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CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 924 060 296 278 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924060296278 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
A DEFENCE 
 OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 A TEXT BOOK FOR TORIES 
 
 BY 
 
 ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI 
 
 LeRoy Phillips 
 
 i9A BEACON STREET 
 
 BOSTON 
 
DEDICATED 
 TO THE LOVING MEMORY OF 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 WHO UNTIL HER DEATH REMAINED MY 
 CHIEF INSPIRER AND FRIEND 
 
" L'Aristocracie m'e&t facilement adori ; aussi bien il m'en fallait 
 une ; c'est le vrai, le seul soutien d'une monarchie, son levier, son 
 point resistant ; r£tat sans elle est un vaisseau sans gouvernail, un 
 vrai ballon dans les airs. Or, le bon de I'Aristocracie, sa magie, est 
 dans son andeilnet^, dans le temps."-— Napolkon. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In three books published during the last five years, the 
 subject of Aristocracy has already formed a no insignifi- 
 cant part of my theme, and in my last book it occupied a 
 position so prominent that most of the criticism directed 
 against that work concerned itself with my treatment of 
 the aristocratic standpoint in Art. Much of this criticism, 
 however, seemed to be provoked by the fact that I had 
 not gone to the pains of defining exhaustively precisely 
 what I meant by the true aristocrat and by true aristocracy 
 in their relation to a people, and in the present work it 
 has been my object not only to do this, and thus to reply 
 to my more hostile critics, but also to offer a practical 
 solution of modern problems which is more fundamental 
 and more feasible than the solution offered by either 
 Democracy or Socialism. 
 
 In view of the deep discontent prevailing in the modern 
 world, and of the increasing unhappiness of all classes in 
 Western Europe, it is no longer possible to turn a deaf 
 ear even to the Socialist's plea for a hearing, and thou- 
 sands of the possessing classes who, prompted by their 
 self-preservative instinct alone, still retort that Socialism 
 is an impossible and romantic Utopia, are beginning to 
 wonder secretly in their innermost hearts whether, after 
 all, this "vulgar" and "proletarian" remedy is not per- 
 haps the only true and practical solution of modern diffi- 
 culties. Having no other solution to offer, they are 
 beginning to ask themselves, in private, whether this may 
 not be the best way of extricating modern humanity from 
 the tangle of exploitation and privilege, oppression and 
 luxurious hedonigm, in which they — the top-dogs — seem 
 to be, but accidentally, the favoured few. In their 
 
 vii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 conscience they find no deep reply to Socialism, although 
 their natural longing to hold what they possess forces 
 them to cast ridicule and odium upon it. 
 
 Now, in the present work, I outline the terms of a 
 reply to Socialism and Democracy which I venture to hope 
 is deeper than that usually made by their opponents. I 
 ofFer a solution which I believe to be more funda^iental, 
 more consonant with the passions and foibles of human 
 nature, more practical, and above all more vital and full 
 of promise for the future, than anything Socialism or 
 Democracy does and can bring forward. 
 
 I have entered exhaustively neither into the Demo- 
 cratic nor into the Socialistic solution of modern evils, 
 but have confined myself closely to the statement of the 
 true aristocrat's position, leaving the reader to see how 
 fundamentally such a statement upsets the claims of both 
 of the other parties. 
 
 Thus the book is not merely an argument in defence 
 of true aristocracy; for, to all thinking men, who know 
 it needs no defence, such an argument alone would be 
 simply platitudinous. It is, in addition, an attempt at 
 showing wherein hitherto the principles of a true Aris- 
 tocracy have befen misunderstood by the very aristocrats 
 themselves, and that more than half the criticism directed 
 against the Aristocratic principle to-day no more applies 
 to a true Aristocracy than it does to the man in the 
 moon. 
 
 I have called attention to a political and historical fact 
 which too many writers appear to have overlooked : the 
 fact that all political struggles, and all the fluctuations of 
 fortune which have attended the history of aristocracies, 
 have not consisted actually of a struggle between the 
 principle of aristocracy and a better, nobler and more 
 desirable principle, which by its superior virtues has sup- 
 planted the former, but of a struggle between the principle 
 of aristocracy and its representatives, or, in other words, 
 of Aristocracy versus the Aristocrats. 
 
 My conclusion that Aristocracy means Life and that 
 
 viii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Democracy means Death reveals at once the object with 
 which I undertook to investigate this problem — that is to 
 say, with the object of raising the controversy if possible 
 to a plane higher than mere " matters of opinion " and 
 mere political party; and the impartiality with which I 
 have pointed the finger at the errors and general incomT 
 petence of a particular Aristocracy should be sufficient to 
 prove the non-political and non-party spirit with which I 
 entered upon the investigation. 
 
 The two chapters devoted to Charles I and the Puritan 
 Rebellion, respectively, may seem to some a little irrele- 
 vant in a book of this nature; but when it is remembered 
 that I needed a convincing example of the divergence 
 of bad taste from good taste, -and that this particular 
 divergence of bad taste from good represents the most 
 imposing instance of the kind which the history of England 
 records — so much so, indeed, that the act of murder com- 
 mitted in 1 649 may be regarded as a decisive turning-point 
 in the fortunes of the English people, and a choice of roads 
 which has undoubtedly led to all the evils concerning the 
 origin of which most of us are now consciously or un- 
 consciously inquiring — this excursion into the records of 
 the past, and particularly into the records of the seven- 
 teenth century, will perhaps appear more justified and 
 indispensable. 
 
 I do not claim to have adduced all the evidence possible 
 for the support of my thesis — most of it, probably, I do 
 not even know — ^but if I have succeeded in providing at 
 least a stimulating introduction to the point of view taken 
 in these pages, I shall feel that this is not altogether a 
 superfluous book, or one that can be lightly set aside and 
 ignored. For it is not as if the subject of Aristocracy 
 had been discussed ad nauseam by a large galaxy of able 
 writers. A glance at the Subject Catalogue of the London 
 Library alone shows how inadequately it has been treated 
 compared with the long list of books which deal with the 
 opposing principle of Democracy. There are in all only 
 nine books mentioned under the heading Aristocracy in 
 
 ix 
 
PREFACE 
 
 the 1909 Edition of the London Library's Catalogue, 
 while the corresponding list under the heading Democracy 
 numbers in all eighty-five volumes. When it is remem- 
 bered that of the nine books above referred to four are 
 purely partisan publication*, no one willj I presume, 
 venture to suggest that the author of a new book dealing 
 with the Aristocrat and his life-principle need make half 
 such a profound apologetic bow as he who would add one 
 more volume to the eighty-five dealing with the other 
 subject. 
 
 Anthony M. Ludovici.^ 
 
 ^ The above, together with all the chapters that follow, was written 
 at least a year before even the most prophetic amongst us coilld have 
 had any prem^ition of the Great European War. Almost since the 
 very beginning of the war I have been on active service, and not a 
 line of the book has been altered. With regard to the relevancy ol 
 the work at the present juncture I feel that the message my book 
 conveys has by no means been rendered superfluous by recent events. 
 On the contrary, the fluid state that the beliefs, the hopes and the 
 aspirations of the nation are likely to be in at the end of this long 
 trial, allow me to hope that a work marking out so sharp and definite 
 a point of view may not be altogether ineffectual in helping, however 
 slightly, to mould and direct opinion, once we shall have begun to 
 think of other things than submarines and Zeppelins. 
 
 A. M. L. 
 
 Britisk Exptditionary Force, 
 Franct, April igiS- 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Tbe Aristocbat as the Essential Ruler . . . i 
 An Introduction to some of the fundamental attributes of the 
 Ruler-man. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The English Aristocrat as a Failure in the Art of 
 
 Protecting and Guiding the Ruled ... 31 
 An analysis of the part played by the English Aristocrat in the 
 growth of the Industrial System and its evils. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The English Aristocrat as a Failure in the Tutorship 
 
 OF Ruling . 77 
 
 An analysis of the part the English Aristocrat has played in caring, 
 or rather not caring, for the "heart of the people" since the 
 beginning of the Industrial movement. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Puritanism, Trade and Vulgarity , . . .103 
 The turning-point in English history. Charles I, the last to make 
 a stand against the influences and tendencies which ushered in the 
 present Age, our Age. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 The Metamorphosis of the Englishman in the Seven- 
 teenth Century 165 
 
 The exposure of a pious fraud. The Puritan as a moulder of men. 
 The Enghshman of the seventeenth century transformed and pre- 
 pared for the shop-counter, the ofEce-stool, the factory and the forge. 
 
 xi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Decline of Manners and Morals under the Modern 
 
 Democracy of Uncontrolled Trade and Commerce . 237 
 
 The thesis adumbrated in Chapter I is here restated in full, whereupon 
 its relation to the subject of the chapter is discussed in detail. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Aristocrat as an Achievement .... 295 
 An investigation into the practice that makes for the rearing of ex- 
 ceptional families and men, and which renders higher man something 
 in the nature of a carefully fashioned human product. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Aristocrat in Practice ...... 352 
 
 An examination of the problem of Heredity. The English House of 
 Lords and its loss of prestige shown to be quite independent of the 
 supposed evil results of in-breeding. Conclusion. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 What is Culture? . . . .' . . . 428 
 
 Harking back to the past and the key this provides for a more glorious 
 future. 
 
 Index 433 
 
 xu 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE ARISTOCRAT AS THE ESSENTIAL RULER 
 
 " Neither Montaigne in writing his essays, nor Des Cartes in building 
 new worlds, nor Burnet in framing an antediluvian earth, no, nor Newton 
 in discovering and establishing the true laws of nature on experiment 
 and a sublime geometry, felt more intellectual joys than he feels who is 
 a real patriot, who bends all the force of his understanding, and directs 
 all his thoughts and actions to the good of his country." — ^Bolingbroke, 
 On the Sfirit of Patriotism, p. 23. 
 
 It is not my intention in this essay to support any 
 particular aristocracy or aristocrat. I wish merely to throw 
 what light I can upon the principle of aristocracy itself. 
 Often I shall seem as hostile to aristocracies in particular 
 as the most confirmed Radical; albeit, wherever I reveal 
 any abhorrent vice in an individual aristocracy it wiU be 
 with the object rather of demonstrating how unessential 
 and unnecessary that vice is to the true principle of 
 aristocracy than of stirring up ill-feeling to no purpose. 
 
 When one contends that the hereditary principle, as 
 one of the essential conditions of an aristocracy, is a 
 good principle, it is a common thing to hear people reply 
 By calling attention to the number of instances in which 
 it has hopelessly failed. They say, " Look at the Bour- 
 bons, the Spanish Hapsburgs, the Braganzas, the House 
 of Osman, the later Stuarts! " Perhaps the reader will 
 follow me and attempt to bear with me for a while, if I 
 preface all my remarks by saying that while I shall make 
 no endeavour to vindicate either the Bourbons, the Spanish 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Hapsbvirgs, the Braganzas, the House of Osman or the 
 later Stuarts, I shall, nevertheless, not consider a reference 
 to them relevant as an argument against me, so long as 
 he who mentions them for this pxorpose has not proved 
 satisfactorily that they did not omit to observe one or 
 other of the rules which are essential to the proper 
 preservation or improvement of a character and type. 
 
 I decline to abandon a principle simply because the 
 attempts which have been made to realise it hitherto by 
 most European nations have failed hopelessly. If a prin- 
 ciple can be shown to be a good one, then, whatever stigma 
 attaches to it, owing to European failures to approximate 
 to all it can yield, surely reflects more discredit upon those 
 who have shown themselves unequal to it than upon the 
 principle itself. 
 
 Moreover, in this question, as in all others, there is 
 a wrong view and a right view. It is not merely a " matter 
 of opinion." That which is merely a " matter of opinion " 
 — as people are wont to say when they want to wash their 
 hands of a thing, or to shirk the responsibility of solving 
 a definite problem in a definite way — that, as I say, which 
 is merely a " matter of opinion " does not matter at all. 
 For those things which are merely a matter of opinion 
 can be decided right away by every Tom, Dick and Harry 
 over tea and scones at a cake-shop, and cannot, therefore, 
 be of any consequence. 
 
 In all things that really matter, however, there can be 
 but two opinions — the right opinion and the wrong 
 opinion. And on the question of aristocracy the individual 
 point of view of the man in the street simply does not 
 matter. 
 
 There is a right way of looking at the question and a 
 wrong way; and to those who look at it in the wrong 
 way — that is to say, to those who are opposed to the 
 principle of aristocracy, and who support the principle of 
 democracy in its stead — all that we who support the prin- 
 ciple of aristocracy can say is: that people and nations 
 who believe in and act on our principles will have a longer 
 
 2 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 lease of life, a fuller lease of life, a more flourishing lease 
 of life, than they. 
 
 Human life, like all other kinds of life, cannot be the 
 sport of foolish ideals. However nice and pleasant it may 
 sound to say that the brotherhood of mankind, in which 
 every man has a voice in the direction of human affairs, 
 is the state of bliss, we who support the aristocratic ideal 
 know that that state is one of decay, of doubt, of muddle 
 and of mistakes. Now man cannot doubt, cannot be 
 muddled and cannot make mistakes with impunity. 
 Sooner or later he has to pay for these luxurious fads, by 
 losses in the physique and the term of life of his nation. 
 
