which civilization can yield, that family tends to die out, at all
events in the male line.[15] This is, for instance, the result which
Fahlbeck has reached in his valuable demographic study of the Swedish
nobility, _Der Adel Schwedens_. "Apparently," says Fahlbeck