the grocer. Solid wealth tells where there is no
artificial dignity given to petty public functions. A clerk in the
public service is "nobody"; and you could not make a common Englishman
see why he should be anybody. But it must be owned that this turning of
society into a political expedient has half spoiled it. A great part of
the "best" English people keep their mind in a state of decorous
dulness. They maintain their dignity; they get obeyed; they are good
and charitable to their dependants. But they have no notion of PLAY of
mind: no conception that the charm of society depends upon it. They
think cleverness an antic, and have a constant though needless horror
of being thought to have any of it. So much does this stiff dignity
give the tone, that the few Englishmen capable of social brilliancy
mostly secrete it. They reserve it for persons whom they can trust, and
whom they know to be capable of appreciating its nuances. But a good
Government is well worth a great deal of social dulness. The dignified
torpor of English society is inevitable if we give precedence, not to
the cleverest classes, but to the oldest classes, and we have seen how
useful that is.

The social prestige of the aristocracy is, as every one knows,
immensely less than it was a hundred years or even fifty years since.
Two great movements--the two greatest of modern society--have been
unfavourable to it. The rise of industrial wealth in countless forms
has brought in a competitor which has generally more mind, and which
would be supreme were it not for awkwardness and intellectual gene.
Every day our companies, our railways, our debentures, and our shares,
tend more and more to multiply these SURROUNDINGS of the aristocracy,
and in time they will hide it. And while this undergrowth has come up,
the aristocracy have come down. They have less means of standing out
than they used to have. Their power is in their theatrical exhibition,
in their state. But society is every day becoming less stately. As our
great satirist has observed, "The last Duke of St. David's used to
cover the north road with his carriages; landladies and waiters bowed
before him. The present Duke sneaks away from a railway station,
smoking a cigar, in a brougham." The aristocracy cannot lead the old
life if they would; they are ruled by a stronger power. They suffer
from the tendency of all modern society to raise the average, and to
lower--comparatively, and perhaps absolutely,