 Look about you now! Observe the myriads of ugly, 
 plain and asymmetrical faces in our streets; observe 
 the illness and the botchedness about you! Note, too, 
 the innumerable societies founded in all the corners of the 
 British Empire, with the object of " reforming " some 
 erroneous policy, or of redressing some grievance. Is it 
 not clear to you, when you see all these things, that some- 
 thing is wrong, and that that something which is wrong 
 cannot be made right by the same class of mind which 
 has given rise to all the muddle and confusion.? Is it 
 not clear to you that the men who know, the men of 
 taste and sound instinct, no longer have any say in human 
 affairs ? 3 5| 
 
 The principle of aristocracy is, that seeing that human 
 life, like any other kind of life, produces some flourishing 
 and some less flourishing, some fortunate and some less 
 fortunate specimens; in order that flourishing, full and 
 fortunate life may be prolonged, multiplied and, if possible, 
 enhanced on earth, the wants of flourishing life, its opti- 
 mum of conditions, must be made known and authorita- 
 tively imposed upon men by its representatives. Who 
 are its representatives.? The fanatics and followers of 
 Science are not its representatives, for their taste is too 
 indefinite; it is often pronounced too late to be of any 
 good and it is not reached by an instinctive bodily 
 impulse, but by long empirical research which often comes 
 
 3 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY ' 
 
 to many wrong conclusions before attaining to the right 
 one. It must be clear that the true representatives of 
 flourishing and fortunate life are the artists,' the men of 
 taste. The artist, the man of taste — the successful number, 
 so to speak, in the many blanks that human life produces 
 in every generation — is in himself a chip of flourishing 
 life. His own body is a small synopsis, a diminutive 
 digest of full, flourishing and fortunate life. What he 
 wants, therefore, life wants; what he knows is good, the 
 best kind of life knows is good. His voice is the very 
 voice of full, flourishing and fortunate life. No number 
 of committees or deliberative assemblies, consisting of 
 men less fortunately constituted than he, can possibly form 
 an adequate substitute for him in this. For the voice 
 one has, and the desires and wants it expresses, are not 
 a question of chance or of upbringing, they are a question 
 of the body with which one's ancestors have endowed one. 
 All science, all the known laws of heredity, prove this 
 conclusively. 
 
 If one's choice of ways and means, if one's taste, if 
 one's wants, therefore, are such that when they become 
 general wants and general tastes they lead to an ascent 
 in the line of human life, then unconsciously one's body, 
 which is a specimen of flourishing and fortunate life, is 
 uttering the credo of flourishing and fortunate life. If, 
 on the other hand, one's choice of ways and means, if 
 one's tastes and wants are such that when they become 
 general tastes and general wants they lead to a descent in 
 the line of human life, then unconsciously one's body, 
 which is a specimen of mediocre or impoverished life, is 
 pronouncing the doctrine of decline and of Nemesis. 
 
 1 I do not use the word artist here to mean a painter or a musician 
 or an actor. The word artist has been hopelessly vulgarised by the fact 
 that a legion of inartistic painters, musicians and actors have used it as 
 a designation of their ignoble class. By artist I mean a man of taste, 
 a man who unhesitatingly knows what is right and what is wrong. 
 Nowadays there are perhaps only two or three such men in every 
 generation of painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, poets, legislators 
 and actors. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 Now, if all this is true — and to us who uphold the 
 aristocratic principle it is the only Divine Truth on earth, 
 and one which Science is bound ultimately to confirm and 
 to prove — then it is obvious that only where the voice 
 of flourishing life is raised to authority can there be any 
 hope of an ascent in the line of life, or even of a level 
 of health and beauty in the line of life. 
 
 What do those maintain who stand for the aristocratic 
 principle? They simply hold a finger of warning up to 
 their opponents and say, " Your foolish ideals will have 
 a term; their end will come! You cannot with impunity 
 turn a deaf ear to the voice of flourishing life. You must 
 follow the men who know, the men of taste. If you do 
 not your days are numbered. And the men who know, 
 the men of taste, are simply those examples of flourishing 
 life, those lucky strokes of nature's dice, who, when in 
 authority, lead to the multiplication of flourishing life 
 and an ascent in the line of life. No number of the 
 mediocre or of the botched can hope to fill the place of 
 one or of a few men of taste. Disbelieve in this principle 
 and die. Believe in this principle and live to triumph 
 over all those who do not believe in it! " ^ 
 
 This is not a " matter of opinion," it is not a matter 
 concerning which every futile flaneur in Fleet Street 
 can have his futile opinion. It is the Divine Truth 
 of life. And the democrat who dares to deny it is 
 not only a blind imbecile, he is not only a corrupt and 
 sickly specimen of manhood, he is a rank blasphemer, 
 whose hands are stained with the blood of his people's 
 future. 
 
 ' The Chinaman, Ku Hung-Ming, in his wonderful little book, The 
 Story of a CAinese Oxford Movement (Shanghai, 1910), knew this to be so 
 when, speaking of what the Englishman would discover if he studied the 
 Chinese more carefully, he wrote (p. 60) : " In the Chinaman, he (the 
 Englishman) would find Confucianism with ' its way of the superior 
 man ' which, little as the Englishman suspects, will one day change the 
 social order and break up the civilisation of Europe." Why ? Because 
 the civilisation of Europe is not based upon " the way of the superior 
 man." 
 
 5 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Like all particularly fortunate strokes of the dice, these 
 artists, or men of taste and sound judgment, these 
 " superior men," as the creed of Confucianism calls them, 
 do not occur in legions. Their number in a nation is 
 always small. They are the few, and, owing to their 
 highly complex natures, they are often difficult to rear. 
 "Pauci prudentia honesta ah deterioribus, utilia ah noxiis 
 discernunt, plures aliorum eventis docentur," — says 
 Tacitus.^ But where they are elevated to power — thai 
 is to say, wherever they become rulers — the soundest 
 instincts of sound life are made to lead. 
 
 For it is not only in the matter of establishing order 
 that good government excels. This might be called the 
 simple " craft " of governing. But it is also in that 
 quality of directing choice, in directing the likes and dis- 
 likes of a people, in fact in that great virtue of setting 
 a "good tone" in a nation, that good government dis- 
 tinguishes itself. For to the mediocre, to the less gifted 
 among men, a thousand paths lie open, a thousand goals 
 all beckoning and signing to man to go their way. Many 
 of these paths lead to destruction, a goodly number of 
 these goals mark out the horizon of decadence. Unless, 
 therefore, the taste and judgment of flourishing life inter- 
 vene, by means of the voice of the superior man, these 
 roads acquire their travellers and these goals obtain their 
 aspirants. It is there, then, that the virtue of that second 
 quality of good rulership can operate — that virtue which 
 sets the tone of a people, gives it a criterion of choice, 
 and guides its passions. And this second virtue of good 
 rulership might be called the " tutorship " of governing, 
 as opposed to the " craft " above mentioned. 
 
 It must be obvious that when no check, coming from 
 " superior man," intervenes between ordinary men and 
 the false roads and false goals that lure them continually; 
 
 1 Attna/t of Tacitus, Book IV, cap. 33. Translation by Church and 
 Brodribb (p. 128). "For it is but the few who have the foresight to 
 distinguish right from wrong, or what is sound from what is hurtful, 
 while most men learn wisdom from the fortunes of others." 
 
 6 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 when, that is to say, " every private man is judge of good 
 and evil actions" — a condition which Hobbes rightly 
 characterised as the " disease of the commonwealth " ^ — 
 not only is the life of a people or of a nation endangered, 
 but human life itself is actually under the threat of destruc- 
 tion. For the voice of mediocre and impoverished life 
 cannot be followed very long without humanity having to 
 pay heavily for its guidance. 
 
 I have said that these men of taste and sound judgment 
 are few; hence the high esteem in which an intelligent 
 and life-loving mediocrity will hold them. Hence, too, 
 the honours with which such a mediocrity usually lures 
 them to rulership. For though they, the superior men, 
 may instinctively incline to government, they must find 
 a willing medium for their art, i. e. a people able to recog- 
 nise superiority when it appears, or a people whose moral 
 values actually hold rulership up as the only duty of 
 superiority. 
 
 " It is certain," says Bolingbroke, " that the obligations 
 under which we lie to serve our country increase in pro- 
 portion to the ranks we hold, and the other circumstances 
 of birth, fortune and situation that call us to this service; 
 and above all, to the talents which God has given us to 
 perform it." ^ 
 
 In a sound organisation of society, then, superiority 
 implies, as it always should, the power of undertaking 
 responsibilities. " Superior talents, and superior rank 
 amongst oiu- fellow-creatures," says Bolingbroke, 
 "whether acquired by birth or by the course of acci- 
 dents, and the success of our own industry, are noble 
 prerogatives. Shall he who possesses them repine at the 
 obligation they lay him under, of passing his whole life 
 in the noblest occupation of which human nature is 
 capable.? To what higher station, to what greater glory 
 can a mortal aspire than to be, during the whole course 
 
 1 Leviathan, Chapter XXIX. 
 
 * On the Study of History (Davies, 1779), pp. 156-157. 
 
 7 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of his life, the support of good, the controul of bad 
 government, and the guardian of public liberty ? " ^ 
 
 Thus superiority is inseparable from our idea of the 
 ruler; because the ruler is essentially a protector, and only 
 where men see or experience superiority do they always 
 see and experience protection. Superior power is and 
 always has been the shelter of the weak, Superior strength 
 is and always has been something to cling to ; while 
 superior knowledge is and always has been something 
 awakening trust and confidence. It is the marked 
 superiority of the adult in strength, knowledge and power 
 that first captivates and makes a voluntary slave of the 
 child. It is the marked, though momentary, superiority 
 of the Alpine guide which makes the tourists in his charge 
 like unto menials doing his bidding. 
 
 Without superiority protection is impossible ; it is a 
 pretence, a farce. But to benefit from superiority pre- 
 supposes an attitude of obedience. Not only does one 
 honour superiority by obeying it, but obedience is actually 
 the only way of using superiority, or of profiting by it. 
 
 The obedience which is of value, which is fruitful and 
 which is lasting, is of that kind which redounds in some 
 way to the advantage of those who obey. "Whra-e it is 
 simply the outcome of coercing without benefiting the 
 subject, it not only tends to become sterile, but also stands 
 always on the brink of revolt. Great ruling castes have 
 never failed to understand this. No ruliijg caste, perhaps, 
 ever made a greatfer number of bloodless and victorious 
 invasions than the Incas of ancient Peru. Again and 
 again the tribes whose territories they overran laid down 
 their arms ; and submitted to their rule, overcome by the 
 persuasion of their superiority alone. But in support of 
 the contention that the Incas understood, as all great 
 
 1 On the Spirit of Patriotism (Davies, 1775), PP- 20-21. Let me 
 also recall Charles I's comment on the Petition of Right, just after 
 he had granted it: "It is my maxim that the people's liberties 
 strengthen the King's prerogitive, and the King's prerogative is to 
 defend the peoples libertie " 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 rulers have understood, what the obedience of these sub- 
 ject tribes implied, and what duties they (the Incas) had 
 to perform in return, the anthropologist Letourneau gives 
 us an interesting anecdote. 
 
 The Inca, Huay na-Cdpac, having invaded the territory 
 of a very savage and bestial people, discovered that they 
 had neither covering for their bodies nor homes to live 
 in; that they were addicted to homo-sexual practices, and 
 that they were horribly disfigured by labial ornaments 
 such as the Botocudos of Brazil were wont to wear. He 
 concluded from their habits and their general aspect that 
 they were quite incapable of improvement, far less, there- 
 fore, of civilisation; and, turning away from them in 
 disgust, he observed, " Here are a people who do not 
 deserve to obey us ! " ^ 
 
 I need not labour this point. No ruler who did not 
 earnestly believe that obedience to his rule must be an 
 advantage, and must remain an advantage, to those who 
 obeyed him could have used such language. These words 
 were perhaps the finest ever pronounced by a powerful, 
 conquering people, in turning away from an inferior race 
 which it lay in their power to oppress or to exterminate, 
 if not to improve. That one sentence involves a whole 
 cosmogony, very strange to our modern notions; but it 
 also implies an understanding of the relationship of the 
 obedient to the obeyed, which is no less strange to us 
 of the twentieth century than it is likewise unquestionably 
 profound and correct. 
 
 As Thomas Hobbes wisely said, " The end of obedience 
 is protection, wheresoever a man seeth it, either in his 
 own or in another's sword, nature applieth his obedience 
 to it, and his endeavour to maintain it." ^ 
 
 Thus to disobey is not only to dishonour, but to deny 
 superiority." 
 
 1 Vevolutim de V education, by Qh. Letourneau, p, 209. The italics 
 are niine.^ — A. M. L. 
 
 2 Leviathan, Chapter XXI. 
 
 ' Ibid., Chapter X. " To obey is to honour, because no man obeys 
 
 9 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 When all the claims of both the "craft" and the 
 " tutorship " of governing are conscientiously met by 
 rulers, then only can it be truly said that they rule by divine 
 right; and nothing but a vis major, such as an earthquake, 
 a devastating flood, a destructive comet or a superior 
 Force, can shake them from their position of power. 
 
 Admitting, therefore, that the ability to appreciate 
 superiority is to hand, all insurrections and rebellions, 
 when they are internal troubles and do not arise from 
 sedition introduced from outside by a rival power, are 
 always questions of the heart. They are but rarely even 
 economical in their nature. They are always a sign that 
 rulers have lost their essential quality — superiority — that 
 the " craft " and " tutorship " of governing are inade- 
 quately exercised, and that the ruled no longer admit the 
 divine right of those above them.^ For as Bolingbroke 
 justly observesj "A divine right to govern ill is an 
 absurdity : to assert it is blasphemy. A people may raise 
 a bad prince to the throne; but a good king alone can 
 derive his right to govern from God." '^ 
 
 them whom they think have no power to help or hurt them. And 
 consequently to disobey is to dishonour." 
 
