he
worship of money is as good as the worship of rank. Even granting that
it were so, it is a great gain to society to have two idols: in the
competition of idolatries the true worship gets a chance. But it is not
true that the reverence for rank--at least, for hereditary rank--is as
base as the reverence for money. As the world has gone, manner has been
half-hereditary in certain castes, and manner is one of the fine arts.
It is the STYLE of society; it is in the daily-spoken intercourse of
human beings what the art of literary expression is in their occasional
written intercourse. In reverencing wealth we reverence not a man, but
an appendix to a man; in reverencing inherited nobility, we reverence
the probable possession of a great faculty--the faculty of bringing out
what is in one. The unconscious grace of life MAY be in the middle
classes: finely-mannered persons are born everywhere; but it OUGHT to
be in the aristocracy: and a man must be born with a hitch in his
nerves if he has not some of it. It is a physiological possession of
the race, though it is sometimes wanting in the individual.

There is a third idolatry from which that of rank preserves us, and
perhaps it is the worst of any--that of office. The basest deity is a
subordinate employee, and yet just now in civilised Governments it is
the commonest. In France and all the best of the Continent it rules
like a superstition. It is to no purpose that you prove that the pay of
petty officials is smaller than mercantile pay; that their work is more
monotonous than mercantile work; that their mind is less useful and
their life more tame. They are still thought to be greater and better.
They are decords; they have a little red on the left breast of their
coat, and no argument will answer that. In England, by the odd course
of our society, what a theorist would desire has in fact turned up. The
great offices, whether permanent or Parliamentary, which require mind
now give social prestige, and almost only those. An Under-Secretary of
State with 2000 pounds a year is a much stronger man than the director
of a finance company with 5000 pounds, and the country saves the
difference. But except in a few offices like the Treasury, which were
once filled with aristocratic people, and have an odour of nobility at
second-hand, minor place is of no social use. A big grocer despises the
exciseman; and what in many countries would be thought impossible, the
exciseman envies