f this
hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls: they are absent in the
field: they are working, not triumphing. Fashion is made up of their
children; of those, who, through the value and virtue of somebody,
have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of
cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical organization, a
certain health and excellence, which secures to them, if not the
highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class of power,
the working heroes, the Cortez,[402] the Nelson,[403] the Napoleon,
see that this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such as
they; that fashion is funded talent; is Mexico,[404] Marengo,[405] and
Trafalgar[406][407] beaten out thin; that the brilliant names of
fashion run back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty
years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and
_their_ sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield the
possession of the harvest, to new competitors with keener eyes and
stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year
1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The
city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it
was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town
day before yesterday, that is city and court to-day.

8. Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These
mutual selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the
least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on
the excluding minority, by the strong hand, and kill them, at once a
new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a
bowl of milk: and if the people should destroy class after class,
until two men only were left, one of these would be the leader, and
would be involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may keep
this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of
life, and is one of the estates of the realm.[408] I am the more
struck with this tenacity, when I see its work. It respects the
administration of such unimportant matters, that we should not look
for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet men under some
strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a religious
movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man and nature. We
think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive,
this of caste or fashion, for example;