 ^ See Disraeli's Con'tngsby (Langdon Davies Edition), p. 290. "I 
 think," said Sidonia, " that there is no error so vulgar as to believe that 
 revolutions are occasioned by economical causes. They come in, 
 doubtless, very often to precipitate a catastrophe, but rarely do they 
 occasion one. I know no period, for example, when physical comfort 
 was more diffused in England than in 1 640. England had a moderate 
 population, a very improved agriculture, a rich commerce ; yet she was 
 on the eve of the greatest and most violent changes that she has as yet 
 experienced. . . . Admit it, the cause was not physical. The imagina- 
 tion of England rose against the Government. It proves that when 
 that faculty is astir in a nation it will sacrifice even physical comfort to 
 follow its impulses." 
 
 ' The Idea of a Patriot King (Davies, 1775), pp. 78-79. See also 
 Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, Chapter XXI. " The obligation of subjects 
 to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the 
 power lasteth by which he is able to protect them." Here Hobbes 
 does not even consider good or bad government, but simply « the power 
 to protect," which, if failing, relievei the inferior of his attitude of 
 lubjection. 
 
 10 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 I have already described the qualities which constitute 
 the chief superiority of the true ruler. I said they were 
 taste and good judgment, arising directly from the 
 promptings of fortunate and flourishing life in the superior 
 man. 
 
 Are such men born to a nation.? Do men who know 
 what flourishing life Wants, and who thus stand higher 
 than their fellows — men who are wise enough, strong 
 enough and conscientious enough to undertake the appal- 
 ling responsibility that ruling implies — come into existence 
 among ordinary mortals? 
 
 Most certainly they do. Every nation gets them. Not 
 every nation, however, is wise enough to use them. It 
 is true that they appear more frequently in ages of order 
 and of long tradition than in ages of anarchy and constant 
 change; because their very rule, which is a reflection of 
 themselves, must, in order to be good, be the emanation 
 of something square, symmetrical and harmonious. They 
 themselves, therefore, must be something square, sym- 
 metrical and harmonious in body and spirit. But how is 
 squareness in body and spirit, symmetry and harmony 
 attained in one man.? Only by long tradition, only by 
 the long cultivation, through generations, of the same 
 virtues, the same tastes and the same aversions; only by 
 the steady and unremitting storing and garnering of 
 strength, conscientiousness and honesty. It is only thus 
 that a man can be produced who never hesitates between 
 two alternatives, and whose " conscience " is the definite 
 voice of his ancestors saying "yes" or "no," "we did 
 like this," or "we did not do like this," every time he 
 braces himself for action. 
 
 And that is why the true ruler, the true superior man, 
 is always a beautiful man, according to the standard of 
 beauty of his people.* Because regular features, strong 
 
 ^ According to an early Peruvian legend, the first Incas who acquired 
 a hold upon the uncivilised population of ancient Peru impressed and 
 awed their subject people by their beauty. Sec Ch. Letourneau, 
 U evolution de I' iducation, p. 196. 
 
 II 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 features, harmonious features and grace of body are bred 
 only by a regular life lasting over generations, strength 
 of character exercised for generations, harmonious action 
 enduring for generations, and that mastery in action which 
 is the result of long practice for generations, and which 
 leads to ease in action and therefore to grace. 
 
 He who doubts that this long tradition produces that 
 beauty of body and grace of countenance and build which, 
 when it expresses itself in the art of ruling or any other 
 kind of art, must produce beauty, harmony and grace, 
 contradicts not only one of the most fundamental beliefs 
 of mankind, but also, one of the most fundamental facts 
 of science. 
 
 As early as the time pf Mcncius, one of the most noted 
 of the followers of Confucius, this belief was already pro- 
 nounced quite categorically, though unscientifically, as 
 follows — 
 
 " What belongs by his nature to the superior man are 
 benevolence, righteousness, propriety and knowledge. 
 These are rooted in his heart; their growth and mani- 
 festation are a mild harmony appearing in the counten- 
 ance, a rich fulness in the back, and the character imparted 
 by the four linabs. Those limbs understand to arrange 
 themselves without being told." * 
 
 And men like Dr. Reibmayr have since shown con- 
 clusively with what care and what scrupulous observance 
 of traditional customs and rites the characteristic type of 
 beauty of a race or a tribe, and therefore the superlative 
 beauty of the superior individual in that race or tribe, are 
 attained.* 
 
 1 Ciinese Classics, Vol. II, The Works of Mencius, Book VII, 
 Chap. 21. The Jews also recognised this fact very early in their 
 history. See the laws concerning the beauty of the body, or rather the 
 faults of the body in regard to the ruling priesthood (Leviticus xxi. 
 i^-2S)> whilst there is an ancient Arab proverb which proves con- 
 clusively that the Arabs laid and still lay great store by the message 
 that a face and body reveal. The proverb is : " When you do not 
 know a man's parents look at his appearance." 
 
 * See his ItizucAt and VermUchung (Leipzig, 1 897). 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 We know that beauty of design or construction always 
 involves a certain observance of order and balance. Why, 
 then, should the production of beauty in the human race 
 be an exception to this rule? And if bodily beauty is 
 the creation of order lasting over generations, then, since 
 the spirit is but the emanation of the body, a beautiful 
 spirit must likewise depend upon the same laws that 
 govern the production of a beautiful body, and the two 
 are inseparable. None but shallow people deny this. 
 None but those who are hopelessly corrupted by the 
 dangerous errors of democratic disorder and Puritanism 
 ever doubt that beauty of body and spirit must be related. 
 Herbert Spencer is among the philosophers who insisted 
 upon this relationship, and his essay on the subject is, in 
 riiy opinion, the most valuable treatise he ever wrote. ^ 
 
 An ugly or repulsive aristocrat is, therefore, a contra- 
 diction in terms? Certainly! 
 
 What is the only creed that can be offended at such a 
 doctrine? A creed that maintains not only that body and 
 spirit are distinct, but also that the body is in any case 
 ignoble, and that only a beautiful spirit can sanctify and 
 justify a body, whether it be beautiful or botched. 
 
 But the definition of the true superior man or aristocrat 
 which I gave at the beginning of the discussion — that he 
 was a fortunate stroke of nature's dice, a synopsis and 
 digest of flourishing and full life — precludes the very 
 possibility of his being an ill-shaped or ugly man. It 
 was, however, necessary to give a more detailed demon- 
 stration of the quality "beauty," as nowadays, strange 
 as it may seem, the attitude I assume in this respect is 
 not exactly taken for granted. 
 
 Now, in advancing the proposition that a community of 
 men, whether numbering tens, or hundreds of thousands, 
 
 ^ See Vol. II, Collected Essays, p. 387, "Personal Beauty." Schopen- 
 hauer, in his essay " Zur Physiognomik " (Chapter XXIX of the second 
 volume of the Parerga and Paralipomena), also upholds the doctrine of 
 the fundamental agreement of body and spirit. See also p. 317 of 
 this book (Chapter VII). 
 
 13 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 should be governed only by the few, I am not guilty of 
 very great heterodoxy, even from the purely Liberal stand- 
 point; for even so thorough a Liberal as John Stuart Mill 
 accepted this as a principle, and argued that the most a 
 Popular Parliament could do was to play the part of a 
 supreme Watch Committee.^ But this amounts to no 
 more than to say that government must always be with 
 the consent of the people — a principle which the Chinese 
 have observed for centuries, although the Chinese people 
 are not actually represented by delegates. 
 
 Nobody, however, would cavil at the idea of all govern- 
 ment being carried on with the consent of the people. Of 
 course, the people must watch that they are well governed. 
 The very condition of rule by Divine Right, as I have 
 stated above, involves this proviso. And aristocracies who 
 imagine that they can rule hedonisticaUy and egotistically 
 without the consent of the people are bound to fail and 
 to be swept away. 
 
 In regard to this matter, it is surely a significant fact 
 that such very profound, though vastly different, thinkers 
 as the Chinaman Mencius and the Italian St. Thomas 
 Aquinas ^ — thinkers separated from each other not only 
 by centuries of time, but also by thousands of leagues of 
 territory — should both have conceded the right of revolu- 
 tion to a badly ruled people. Mencius, that wise follower 
 of Confucius, in addition to justifying regicide in the case 
 of an unjust sovereign,* stated as a principle that " if the 
 
 i ^ Representative Government, Chapter V. " Instead of the function of 
 governing, for which it is so radically unfit, the proper office of a repre- 
 sentative assembly is to watch and control the government ; to throw 
 the light of publicity on its acts ; to compel a full exposition and 
 justification of all of them which any one considers questionable, to 
 censure them if found condemnable, and, if men who compose the 
 government abuse their trust, or fulfil it in a manner which conflicts 
 with the deliberate sense of the nation, to expel them from office, and 
 either expressly or_ virtually appoint their successors." 
 
 * See Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (loth Ed.>. 
 Vol. I, p. 6. ' 
 
 • See The Chinese Classics (translated by James Legge, D.D.), Vol II 
 Book I, Part II, Chap. 8. 
 
 H 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 Emperor be not benevolent, he cannot preserve the Empire 
 from passing from him. If the sovereign of a state be 
 not benevolent, he cannot preserve his Kingdpm." ^ 
 
 I wish to lay no stress, therefore, upon the contention 
 that government should be carried on by the few — that 
 seems to be generally accepted by the consensus of intel- 
 ligent thinkers on this matter. I only wish to emphasise 
 the point that the few who do govern should be of the 
 stamp that I have described above. 
 
 Only on that condition can government be successful; 
 for, as I have said, there is not only a "craft," but also 
 a " tutorship," of governing. 
 
 I am, therefore, concerned to show that whoever these 
 few may be to whom the government of a nation is en- 
 trusted, they should be able not only to manage the prac- 
 tical business of public affairs, but also to direct, inspire 
 and animate the hearts and imagination of the people. 
 The very fact that here in England we already hear some 
 people ignorant and materialistic enough to clamour for 
 a government of merely business men, and that no very 
 great alarm or panic has been caused by the suggestion, 
 shows how very far we have departed from the wise 
 economy that never forgets that there is a "tutorship" 
 as well as a " craft " of governing. 
 
 Since men are born unequal, and natural distinctions 
 between them as regards nobility, strength, beauty, size, 
 intelligence and elevation of spirit are undeniable, the 
 wisest regime is the one in which these distinctions are 
 not ignored or overlooked, but exploited, placed, used 
 and turned to the best advantage. Admitting that some 
 must and can rule, there will be others who will have to 
 supply the community with the material needs of life, 
 others who will be the servants of these, and so on, until 
 that labourer is reached whose capacities fit him only for 
 the plough or the spade. If, however, the society is to 
 benefit from the nile of the superior man with taste and 
 judgment, a certain spiritual tendency will have to be 
 ^ Chinese Classics, Book IV, Chap. 3. 
 
 H 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 made to prevail by him, which will direct the manner in 
 which these material supplies must be used, the method 
 and moderation with yrhich the people's passions and 
 desires may be indulged, so that liothing may be misused 
 or abused, and so that no gift of the earth or of the body 
 may turn to a curse and a poison. A certain art of life 
 must, therefore, enter into the community — a certain good 
 taste on which its power and permanence depend.^ There 
 must be not only producers and consumers; even the 
 lowest in the community must develop a heart, and that 
 heart must be furnished. 
 
 " With fear and trembling," said Confucius, *' take 
 care of the heart of the people: that is the root of the 
 matter in education — that is the highest education." 
 
 And who can supply this furniture of the heart — ^who 
 can direct and guide mere industry, if not the man of 
 higher judgment, i. e. of good taste, who sets, as it were, 
 " the tone " of his people ? 
 
 In his Story of a Chinese Oxford Movement the China- 
 man Ku Hung-Ming ^ says : " In a healthy and normal 
 state of society in China, the nation has to depend first 
 upon the power of industry of the people or working class 
 to produce food and other necessary commodities for the 
 national well-being. The nation has next to depend upon 
 the power of intelligence of the Chinese literati to train, 
 educate and regulate the power of industry of the people, 
 and properly to distribute the product of that industry. 
 Lastly, and most important of all, the nation has to depend 
 upon the nobility of character of the Manchu Aristocracy 
 
 1 See Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (Chapter XXIX). "Though 
 nothing can be immortal which mortals make, yet, if men had tjie use 
 of reason they pretend to, their commonwealth might be secured at 
 least from perishing from internal disease. For by the nature of their 
 institutions they are designed to live as long as mankind or as the laws 
 of nature, or as justice itself which gives them life. Therefore, when 
 they come to be dissolved, not by external violence but by intestine 
 disorder, the fault is not in men, as they are the ' matter,' but as they 
 are the ' makers ' and orderers of men." 
 
 'p-4- 
 
 i6 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 to direct-^— to see that the power of industry of the people 
 is nobly directed, directed to noble purpose, and also that 
 the product of that industry is justly and humanely dis- 
 tributed. In short, the power of industry of the people 
 in China has to produce; the power of intelligence of the 
 Chinese literati has to educate; and the nobility of the 
 Manchu Aristocracy has to direct the power of industry 
 of the people to a noble national life — to a noble civilisa- 
 tion. ^ Foreigners who have travelled in the interior of 
 China and seen the renaains of bridges and canals in the 
 country will understand what I mean by noble direction 
 of national life — the direction of the power of industry 
 of the people as regards things material to noble purposes. 
 As for things of the mind, works such as the great K'ang- 
 hsi dictionary will attest sufficiently to the nobility of 
 character ofthe early Manchu Emperors, and their ability 
 to direct the power of industry of the mind of the nation 
 to noble purposes." 
 
 Hence it seems to be an essential part of the highest 
 utility in a natron that there should be some members of 
 it who stand much higher than the rest, and who can give 
 a meaning and a direction to their inferiors' manual or 
 mental labour. Thus, even admitting that the essential 
 and most difficult task of general legislation has been 
 already satisfactorily accomplished by an artist legislator, 
 I maintain that those who continue the work must be 
 cultured, tasteful and artistic men; otherwise that very 
 humanity which insists upon the man bearirtg the hardest 
 material burden of the community, being materially con- 
 tent and spiritually well-nourished, will be violated and 
 spurned, to the glory of the Devil and of the Dragon of 
 Anarchy. 
 
 But that flourishing life in body and spirit which is 
 the sine qua non of the superior man, of the artist ruler, 
 is not bred by struggle, manual labour, strenuous bodily 
 exertions and the neglect of spiritual pursuits. The man 
 who possesses this endowment of superlative vitality in 
 body and spirit will be very largely dependent, as his 
 c 17 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 father, grandfather and great-grandfather were before 
 him, upon the industry of the people. He will, therefore, 
 have to pay for the glory of his exalted calling, not only 
 by being exploited as a responsible ruler by the mass 
 beneath him, but by being dependent upon it for his 
 sustenance and security. That is why it is so preposterous 
 and unintelligent for a ruler-aristocrat to regard himself 
 as a mere man of wealth or property, whose means can 
 be consumed in a round of pleasure or in a life of ease 
 without any concern about the duties that all golden and 
 well-fed leisure tacitly implies. It amounts to a miscon- 
 ception and a debasing of his dignity for him tq rank 
 himself with the ordinary plutocrat, who simply has no 
 duties because he has no gifts. If he, the ruler-aristocrat, 
 understands the price of aristocratic leisure, he must know 
 that it is meditation — ^meditation upon the profound 
 problems of the " craft " and " tutorship " of his exalted 
 calling. He should remember that the mere " business " 
 or "craft " of his duties will probably be taken for granted 
 by those he governs. They will not even reckon his 
 exertions in this respect; for when all goes smoothly, who 
 suspects that there are pains behind the process? 
 
 What they will not take for granted, however, will be 
 his pains about their heart, if he really does take pains 
 in this matter. This presupposes a divine element in 
 him that all men do not possess— it is the element which 
 distinguishes the true ruler from that other kind of 
 governor tvho is efficient only in the business or " craft " 
 of ruling. 
 
 It would seem a perfectly natural thing that the ruler 
 who was very much in earnest about the craft and the 
 tutorship of his calling could not possibly be a very 
 happy man, as people understand such a creature now- 
 adays. The ordinary pleasures of common human life 
 would, by virtue of his very office and of his vast know- 
 ledge, fall rather short of his concept of what constituted 
 happiness. He would have to be content with the secret 
 joys that attend the artist at his work-^that is the utmost 
 
 i8 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 that his life could bring him in the matter of happiness. 
 But as to the rest, as to those joys which constitute the 
 staple diet of the present plutocratic hedonist, he, the 
 ruler, would be a very sad man indeed. For apart from 
 his higher taste in happiness, his very respect for those 
 depending upon him for their security and their guidance 
 would drive his sense of responsibility so high as to keep 
 him ever vigilant, ever thoughtful, and perhaps ever 
 melancholy too.^ Those who are experienced even in so 
 humble an art as that of keeping children happy will 
 understand what I mean when I say that the hand which 
 dispenses happiness does not necessarily quiver with joy 
 itself. 
 
 The fact that this concern about the contentedness and 
 comfort of the man who does the rough work of the State 
 constitutes an important part of that sense of responsibility 
 which all true rulers must feel, finds an excellent formula 
 in one of my favourite anecdotes about Napoleon. 
 
 It is given by Enierson in his essay Napoleon^ or the 
 Man of the World, and is as follows : " When walking 
 with Mrs. Balcombe, some servants carrying heavy boxes 
 passed on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in 
 rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, 
 saying, ' Respect the burden, madam ! ' " 
 
 " Respect the burden ! " This is what all noble and 
 successful rulers have done. A less noble nature, a nature 
 unfitted for the task of ruling, such, for instance, as the 
 
 ^ See Madame de Rmusafs Memoires, Vol. I, p. loi. Speaking of 
 Napoleon she says : " La gravite etait lejimd de son caracttre ; non celk qui 
 vient de la noblesse et de la. digniti des habitudes, mais telle que donne la 
 profindeur des meditations. Dans sa jeunesse il etait viveur ; plus tard il 
 devint triste . . " See also Bolingbroke, On the Spirit of Patriotism 
 (Davies, 1775), pp. 5-6. Speaking of the two kinds of men, the Vulgar 
 and the Few, Bolingbroke says: "The latter come into the world, or 
 at least continue in it after the effects of surprise and inexperience are 
 over, like men who are sent on more important errands. They observe 
 with distinction, they admire with knowledge. They may indulge 
 themselves in pleasure ; but as their industry is not employed about 
 trifles, so their amusements are not made the business of their lives." 
 
 n 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 nature of most of our English and European aristocrats, 
 past and present, does not understand or pay heed to such 
 a principle. As an example of a vulgar person's behaviour 
 in circumstances almost similar to those described in 
 Emerson's anecdote, hear the following^ — 
 
 " More than forty years ago, a party of six young 
 Englishmen went out for an excursion in the country in 
 the neighbourhood of one of the Treaty Ports [of China]. 
 They were entirely ignorant of Chinese etiquette and 
 custom, and while walkihg along one of the narrow paths 
 at the side of a paddy-field they met an old man carrying 
 a load, whom they thought very rudely insisted on the 
 path being given up to him and his burden, until he had 
 passed with it. They pushed him out of the way, and 
 struck him with their sticks for his rudeness, entirely 
 unaware that they were the oiFenders, and gross offenders 
 too. The path being narrow and there being no room for 
 the encumbered and unencumbered to pass at the same 
 time, the Chinese, with commendable common sense, allow 
 the burden-bearer in such cases the right of way, while 
 the unencumbered, who can easily step off the way, do 
 so. . . . The villagers, indignant at the insult, rose, took 
 the young- Englishmen into custody, and avenged their 
 wrongs by putting them to death, after some days of 
 imprisonment." ^ 
 
 In my opinion, of course, the execution of these six 
 Englishmen was entirely justified. Why.? Because they' 
 had sinned against a divine precept. Those representatives 
 of flourishing life, Confucius and Napoleon, had taught 
 independently that the burden must be respected.^ This, 
 then, was a law of flourishing life itself. To flout the 
 
 1 TAingj Chinese, by J. Dyer Ball, pp. 253-254. 
 
 * Petrarch is another good instance of a profound thinker who was 
 no less exacting in the demands he made upon the wise ruler. Address- 
 ing his patron, the Lord of Padua, he said ^ " Thou must not be the 
 master but the father of thy subjects, and must love thenj as thy 
 children ; yea, as members of thy body." See Burclchardt, op. cit., 
 p. 9. 
 
 ao 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 bidding of flourishing life is, as I have said in the early 
 part of this discussion, rank blasphemy. And blasphemy 
 of that sort deserves death even niore than murder does, 
 because it jeopardises not only the life of one man, but 
 the life of a whole nation. You may argue that the six 
 young Englishmen were ignorant of Chinese customs and 
 manners, and had different manners and customs in their 
 own home. But. this only makes the matter worse; for 
 it means that instead of being only half-a-dozen isolated 
 dangerous and blaspheming barbarians, they must hail 
 from a land teeming with such blaspheming barbarians, 
 otherwise they would have learnt that fundamental prin- 
 ciple of flourishing life at home. The sooner six such 
 dangerous creatures were killed, therefore, the better. 
 
 The Chinese burden-bearer was accustomed to live in 
 a country where some true ruler spirit wais rife; he, there- 
 fore, felt justified in enforcing that principle of flourishing 
 life which reads " Respect the burden." The Englishmen, 
 on the other hand, came from a country where puling 
 sentimental charity towards the burden-bearer went hand 
 in hand with brutal exploitation of him. They were, there- 
 fore, dangerous; the blood of millions of burden-bearers 
 was already on their hands before they touched that 
 Chinese workman, and it was right that they should be 
 slaughtered like blasphemers. 
 
 The light that the moral of these two anecdotes throws 
 upon the downfall of the aristocracies in Europe is very 
 interesting indeed. The omission to " respect the burden" 
 is a violation not only of the " craft," but also of the 
 " tutorship," of governing. 
 
 And what is there that is not included under the head 
 of " respect the burden " ? ^ How many problems, socio- 
 
 ^ Many instances could be given of Napoleon's unswerving adherence 
 to this principle, and, in his Memoirs to serve fir the History rf 'Napoleon I 
 the Baron de M6ndval (English translation) gives two interesting anec- 
 dotes, which, though not important in themselves, reveal the consistency 
 of Napoleon's ruler instincts. The first, on p. 126, is as follows: 
 " M. Amid^e Jaubert, who had been General Bonaparte's interpreter 
 
 21 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 logical, physiological, artistic and political, on whose proper 
 solution the contentedness and comfort of the burden- 
 bearer depend, have not to be faced and mastered before 
 the "respect of the burden" has exacted its last office 
 from the ruler-aristocrat and his peers? No wonder 
 Bolingbroke, when speaking of rulers, was able to say, 
 "They may indulge in pleasure; but as their industry is 
 not employed upon trifles, so their amusements are not 
 made the business of their lives." ^ 
 
 Indeed, if rulers take their task to heart, the mere 
 " craft " of governing, apart from the " tutorship " of 
 governing, is enough to tax the energies of the greatest, 
 and to make them pay very, very dearly for the privilege 
 of being at the head of the social pyramid. 
 
 There seems to be very convincing evidence to show 
 that the commercial aristocracy of Venice approximated 
 very nearly to the ideal rule of the best.' It consisted of 
 men of great taste, courage, honour and intelligence, of 
 men who could be, and were, both rigorous and kind. 
 "Care of the people, in peace as well as in war," says 
 Burckhardt, "was characteristic of this government, and 
 
 [in the Egyptian campaign], said that one day seeing the General 
 returning from the trenches, harassed with fatigue and dying with thirst, 
 he had told him that a Christian had just brought a skin ot wine as a 
 present, and that Bonaparte ordered it to be immediately carried to the 
 ambulance." The second (pp. 127-128) tells how Napoleon, during 
 his sojourn in Cairo, arranged for a military band to play various national 
 airs " every day at noon, on the squares opposite the hospitals," to 
 " inspire the sick with gaiety, and recall to their memory the most 
 beautiful moments of their past campaigns." And here is Men^val's 
 comment on the anecdote : " This mark of interest given to poor sick 
 men, to unhappy wounded soldiers, sad and discouraged at the thought 
 of their distant homes, reveals a delicate attention, a maternal solicitude, 
 as Comte d'Orsay expressed it, and that provident goodness which was 
 the basis of Napoleon's character" See also the Duke of Rovigo's 
 Memoirs, which is full of instances of Napoleon's generous good-nature 
 where his inferiors or dependants were concerned. 
 
 ^ See note on p. 19. 
 
 * Interesting confirmation of this view is given by E. A. Freeman in 
 his Comparative Politics, p. 266. 
 
 aa 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 its attention to the wounded, even to those of the enemy, 
 excited the admiration of other states. Public institutions 
 of every kind found in Venice their pattern; the pension- 
 ing of retired servants was carried out systematically, and 
 included a provision for widows and orphans." ^ And if 
 it had not been for the peculiar instability which consti- 
 tutes one of the worst evils of a State depending for its 
 existence on trading alone, this remarkable little band of 
 rulers might have given Europe a happy and rare example 
 of permanence and equilibrium. 
 
 If a race, or a nation, or a people be blessed with a 
 few such rulers, then its security, comfort and heart will 
 be in safe keeping. And not only will the industry of 
 the people reward the ruler and make him great and 
 powerful, but their character, which is the most important 
 of all, by becoming an approximation to the type dictated 
 by the voice of flourishing life, will constitute a sound 
 and stable basis upon which an almost permanent creation 
 may he built by the aristocrat if he chooses. 
 
 And the converse of this condition gives the exact 
 formula of decadence and degeneration. For what are 
 decadence and degeneration ? Decadence and degeneration 
 are states in a nation's career in which it has forgotten 
 the precepts and values of flourishing life, and in which 
 the voice of flourishing^ life can no longer make itself 
 heard in its midst. Why, then, are England, France, 
 Germany and almost the whole of Europe decadent to-day ? 
 Because for many hundreds of years now the precepts and 
 principles of flourishing life have been neglected, for- 
 gotten and even scorned in the Western world. Decadence 
 means practically that the voice of flourishing life has been 
 silenced, that the true aristocrat is dethroned or no longer 
 bred. 
 
 You must not, however, suppose that in a decadent or 
 
 degenerate State the people, the masses, are guided by no 
 
 taste, by no values. Because nothing could be more plain 
 
 to-day than the fact that they are so guided or prompted. 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 67. 
 
 23 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 But. the taste which guides them is confused, uncertain, 
 independent of any higher or wise authority; it is self- 
 made, reared on insufficient knowledge, culture and health. 
 And, therefore, the promptings of their heart, instead of 
 leading them to an ascent in life, lead them to further 
 degeneration. It is bad taste which reigns to,-day. All 
 taste .which is not the precept of flourishing life> must be 
 bad or dangerous taste. 
 
 With Guicciardini, Disraeli also realised, the importance 
 of this matter of the heart and character of a nation, and 
 in Coningsby we read : " A political institution is a 
 machine; the motive power is in the national character 
 — ^with that it rests whether the machine will benefit 
 society, or, destroy it." ^ 
 
 Thus all attempts at ruling a people on purely material- 
 istic lines, all attempts at exploiting, their industry without 
 tending their heart, their Imagination and their character, 
 must and do invariably fail. A people that is going to 
 flourish must be taught a certain fastidiousness in the 
 manner in which it works and spends the fruit of its 
 labour; ' it must be given a sound taste for discerning 
 good from bad, that which is beneficial from that which 
 is harmful, and healthy, vital conduct from sick, degenerate 
 conduct. I do not mean. that they. must have that spon- 
 taneous and unerring taste which is the possession of 
 nature's "lucky strokes" — the incarnations of full and 
 flourishing life — ^who are the true aristocrats; but I mean 
 that they should have a taste founded on likes and dis- 
 likes, points of view and opinions, acquired from a higher, 
 
 ■'.Langdon Davjes Edition, p. 290. 
 
 * See Ku Hung-Ming, Tie Story of a Chinese Oxford Movement, pp. 1 3 
 and 14 : "When the power of industry of a people in a community or 
 nation is nobly directed and not wasted, then the community or nation 
 js truly rich, notjn money or possession of. big ugly houses, but rich in 
 the health of the body and beauty of the soul of the people. . . . Eor 
 without these things which Goethe calls the beautiful, there is no 
 nobility of character, and without nobility of character, as we have seen, 
 the power of industry of the people in a nation will be wasted in ignoble 
 pnd vyasteful consumption," 
 
 24 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 guiding and discriminating authority. "For," as Hobbes 
 says, " the actions of men proceed from their opinions, 
 and in the well-governing of opinions consisteth the well- 
 governing of men's actions." ^ 
 
 It is for this reason that I believe that the factor which 
 has largely contributed to the downfall of the European 
 aristocracies has been the relegation of the care of the 
 people's character to a body distinct from and often hostile 
 to the actual governors.^ For apart from the fact that 
 the credo of this independent body, the Church, happens 
 to be hostile to sharp distinctions between man and man, 
 and irrespective of the undoubted truth that to it all men, 
 whether aristocrats or plebeians, have always appeared 
 more or less as. equals, or at least as subordinates who, 
 when the interests of the Church were at stake, might, 
 if necessary, be treated as a mass without distinctions of 
 rank, there is this feature in the influence of the Church 
 which should not be forgotten: it robbed the rulers of 
 that active exercise of the " tutorship " of governing by 
 which the people, as we have seen, lay such great store, 
 and which is the most potent medium for binding a people 
 and their rulers together. Because, as Hobbes says, 
 " Benefits oblige, and obligation is thraldom, and unre- 
 quitable obligation perpetual thraldom." ^ And no benefit 
 is more unrequitable than that gift to the heart which 
 makes a man conscious of a higher purpose and aim in 
 life than the mere material round of everyday existence. 
 The idea of an ecclesiastical body ministering to the 
 spiritual wants of the people is not, however, necessarily 
 anti-aristocratic in itself, for the Church might have been 
 conducted and controlled absolutely by the aristocracy, as 
 ,it was in Venice in the hey-day of her power. It is the 
 fact that it was not so controlled by the majority of aris- 
 tocracies that proved harmful to them, and MachiavelH 
 
 ^ Leviathan, Chapter XVIII. 
 
 ^ See Palgrave's History of the jfnglo'Saxetis, where the Church is 
 shown to have been " the corner-stone of English liberty." 
 ' Leviathan, Chapter XI. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 is among the most distinguished pdliticians who under- 
 stood this.^ 
 
 But the relation of the ecclesiastical body to the people 
 in Europe had another and perhaps still more deleterious 
 influence, though, maybe, it was more indirect than the 
 first. For by "undertaking independently to minister to 
 the hearts of the people, not for a national or racial pur- 
 pose, but for a purpose that lay beyond races and nations, 
 it not only undermined the jealous love of race and nation- 
 ality which we find so constructive a force in the Greeks 
 of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., but also gradually 
 divorced the very idea of aristocracy from that noble duty 
 of caring for the hearts of the masses, which was the very 
 task that gave all the gralvity and higher responsibility to 
 the calling of the ruler-aristocrat. By doing this, it 
 destroyed in part his conscientiousness and his earnest- 
 ness, and left him only the " craft " or business of 
 governing, which, as I have pointed out, is much more 
 often taken for granted by a people, even when it is done 
 with the most consummate skill, than that more delicate 
 and artistic duty of firing their imaginations and filling 
 their hearts, which constitutes the divine element of 
 rulership. 
 
 " I say it seems to me," says Bolingbroke,* " that the 
 Author of nature has thought fit to mingle from time to 
 time, among the societies of men, a few, and but a few 
 of those, oh whom He is graciously pleased to bestow a 
 larger proportion of the ethereal spirit than is given in 
 the ordinary course of His providence to the sons of men. 
 These are they who engross almost the whole reason of 
 the species, who are born to instruct, to guide and to 
 preserve; who are designed to be the tutors and the 
 guardians of human kind. "When they prove such, they 
 exhibit to us example of the highest virtue and the truest 
 piety; and they deserve to have their festivals kept, 
 
 * See his reply to Cardinal Rouen in Chapter III of The Prince. 
 " On the ^irit of Patriotism (Davies, 1775), p. a. 
 
 a6 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 instead of the pack of Anachorites and Enthusiasts with 
 whose names the calendar is crowded and disgraced. 
 When these men apply their talents to other purposes, 
 when they strive to be great and despise being good, 
 they commit a most sacrilegious breach of trust; they 
 pervert the means, they defeat as far as in them lies the 
 designs of Providence, and disturb in some sort the system 
 of Infinite Wisdom. To misapply these talents is the 
 most diffused, and therefore the greatest, of crimes in its 
 nature and consequences, but to keep them unexerted and 
 unemployed is a crime too." 
 
 And now, apart from the broad and general advantages 
 to which I have already referred, what other real and 
 lasting benefits does human society derive from these 
 divine missionaries sent direct from flourishing life who 
 occasionally descend among us, as Bolingbroke says, and 
 who are much more deserving of a place in the Calendar 
 than all the neurotic, exasperated and bitter saints who 
 now figure there.? 
 
 By the order and stability they establish, by their instinc- 
 tive avoidance of those by-paths which lead to degenera- 
 tion, and their deliberate choice of those highways leading 
 to the ascent of their fellows, they give rise to everything 
 which is of value on earth and which makes life a boon 
 instead of a bane. 
 
 Beauty, Art, Will, Conscience and Spiritual Strength 
 to face and to endure even the inevitable pangs and pains 
 of a full life— nay, the very willingness to embrace them, 
 because they are known to have a vital purpose — these 
 are some of the things that can be reared by long tradition 
 and careful discipline alone, and these are some of the 
 things that depend for their existence on the aristocratic 
 rule. For real Beauty is impossible without regular and 
 stable living, lasting over generations; real Art is impos- 
 sible without surplus health and energy, the outcome of 
 generations of careful storing and garnering of vital forces, 
 and without that direction and purpose which the supreme 
 artist — the tasteful legislator — alone can give to the minor 
 
 27 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 artists, be they painters, architects or musicians, within his 
 realm. Will is impossible without sound instincts getting 
 the mastery of a family or a tribe through generations 
 spent in the rearing of those instincts, and causing that 
 family or tribe passionately to desire one thing more than 
 another; while Conscience and Spiritual Strength depend 
 for their degree of development simply upon the length 
 of the line of ancestors who have systematically, built them 
 up for an individual. For what I call conscience is nothing 
 more than the voice of a man's ancestors speaking in him, 
 saying this is right and that is wrong, and uttering this 
 accompanying comment to his deeds, either feebly or 
 powerfully in proportion to the length of the time during 
 which unbroken traditions have lasted in his family. And 
 Spiritual Strength in facing or assailing difficulties or pain 
 is the outcome of the consciousness off being right, .which 
 arises from the fact that the comment of one's ancestors 
 in one's breast is heard to be on one's side and with 
 one's cause. 
 
 For all these things to be reared, even for the unlsroken 
 tradition, on which these, things depend, to be established, 
 there must, however, be great stability and permanenqe 
 in the institutions of a race or a people, and it is the 
 direction of flourishing life, alone, speaking through her 
 representatives, that can reveal the good taste and the 
 good judgment necessary for the preservation of such 
 stability and permanence. For stability and permanence 
 are desired only when beauty is present. When, therefore, 
 we see things constantly changing, as they are to-day, 
 when every day brings a new custom and a new curse, 
 we may feel sure not only- that the voice of the real ruler 
 is silent in our midst, but that life is growing consclovs 
 of her ugliness. For, like a beautiful woman looking into 
 a mirror, a people who have once achieved beauty, real 
 beauty, and caught a glimpse of this beauty in all the 
 departments of their social life, must cry for permanence 
 rather than change, stability rather than flux. It is only 
 then that change is the most dreaded catastrophe of all; 
 
 28 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT 
 
 for change threatens to rob the beauty from the face, the 
 limbs and trunk of their civilisation, and their pride and 
 love of its beauty is outraged by the very thought of 
 such vandalism. The permanence and stability of a 
 people's inistitutions are called by the ugly name of 
 " stagnation " only when these institutions have little or 
 no beauty. 
 
 But there is one more problem, and a very important 
 one, which finds its best solution in the rule, not of all 
 men by their equals, but of the mass of men by the 
 aristocrat as I have attempted to sketch him in the 
 preceding pages. 
 
 In all civilised human communities there have been 
 and always will be a certain number of menial offices 
 that some have to perform for others — ofiaces which do 
 not necessarily debase, but which may on occasion 
 humiliate. It is, therefore, clear that in order that even 
 the menial ofiice may seem to have a sheen of gold upon 
 it, the personality for whom it is performed must be such 
 as to glorify it and transfigure it in the eyes of the servant. 
 It is not only foolish, it is actually brutal to lose sight 
 of this fact. Look into yourselves and inquire when it 
 is that you feel humiliated by the performance of menial 
 oflSces. You know perfectly well that for some people 
 you perform, them quite cheerfully, willingly; for others 
 you resolutely decline to do so. What makes the differ- 
 ence in your attitude ? It is useless to point to the menial 
 office itself, for we can imagine that as remaining the same 
 for all cases. What is it, then, that effects the change in 
 your attitude.? Obviously it is the quality of the person 
 for whoni the menial office is performed. 
 
 When men exist, therefore, whose characters and 
 achievements shed a glamour upon everything that sur- 
 rounds them, no duty they can impose upon their imme- 
 diate entourage, no effort they can demand of it, whether 
 it be the bearing of children or the building of a pyramid, 
 can be felt as a humiliation or as an act of oppression. 
 And it is only in such conditions that menial offices are 
 
 29 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 performed daily, year in, year out, century after century, 
 without a suggestion of that rankling spirit of detestation 
 and loathing which, when it ultimately finds a vent, rises 
 up in the form of the black cloud of revolution and revolt, 
 and thunders out the cry of Liberty and Emancipation ! 
 
 3» 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE IN THE ART OF 
 PROTECTING AND GUIDING THE RULED 
 
 "No slavery can be so effectually brought and fixed upon us, as 
 parliamentary slavery." — Bolincbroke,^ Dissertation upon Parties, p. 151. 
 
 The House of Lords has been deprived of much of its 
 power. In the summer of 191 1 it stood against the wall 
 and emptied almost all its pockets on demand. With 
 remarkable meekness it even assisted its opponents in 
 fleecing it of its legitimate rights. 
 
 It is hard to picture a group of English schoolboys, 
 however unnerved, however out-numbered, yielding 
 passively, without showing fight, to a general raid on their 
 pockets, especially if one or two neutral mates were 
 looking on. And yet we have seen a group of English 
 peers perform this unsporting feat before the eyes of an 
 assembled nation and of the whole world! B. M. S., in 
 the National Review for October 191 1, spoke of it as " the 
 extraordinary act of cowardice and folly committed in the 
 House of Lords on August the loth "; ^ but the fact that 
 he ascribed the responsibility of the act to bad leaders, 
 and to Mr. Balfour in particular, does not in the least 
 exonerate the Peers themselves from all blame in regard 
 to the wretched business. 
 
 The passing of the Parliament Act was indeed a blood- 
 less revolution of the most fundamental kind. Examine 
 it for an instant in the fierce light which, as Lord Wil- 
 loughby de Broke pointed out," a certain able writer in 
 
 1 Article : "The Champion Scuttler," p. 214. 
 » National Review, "The Tory Tradition," p. eo8. 
 
 31 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the Academy threw upon it, and the extent of its sub- 
 versive character becomes doubly clear. 
 
 The said writer declared — 
 
 " In 1909 we had a House of Lords which we regarded 
 as part of the bedrock of our constitution and its impreg- 
 nable bulwark, whereas all the time it never rested on any 
 more stable basis than this, that a Radical leader had only 
 to come into office, to bring in a Bill for its abolition, to 
 call upon the Crown to create Peers, and there was an end 
 of its existence. So that, so far from being founded upon 
 rock, it was not even founded upon sand, it was established 
 upon straw." 
 
 It was all very well for Lord WiUoughby de Broke to 
 say that " the repeal of the Parliament Act ... is the 
 first duty of the Unionist Party when retvirned to power," * 
 but, as B. M. S. in the same number of the journal 
 rightly observed : " How can the Parliament Bill be re- 
 pealed when all the machinery of the official Unionist 
 organisation was utilised to induce certain renegade 
 Unionist Peers to vote for it? Repeal in such circum- 
 stances will only add infamy to infamy." ^ 
 
 Nor did Lord WiUoughby de Broke entirely clear 
 matters up when he spoke of the destruction of the House 
 of Lords " as part of the class war that a certain type of 
 Radical has waged for many generations," ^ or of the 
 Radicals themselves as having " the whole field of bribery 
 and corruption and class hatred that we (the Tories) 
 cannot touch-" * 
 
 The best thing the noble Lord did say in his vigorous 
 though to my mind somewhat shallow article, was that 
 Tories should "drink copiously at the fount of Boling- 
 broke, Pitt and Beaconsfield." * In this sentence he 
 really shows that he means business, and that he is vaguely 
 
 * Op. cit., p. 208. « Op. cit., p. 215. 
 
 * Op. cit., p. 202. « Op. cit., p. 210. 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 208. The inclusion of Pitt, however, maices me 
 feel doubtful whether the writer really knew anything about the 
 matter. 
 
 3ft 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 conscious of the great flaw in the policy and traditions of 
 his caste. 
 
 For, in my opinion, it is inconceivable that a body of 
 men could ever have been induced to connive, even for 
 the purpose of strategy, in depriving themselves of a great 
 and solemn right or privilege, unless a good deal of doubt 
 had prevailed in their own minds concerning the sanctity 
 and unassailability of that right or privilege. 
 
 It is true that, when the fell deed was about to be 
 accomplished, a considerable amount of indignation and 
 revolt was to be observed in the ranks of the Unionist 
 Peerage; but the amputating operation was performed 
 notwithstanding, and in a trice we all realised that the 
 aristocrats — that is to say, the hereditary rulers of the 
 country — the body of men who might have created a 
 position for themselves so secure and so popular that 
 nothing could have shaken it, had been given a smart 
 conge, an unmistakable " Your services are no longer 
 required! " and had been deprived of their full share in 
 the determination of the nation's destiny. 
 
 Instinctively they must have felt that they did not 
 deserve to keep the faith of those beneath them, other- 
 wise, as I say, it is inconceivable that they should have 
 shown no fight. They would have preferred to die, as 
 Charles I did, rather than to relinquish an iota of 
 their power, if they had really felt that they were ruling 
 by Divine Right. 
 
 The problem which naturally confronts you, when you 
 examine the event in detail is, how did the Lords grow 
 sufficiently weak and doubtful of their superiority, suffi- 
 ciently disliked and devoid of advocates among the people, 
 to fall such an easy prey to the opposing party .■' This 
 problem is neither so deep, nor so difficult as it would 
 appear at first sight. If you have eyes to see, you can 
 solve it by walking over Arundel Castle one summer's 
 afternoon ; you can solv^ it by reading the lives of 
 the poets, the great prose-writers, painters, sculptors^ 
 
 D 33 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 politicians and general thinkers of England for the last 
 two hundred years; you can even solve it by looking out 
 into the streets of London, or by analysing the psychology 
 of the Women's Suffrage Movement. 
 
 But however you may solve it, whatever your diagnosis 
 may be, your conclusion is sure to be wrong, if, in company 
 with the most stupid among the Tories, you set out with 
 the assumption that class-hatred or class-envy was the 
 starting-point of the recent attack on the Lords. For even 
 supposing we acknowledge that Mr. Lloyd George has 
 been unwarrantably bitter in a number of his speeches, 
 does any reasonable man think that these speeches would 
 have been of any avail if they had been pronounced among 
 a people devoted to their rulers, and conscious of innumer- 
 able debts of gratitude to them.'' Does any one suppose 
 that Mr. Lloyd George's eloquence could ever have suc- 
 ceeded in turning a loving child against its parents .'' The 
 whole of human experience and human history denies 
 this possibility. 
 
 Rulers who maintain their superiority and who make 
 themselves indispensable to, and loved by, the community 
 they rule, or whose beneficent power is so directly felt by 
 the society over which they preside that there can be no 
 doubt as to their value, stand almost quite immune from 
 so-called class-hatred and class-envy; and even if such 
 class-hatred and class-envy do exist among a small minority 
 and lead to conspiracies, these can be treated very lightly.' 
 Such rulers are just as immune as the good father from 
 hatred or envy, and against them demagogues and revolu- 
 tionary agitators can rant and rave to all eternity without 
 succeeding in making a single convert. Rivals may arise 
 against such rulers; but, generally speaking, in healthy 
 communities, a subject movement to depose them 
 cannot. 
 
 Now, looking at the present condition of England and 
 
 1 See Machiavelli, Tie Prince, Chapter XIX. " I consider a prince 
 right to reckon conspiracies of little account when his people hold him 
 in esteem." 
 
 34 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 at the steps by which it has reached this condition, what 
 is it precisely that we find? 
 
 We find a huge population of about forty millions, of 
 which at least two-thirds are dissatisfied and resentful, 
 and suffering from what might be termed genuine fear of 
 what the future may bring; of which at least a third are 
 either semi-sick or seriously sick, and of which at least a 
 ninth are constantly on the threshold of starvation and 
 unemployment. Labour troubles are not by any means 
 the only signs which reveal the restless discontent of the 
 subject masses to-day. These troubles among the workers 
 do indeed show that there is something very seriously 
 wrong; but does not the vast number of reform move- 
 ments and organisations — from the Salvation Army to the 
 Women's Suffrage societies — prove the same thing? If 
 for the moment we leave the spiritual side, alone, of the 
 Salvation Army out of our reckoning, what can we possibly 
 think of a community in which even the material and 
 practical work of an independent and unofficial organisa- 
 tion such as the Salvation Army, can be urgently needed 
 and readily employed in order to supplement the care 
 which the true rulers should take of their subjects? For 
 it cannot be repeated too often, or too emphatically, that 
 the only possible justification of the non-labouring, non- 
 productive class, lies in their efficient discharge of the duty 
 of protecting and guiding the labotiring and productive 
 masses. Any aristocracy that denies this principle is 
 rightly doomed. 
 
 In the space of two centuries life in England has grown 
 so complicated, and unrestricted competition in the field of 
 modern capitalistic enterprise has shown that it can grind 
 so many workers down to the level of characterless, spirit- 
 less and dependent paupers, that the question which 
 presses continually for an answer is. What has been done 
 by the rulers of the State to regulate, to guide, and pari 
 passu to weigh, the value of each item in the incessant 
 inrush of industrial and commercial innovations, and to 
 guard against their evils for the present and the future ? 
 
 3S 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Any fool can realise a state of muddle, disorder and 
 distress, once it has been created. But who has been 
 wise enough to foresee such a state, to guard against it, 
 or to render its fulfilment impossible? 
 
 There is but one answer to this question — Nobody! 
 
 According to the doctrine of experience which is sacro- 
 sanct in England and all countries like her, it would even 
 have been considered sheer impudence on the part of any 
 thinker to have prophesied, when, for instance, the 
 machine began to show signs- of mastering labour, that 
 such and such a state of things would be the result of the 
 innovation.* 
 
 The whole of the newspaper-reading middle-classes of 
 the British Isles would have cried indignantly, " What is 
 this man saying ? Who can tell what the machine's mas- 
 tery over men may lead to.'' Possibly the millenium! 
 This thinker is not speaking from experience, how can he 
 tell.?" 
 
 According to the doctrine of experience one may wait 
 for a whole nation to go stark raving mad before one 
 arrests a development which has not yet been tested by 
 time ! 
 
 And these people who possess no imagination, no know- 
 ledge of true social laws or of human nature, were able 
 to look on with equanimity while the official rulers of 
 England did nothing to guide or direct the tremendous 
 movement, industrial and commercial, of the eighteenth 
 and nineteenth centuries, with its accompanying accumu- 
 lation of vast urban populations; simply because, like their 
 rulers, they were not people of culture, but creatures 
 reared behind the shop-counter. 
 
 There was, however, some excuse for the ignorant 
 middle-classes, upper and lower, if they were able to look 
 on unalarmed at the appalling inrush of ill-considered 
 innovations, especially during the nineteenth century. At 
 
 One of the few thinkers who did oppose machinery almost from its 
 inception, the spirited William Cobbett, was regarded by those in power 
 as an impudent upstart. 
 
 36 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 least they were not the aristocrats. Most of them had 
 neither the education, nor the traditions, nor the travelled 
 knowledge, nor above all the leisure of aristocrats. They 
 were simply sheep who were allowed to bleat once at every 
 general election and no more ; and even this influence 
 exercised through the House of Representatives was, at 
 least during the first half of the century, practically neg- 
 ligible. Their brains were cabbage and newspaper fed, 
 and by way of intellectual refreshment all they had were 
 the novels that became popular and the stimulating 
 sermons of their clergy. 
 
 But there was absolutely no excuse for the aristocrats. 
 They had a good many of the things which rendered men 
 fit to grapple with problems sprouting up all about them. 
 Moreover, they were once in a position when their word, 
 if they had shown that it was prompted by a " respect for 
 the burden," would have been listened to with interest 
 and reverence. What happened .'' 
 
 They not only neglected the "craft" of governing, 
 which as I have said is more often than not taken for 
 granted by the subjects of a nation, even when they are 
 well governed; but they also scouted the responsibility of 
 the " tutorship " of governing. The character and spirit 
 of the nation were allowed to rot from sheer neglect, or to 
 be ministered to independently by ignorant subject minds 
 (in no way representative of flourishing life), in the form 
 of unguided religious maniacs and incompetent busy- 
 bodies. 
 
 Foolishly, almost blindly, most of the rulers by birth 
 in the British Isles actually regarded themselves merely 
 as plutocrats whose peculiar privileges sent them by God 
 implied no arduous duties, no responsibilities, and no 
 cares beyond those of consolidating their position and 
 rendering it as easy and as pleasurable as possible. 
 
 It should, of course, be remembered In this respect that 
 about one half of the existing peerages were created in 
 the nineteenth century, and for three hundred years at 
 least the peers of the realm have been largely recruited 
 
 37 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 from the capitalists. Still, the principle remains the same. 
 However differently a man may feel, who is the descendant 
 of a wealthy alderman or an industrial magnate, from him 
 whose position and wealth come to him through land that 
 has belonged to his family since the Norman conquest, 
 wealth and power ought always to suggest certain respon- 
 sibilities to their holders. Both are derived ultimately 
 from the nation; both represent leisure obtained through 
 the nation or some portion of it, and to the conscientious 
 man who feels that a life of ease cannot be enjoyed for 
 nothing, both ought to imply certain duties and obliga- 
 tions which cannot devolve upon the masses who are too 
 deeply immersed in the daily struggle for existence to be 
 able to direct this struggle from serene and peaceful 
 heights above, so that it may redound to the credit and 
 not to the shame of the community, so that it may conduce 
 to the glory, permanence and supremacy of a great people, 
 and not to that people's degradation. 
 
 But this obligation is all the more binding upon large 
 landowners, seeing that in times past the very condition 
 of land-tenure involved certain duties that could not be 
 neglected with impunity. "The essence of the Feudal 
 polity was that of protector and protected." ^ As Rogers 
 says : " The English landowner of the thirteenth and 
 fourteenth centuries did two things for the savage tenant. 
 He guaranteed the King's peace, that is to say the. con- 
 tinuity of the farmer's industry free from the risks of 
 brigandage, and he taught him, by his own example and 
 practice, the best system of agriculture which the age 
 could develop." ^ Thus there was no suggestion of that 
 unlimited possession without return or without propor- 
 tionate protection or compensation to those not in posses- 
 sion, which is characteristic of the position of many of the 
 landowners and plutocrats of the present day. On the 
 contrary, as the same author argues, " It cannot be doubted, 
 
 ''■ Annals of the British Peasantry, by R. M. Gamier, p. 1 16. 
 * See The Industrial and Commercial History of England, by James E. 
 Thorold Rogers, p. io8. 
 
 38 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 if the language of those who wrote in early ages on the 
 common law of England has any force whatever, that in 
 theory the largest rights of the private owner of land were 
 very limited and qualified." ^ 
 
 When, however, the large private owner of land, accus- 
 tomed to the conditions of agricultural tenants, suddenly 
 found himself in the late eighteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries the possessor of extensive urban property, he 
 seems to have regarded the changed condition as absolving 
 him altogether from the ordinary duties of ownership, and 
 there seems to have been no attempt on the part of the 
 legislature to outline in any way a return in duty and 
 protection to the urban tenant equivalent to that which 
 was expected from the mediaeval landowner. Thus, in the 
 light of this aspect alone, the Parliament Bill of 191 1 
 might well be regarded simply as a belated expression of 
 revolt, on the part of urban populations, against powerful 
 proprietors who had never done anything to justify their 
 position of power over the industrial, commercial and in 
 any case non-agricultural tenants on their estates. They 
 did not even regard it as their incontrovertible duty to 
 apply their thought assiduously to the solution of urban 
 problems or to the guidance and direction of urban 
 tendencies. 
 
 The rise of modern capitalism, therefore, with all its 
 cruel lust of gain at all costs, not only met with no check 
 from the legislature, as it had done in earlier Tudor and 
 Stuart times; but it was left practically to perpetrate its 
 worst crimes against the working proletariat under the 
 very noses of the leisured classes, who had themselves 
 degenerated into little more than sweaters and exploiters 
 of labour upon the land. For, if the landowner omitted 
 to perform his duties of protector among the city and town 
 populations, which at least pr;esented new problems, to 
 how much greater a degree had he not already omitted to 
 perform his duties of protector among the rural popula- 
 tions, where the problems were as old and older than his 
 1 Op cit., pp. 206-207. 
 39 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 ancestors themselves ! As we shall see below, the exploita- 
 tion and cruelty of modern capitalism began on the land. 
 
 It takes a long time for such crimes to be realised by 
 those whom they injure. In addition to the fact that the 
 struggle for existence among the proletariat is sufficiently 
 engrossing and preoccupying in itself, subject minds are 
 much more likely, at first, to ascribe the evils about them 
 to chance, to inexorable economic laws, to Providential 
 punishments and to the inevitable scourges of civilisation, 
 than to trace them to the rulers above. For it requires 
 both knowledge and insight to trace a state of distress or 
 oppression to its proper source. In time, however, the 
 truth will out, and then it is discovered that all the benefits 
 that these " superior" men have been deriving from their 
 position of power have in no way recoiled to the advantage 
 of the inferior, nor driven the former to a sense of the 
 duties which they ought to perform in return. 
 
 Thus, happily, abuses cannot go on for ever, and as 
 'Mr. Arthur Ponsonby says, in a book which, though full 
 of banalities and by no means profound, contains many 
 a truth which Tories would do well to consider : "... the 
 suspicion is growing that our aristocratic model is deterior- 
 ating, that our patricians are inadequately performing the 
 duties which fall to them, that they are by no means alive 
 to their responsibilities, and that democracy demands a 
 higher level of trained, well-informed and, if necessary, 
 specialised capacity in the agents which are required to 
 perform its work. There is an increasing impatience 
 against the existence of a class that merely vegetates, lives 
 off the fat of the land, and squanders, according to their 
 whim and fancy, the wealth that others have toiled to 
 create." ^ 
 
 I shall riot refer to the obvious and direct crimes of 
 exploitation, robbery and oppression which have been 
 committed in the past by exalted and powerful ruling 
 families, and which it could be easily shown have contri- 
 buted greatly towards undermining that trust and faith 
 •*• Tie Decline of Aristocracy, by Arthur Ponsonby, M.P. (19 12). 
 
 40 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 in the aristocracy which the proletariat were once capable 
 of feeling. All such crimes, besides being general hack- 
 neyed arguments in the mouths of turbulent Radical 
 agitators, may be readily discovered in any history or 
 biographical dictionary. I shall make it my point rather 
 to call attention to the less obvious crimes of omission 
 and commission, which, in my opinion, have tended in a 
 concealed though potent manner to destroy the prestige 
 of the ruling minority in these islands, and which, while 
 being less direct and less deliberate than the former crimes, 
 may nevertheless be brought home to the aristocracy with 
 quite as much justice as crimes of carelessness and neglect 
 against dependent children may be brought home to parents. 
 
 Neither shall I refer to individuals. Everybody knows 
 that there are men in the English, Scotch and Irish 
 peerage, who, like those six Englishmen whom I men- 
 tioned in the preceding chapter, no more deserve to be put 
 at the head of affairs than a party of South Sea Islanders; 
 and who, by their sins of omission and commission against 
 their dependents have forfeited all right to our respect. 
 But I do not wish to revive bitter memories; though I am 
 quite ready, if challenged, to provide the proof of my 
 contention. 
 
 The reason why I condemn these men in a body with 
 warmth and indignation is simply because I regard the 
 evils which they have brought about as in no way essential 
 to an aristocratic regime, and because the slur they have 
 thus cast upon a divine institution is all the more difficult 
 to forgive. 
 
 For many years now vast changes have been coming 
 over our world. Thanks to the influence of modern 
 capitalistic enterprise and mechanical science, together with 
 the kind of industrialism and commercialism to which they 
 have given birth, new relations have cropped up between 
 man and man; new occupations, some of which are most 
 deleterious both to limb and to character, have been intro- 
 duced; new ways of living and of spending leisure have 
 been created, new portions of the community have been 
 
 41 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 enlisted in the ranks of the army of labour; innumerable 
 hordes of women have been enticed by wages, however 
 low, to accept employment in the emporiums of commerce 
 and industry, and the population has tended to congregate 
 and to multiply ever more and more in enormous urban 
 centres. 
 
 Dr. Cunningham says, "In 1770 there was no Black 
 Country, blighted by the conjunction of coal and iron 
 trades; there were no canals, no railways and no factory 
 towns with their masses of population. The differentiation 
 of town and country had not been carried nearly so far as it 
 is to-day. All the familiar features of our modern life and 
 all its pressing problems have come to the front with the 
 last century and a quarter." ^ 
 
 This is very true; but it must not be supposed that the 
 general exodus from the country into the towns was quite 
 so recent in its origin. For hundreds of years there had 
 been a steady flow on the part of the rural population to 
 the urban centres, and it is impossible to separate this 
 steady flow altogether from a certain dissatisfaction on the 
 part of the peasantry with their lot. The number of 
 measures passed during the Middle Ages to make it 
 difficult for the peasant to take up his abode in the town 
 shows that the evil of depopulating the country districts 
 was recognised; but it is a significant fact that the legis- 
 lation to remedy the evil consisted rather in increasing the 
 constraints upon the peasantry, than in alleviating their 
 lot.* Even as early as 138 1 Wat Tyler's rising proves 
 that there was already great discontent among the rural 
 labourers; while Jack Cade's rising in Kent in 1450, the 
 Lincolnshire rising in 15 -^8, and Kett's in Norfolk in 
 1 549,^ furnish further evidence of the same nature. When 
 
 '^ Tie Growth of English Indtutry and Commerce, Vol. Ill, p. 613. 
 
 * See, for instance, the Statute 7 of Henry IV, cap. 17. 
 
 ^ Among Kett's demands there was this significant clause : " That no 
 landlord be allowed to keep flocks and herds for purposes of trade, but 
 merely for the use of his own household." — Annals of the British 
 Peasantry, p. 104. 
 
 42 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 it is remembered that between 1349 and the reign of 
 Elizabeth as many as eight measures were passed to fix 
 wages/ and that in each of them it was the object of the 
 legislature to establish a maximum, beyond which it was 
 a crime to rise, rather than to establish a minimum below 
 which it was a crime to descend, we may, perhaps, form 
 some idea of at least a portion of the peasants' grievances; 
 for the rest we have only to recall Wat Tyler's, Cade's 
 and Kett's demand. As Sir G. Nicholls, K.C.B., remarks : 
 " It cannot fail to be observed that in all these enactments 
 for the regulation of wages, the great object of the legis- 
 lature was to prevent a rise — to fix a maximum, not to 
 assign a minimum — to place a limit on the ascending 
 scale, leaving the descending scale without check or 
 limitation." ^ 
 
 Still, as Dr. Cunningham says, at the end of the first 
 half of the eighteenth century, " the differentiation of 
 town and country had not been carried nearly so far as 
 it is to-day." It was effectively completed, however, 
 between 1760 and 1845, when vast numbers of the rural 
 population were dispossessed and herded like sheep into 
 the slums of great towns. And how was this ultimately 
 accomplished.'' "The misery of the poor," says Thorold 
 Rogers, " was the deliberate act of the legislature, of the 
 Justice's assessments, of the enclosures, the appropriation 
 of commons, and the determination, as Mr. Mill has said, 
 on the part of the landowners to appropriate everything, 
 even the air we breathe, if it could only be brought 
 about." ^ 
 
 In the interval between 1770 and the present day huge 
 factories have been erected and vast armies of workers 
 drawn within their gates. With the increasing growth of 
 
 1 See, for instance, the Statute of Labourers, Edward III (13+9), 
 12 Richard II (1388), 4 Henry V, cap. 4 (1416), 6 Henry VI, cap. 3 
 (1423), 23 Henry VI, cap; 12 (1443), n Henry VII, cap. 2, 6 
 Henry VIII, cap. 3. 
 
 2 See A History of the English Poor Law, Vol. I, p. 82. 
 Op. cit., pp. 54-55. 
 
 43 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 public companies, the relations of employer and employee 
 have gradually tended to become less and less human, less 
 and less that of a master of flesh and blood to a workman 
 of flesh and blood. Not only on paper, but in actual life, 
 the two have drifted ever further and further apart, and 
 the only circumstances which could bring them face to 
 face were the circumstances of strife. The cruel and life- 
 less notion of the " Wealth of Nations," the only notion 
 which economists of the last two centuries seem to have 
 been able to form of the measure of a people's prosperity 
 and contentment, fitting in as it did admirably with the 
 growing spirit of greed and gain, left the whole question 
 of the spiritual and physical condition of the country out 
 of the reckoning. It measured the actual degree of 
 flourishing life in the nation by putting its finger into the 
 mass of its pecuniary accumulations or profits. Irrespec- 
 tive of all else it advocated every measure that promoted 
 wealth and deprecated every measure that threatened to 
 reduce it, and thus allowed every kind of inhumanity and 
 shortsighted policy to be practised and pursued which the 
 combined wisdom of the rising modern capitalists might 
 think suitable. It allowed agriculture to be killed, it 
 tolerated the formation of that laziest, stupidest and 
 crudest of all principles laissez-faire, It'condoned starva- 
 tion among the poor, poor-rates in aid of wages, capital 
 punishment for the destruction of machinery, transporta- 
 tion for poaching and for the forming of Trades Unions,* 
 and a host of other abuses which will appear in the course 
 of this essay. 
 
 The economists' bodiless and abstract concepts Capital 
 and Labour are no longer virtually, they are actually the 
 only two classes of the community. " Capital," which has 
 taken the place of the old master owner, has become merely 
 a vague concept to the workman; and "Labour," which 
 has taken the place of the old servant workman who was 
 
 ^ "In 1834 we transported to Van Diemen's Land six Dorsetshire 
 labourers for forming a Trades Union." — Annals of the British Peasantry, 
 p. +17. 
 
 44 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 part of the master's household, has become but a vague 
 and almost intangible concept to the masters, or owners 
 of capital. And with it all machine after machine has 
 been foisted upon the community without let or hindrance, 
 each machine bringing with it its own particular economic 
 and moral changes. Life's pace has been increased. 
 People no longer feel themselves tied to a given spot, 
 village, town or city. The population has become very 
 largely fluid, and thousands who are here to-day have 
 gone to-morrow. 
 
 And now let me put and answer a few questions — 
 (i) How many of the hereditary rulers of the country, 
 who had the leisure to meditate upon the problems to 
 which all these innovations gave rise, and who had the 
 opportunity for acquiring the knowledge and the insight 
 for dealing with these problems, have attempted pari passu 
 to take up, weigh and judge each change as it came 
 about? 
 
 To this question I shall reply simply in the words of 
 Mr. Arthur Ponsonby, because I deem them substantially 
 correct and susceptible of proof. Mr. Ponsonby says : 
 " To take only the last 300 years, we find the gradual 
 and profound social and economic changes hardly touched 
 the aristocracy in their sheltered position, and passed 
 almost unnoticed by them. Their castle in the sand served 
 their purpose perfectly, and was, in truth, solid enough 
 so long as the tide was far enough out." ' 
 
 (2) How many of the hereditary rulers have attempted 
 to face the question of capitalistic enterprise and mechanical 
 science and the kind of industrialism and commercidism 
 to which they have given birth, and to guard against their 
 possible evils ? 
 
 The answer to this question is obvious. Capitalistic 
 
 enterprise and mechanical science, together with the kind 
 
 of industrialism and commercialism to which they have 
 
 given rise, still flourish in our midst, and nobody in a 
 
 ^ lie DetBne of Aristocracy, p. 30. 
 
 45 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 high quarter has yet questioned whether it is advisable 
 that they should be allowed to hold undisputed sway over 
 the community or not. On the contrary, all attempts 
 that have been made by commoners to limit modern 
 capitalistic methods have always been mistaken by the 
 aristocrats as attacks on property in general, which, it is 
 unfortunately true, they usually have been. But there 
 is absolutely no sense in characterising all reforms which 
 aim at restricting or directing the power of capital benefi- 
 cently as socialistic, otherwise Elizabeth and Charles I 
 must be classed as Socialists. 
 
 "No authoritative attempt," says Dr. Cunningham, 
 " was made to recast the existing regulations so as to suit 
 the changing conditions. ... In the absence of any 
 enforcement of the old restrictions, in regard to the hours 
 and terms of employment, the difficulties of the transition 
 were intensified; and the labourers, who had never been 
 subjected to such misery under the old regime, agitated 
 for a thorough enforcement of the Elizabethan laws. The 
 working classes, for the most part, took their stand on 
 the opinions as to industrial policy which had been 
 traditional in this country, and were embodied in existing 
 legislation. To the demand of the capitalist for perfect 
 freedom for industrial progressj the labourers were inclined 
 to reply by taking an attitude of impracticable conserva- 
 tism." ^ 
 
 But the workman's true protector, the real ruler, who 
 cares for the " heart of the people " and who respects the 
 burden-bearer, was no more. The; little of him that had 
 ever existed in England had been successfully exter- 
 minated, and the cruel capitalistic cry of " laissez-faire " 
 rose like a threat of exploitation, worse than death, 
 throughout the land. 
 
 The very formation of the Trades Unions by workmen, 
 as a means of protecting themselves against the exploita- 
 tion of capitalists and the undue influence of unrestricted 
 competition, shows how necessary it seemed to the indus- 
 1 Op. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 613. 
 46 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 trial proletariat to erect with their own hands and resources 
 some sort of shelter to ward off from their lives, left 
 unsheltered by negligent rulers, the full brunt of an 
 unorganised, unlimited and unrestricted state of helium 
 omnium contra omnes. The fact that these early organisa- 
 tions of workmen were suppressed and their promoters 
 severely punished shows how the rulers resented this 
 usurpation of their right to protect; but what was the 
 good of protesting against such usurpation if no steps 
 were taken to render the provocation or the temptation 
 to this movement null and void? To decline to act as 
 protector, and then to punish those who decided to protect 
 themselves, was obvious folly, and it was soon found that 
 the laws against labour combinations had to be repealed. 
 No Trade Union, however, need necessarily have been 
 formed had the industrial proletariat felt and known that 
 its protection was a thing assured and lasting. 
 
 Maybe the problem has now grown so formidable that 
 the possibility of its solution seems beyond the powers of 
 a single generation of thinkers. This, however, does not 
 exonerate those who watched its growth from infancy 
 upwards from all blame in allowing it to attain such 
 unwieldy proportions. Not only the hereditary rulers, 
 therefore, but the political economists of the last centviry 
 as well, have shown a lack of taste and of fine feeling, 
 the evil results of which are now recoiling upon the nation 
 as a whole in the form of ugliness, vulgarity, squalor and 
 ill-health in every department of its life. Labour troubles 
 can be adjusted, patched up temporarily, and slurred over 
 for a while; but labour troubles will continue until the 
 root of this inhuman system of separation, isolation and 
 so-called independence is eradicated. 
 
 Obedience on the part of labour necessarily implies 
 protection on the part of capital. But where labour and 
 capital are both phantoms to each other, where they have 
 only the relationship of cash, where the faith of labour 
 in the protective capacities of capital has been broken by 
 barbarous cruelties in the past, and inhuman practices in 
 
 47 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the present, all obedience on the part of labour must be 
 sullen, forced, reluctant and resentful, all protection on 
 the part of capital, however splendidly and conscientiously 
 it may be organised, must be heartless, bloodless and 
 charitable, when it knows but vaguely whom it protects, 
 to what sort of man, woman or girl it extends its pro- 
 tection, and when it lives in inhuman isolation and seclu- 
 sion from its dependents. Even the sense of responsibility, 
 both in Labour and Capital, must tend to decline when 
 these divisions in a community are but phantoms to each 
 other; and perhaps not the least of the injuries their 
 respective isolation has wrought is precisely this loss in 
 the feeling of responsibility. And this is quite distinct 
 from that other influence which is hostile to all sense of 
 responsibility — the influence of the peculiar lines on which 
 limited liability companies are run. 
 
 If all these evils, all this lack of warm human relation- 
 ship and responsibility, are inseparable from capitalistic 
 enterprise, then capitalistic enterprise must be wrong, in 
 bad taste and contrary to the dictates of flourishing life. 
 For it is not as if we had had no examples of a contrary 
 tendency. I might almost say that I am at fault in main- 
 taining that the change from the comparatively happy 
 conditions of workmen during the Middle Ages, the' 
 Tudors and the early Stuarts ^ was blindly allowed to instal 
 itself, without inquisition or protest. There was inquisi- 
 tion and there was protest. Machinery and capitalistic 
 enterprise could never have conquered us if a large and 
 influential portion of the nation had not shown a deliberate 
 preference for, and pronounced taste in favour of, the 
 innovation-. Not that I mean to imply that capitalism 
 and the machine, properly controlled and delimited, would 
 
 See Dr. Cunningham, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 552. " In our time the 
 wealthy capitalist has been spoken of by men of the Manchester School 
 with great enthusiasm as if he were a sort of national benefactor ; in 
 Tudor days he was regarded with grave suspicion." See also Vol. II, 
 PP- 50, 93-94» 170. for particulars concerning the same attitude on the 
 part of the Stuarts. 
 
 48 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 of their very nature be bad, for the machine and capital- 
 istic enterprise have probably always existed, and will 
 continue to exist. Their worst evils arose when they 
 ceased from being controlled, delimited and guided; 
 when, that is to say, no one arose to prevent them from 
 harming the burden-bearer. 
 
 The rule of the machine, or of a system of commerce 
 and industry such as the one termed capitalistic, does not 
 come from Heaven. It is not a visitation of Providence. 
 If it comes at all, if it prevails at all, its ultimate triumph 
 must be due to a deliberate act of taste and judgment on 
 the part of some portion of the nation. The contention 
 that it would have been in the interest of all concerned, 
 and particularly of the landed aristocracy, to resist the 
 ultimate complete triumph of the vulgar tradesman's 
 taste, I for one heartily uphold; and when I look around 
 me to-day and see the ugliness and appalling squalor of 
 our large cities, when I realise that the growing mass of 
 useless dregs in the population, the .growing unsavouri- 
 ness and repulsiveness of mankind, are almost entirely the 
 outcome of a change which is barely 150 years old, I 
 cannot help thinking that those of the governing classes 
 who allowed this change to come about showed a lack of 
 fine feeling and of good judgment, for which they deserve 
 to perish in the general Nemesis which threatens to over- 
 take all societies that allow themselves to become the 
 victims of the engineer's, the shopkeeper's and the stupid 
 person's democratic mind. 
 
 The best instincts of the Tudors and the Stuarts were 
 against this transformation of England from a garden into 
 a slum, from " Merrie England " into a home of canting, 
 snivelling, egotistical, greedy and unscrupulous plutocrats, 
 standing upon a human foundation of half-besotted slaves. 
 The best instincts, too, of the British workman were 
 against the change,^ and although I do not know of the 
 theory ever having been advanced before from an authori- 
 tative source, I have gone sufficiently into this question 
 ^ See Dr. Cunningham, op. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 611. 
 E 49 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 to feel able to suggest, just as a working hypothesis for 
 better scholars than myself either to substantiate or to 
 explode, that the Grand Rebellion, or the so-called Civil 
 War of the seventeenth century, was as much the first 
 struggle between the new, vulgar spirit of the nation and 
 the old, declining better taste of the nation as it was a 
 contest between Puritan and High Churchman, or of King 
 and Commons. I submit that it was on the battlefields 
 of Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby that trade first 
 advanced in open hostility against tradition, quantity 
 against quality, capitalistic industry^ against agriculture 
 and the old industry of the Guilds, vulgarity against taste, 
 machinery against craftsmanship, grey and moxu-nful 
 Puritanism against cheerful and ruddy Paganism — in fact, 
 plebeian democracy against aristocracy. 
 
 For many years the more vulgar and grasping portions 
 of the community had made attempt after attempt to alter 
 the quality and quantity of English industries, but had 
 found in the Tudors and the Stuarts an insuperable barrier 
 to their contemptible schemes. Edward IV and Elizabeth 
 had prohibited the introduction of so-called time and 
 labour saving engines, and James I and Charles I had 
 been equally active in this respect. If all the peers of 
 that day had also been tasteful and thoughtful, and had 
 supported their sovereigns' policyj instead of indolently 
 allowing matters to take their course, the triumph of 
 modern trade and of the. machine might have been 
 successfully averted. 
 
 It was only after the vulgarest and most grasping of 
 the nation had been driven to desperation by Charles I's 
 constant interference with trade for the benefit of the 
 consumer that things finally assumed a threatening 
 aspect. For the wrath of a thwarted shopman bent on 
 robbing at all costs is mightier than all the political or 
 
 ^ I say " capitalistic " advisedly here, because the triumph of the 
 machine and the increased expensiveness which it introduced in plant, 
 make machinery and the capitalistic system almost inseparable 
 associates. 
 
 50 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 religious fervour on earth, though it may adopt a con- 
 venient religious disguise. 
 
 In a subsequent chapter I shall attempt to throw some 
 light upon this conception of the so-called Civil War; 
 meanwhile, suffice it to say that all the squalor, all the 
 ugliness and all the vulgarity from the sight of which the 
 tasteful people of this nation are suffering at the present 
 day were baptised Puritan and Nonconformist in the blood 
 of the Cavaliers sacrificed on the battlefields of the Grand 
 Rebellion. This was the last stand the old world of taste, 
 consideration and quality made against the new world of 
 vulgarity, unscrupulousness and quantity; and the part 
 that religion played in the ultimate triumph of the baser 
 instincts is one of the most interesting chapters in the 
 history of pious frauds.^ 
 
 (3) How many of the hereditary rulers have examined 
 new occupations in order, if they were had, to he able to 
 pronounce a veto upon their introduction? Or investi- 
 gated the new kind of life and leisure among the masses 
 to tell whether it was good or had ? 
 
 In reply to this question, it may be said that, with 
 the exception of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (himself 
 inspired by that noble Tory gentleman, Mr. Michael 
 Thomas Sadler), and later on that other friend of factory 
 legislation. Lord John Russell, not one of the hereditary 
 rulers have ever troubled to examine pari passu, as they 
 appeared, all the new occupations flung by unscrupulous 
 inventors and industrials upon the working classes of 
 England. And even the reforms that Shaftesbury insti- 
 tuted were so terribly belated — not owing to his fault, of 
 course — that thousands were maimed, crippled and killed 
 before the evils which he discovered were suppressed.^ 
 
 1 See Chapter IV. 
 
 ? With the exception of the regulations against truck, the wisdom of 
 which, according to Mr. Russell M. Gamier (op. cit., pp. 415-416) 
 was somewhat doubtful, there was no protection for the miner before 
 1842, and before 1814 it was not even customary to hold an inquest 
 on miners killed in mines ! 
 
 51 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 And even if the abuses in the textile factories were largely 
 suppressed by the Acts of 1833, it was not until 1864 — 
 thirty-one years later — that the miserable facts revealed 
 in unregulated industries, such as earthenware making, 
 lucifer-match making, percussion-cap and cartridge 
 making, paper-staining and fustian-cutting, led to further 
 legislation. And three years later a still largsr addition 
 of trades was made to this list. 
 
 (4) How many of the hereditary rulers, when women, 
 girls and children began to he drawn into the mines and 
 factories of Enghnd, paused to ask themselves what effect 
 this would have upon the growing generation and the 
 mothers of life in the masses f How many inquired into 
 the effects that the innovation would have on the homes 
 of the masses and therefore on the nursery of the character 
 of the people f 
 
 To this question I can only answer violently, because 
 any moderation in discussing such a topic would mean 
 that I was not only a callous barbarian, but also that I 
 took merely an academic interest in these questions. I 
 have told you the tale of the six young Englishmen who 
 were killed by the Chinese villagers for having over- 
 looked the fundamental ruler principle, " Respect the 
 burden! " But I wonder what punishment a party of 
 Chinamen would have meted out to the savage criminals 
 who, towards the end of the eighteenth and throughout 
 the first three decades of the nineteenth century, were at 
 the head of the cotton mills and collieries of England.' 
 I wonder also what punishment a party of Chinamen would 
 have meted out to the hereditary rulers of a country where 
 such savage criminals were allowed to be born and bred 
 and to practise their atrocities.? What with the besotted 
 school of laissez-faire economists, the lazy indifference of 
 the aristocracy, some of whom were drawing large profits 
 both from the cotton mills and the collieries, and the 
 natural unconcern of the Englishman — who, with all those 
 who are more or less like him on the Continent, has 
 
 52 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 succeeded in turning all such fine things as autocracy, 
 aristocracy, slavery (as it is understood in the East), 
 wealth, leisure and power to shame — the lives of the 
 children and women of the lower classes dxiring the period 
 I have mentioned became one long agony. 
 
 It is impossible to exaggerate the brutal treatment that 
 English industrial and commercial men dispensed to dieir 
 dependents and helpers, or were allowed by their legis- 
 latures to dispense to their dependents and helpers, at the 
 time to which I refer. A bald, impartial statement would 
 exceed in horror anything that the imagination could 
 picture, and the wonder is not that the trust of the lower 
 classes in their " superiors " was not for ever broken in 
 those days, but that the spirit of indignation kindled in 
 their breasts did not lead to an implacable desire for 
 vendetta, for revenge, which their progeny might have 
 felt it their sacred duty to carry into effect. A nation 
 that was able to melt into spinsterly tears during the first 
 years of the nineteenth century over the negro slave-trade, 
 a community which in 1824 had founded a Society for 
 the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,^ and which in 1833 
 to 1834 had put an end to negro slavery, was yet able to 
 endure within its midst a form of white slavery, the 
 cruelties and horrors of which, practised as they were upon 
 
 ^ It is characteristic of the delightfully negative attitude of the 
 Englishman towards humanity that the Society for the Prevention of 
 Cruelty to Children was formed exactly sixty years after the foundation 
 of the above-mentioned organisation for the protection of beasts, birds 
 and fishes ; and that at the very time when, in the coal mines, 
 unfortunate infants of six, seven and eight years of age were being 
 made to drag trucks along narrow tunnels on all fours and half naked, 
 the harnessing of dogs to carts was abolished in London (1839) ! ^t is 
 also characteristic of their dangerous and stupid policy of laiisez-faire at 
 home and of impudent interference abroad, that while the whole of the 
 Black Country and of the cotton mill districts were the scenes of abuses 
 unparalleled in the history of any other nation, Robert Morrison, of 
 the London Missionary Society, smugly went to China to spread 
 Christianity among the " heathens,*' and reached Canton in the year 
 1 807 — China, the country where we could have learnt at least a few of 
 the principles and precepts of flourishing life ! 
 
 53 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 boys and girls of the tenderest age, exceed anything of the 
 like that universal history can relate.' When I think of 
 these things, it often occurs to me that there must be 
 thousands of exceptionally delightful and spirited people 
 in Australia. For the period during which there was a 
 penal station for English criminals at Port Jackson — that 
 is to say, from 1788 to 1839 — coincides exactly with the 
 blackest years in the history of English labour. All honour 
 to these men and women who preferred to turn to crime 
 rather than to submit, with their children, to the vulgar, 
 heartless Leviathan which then reigned supreme in the 
 North Country 1 And when I read that in 1821 there 
 were 22,000 convicts in New South Wales, I cannot help 
 believing that, if any of the descendants of these people 
 still survive, they must be worth meeting and worth 
 befriending. I feel for them and admire them just as 
 much as I feel for and admire those white slaves who were 
 deported to Maryland and Virginia, to lead a life of 
 misery and torture, as a punishment for blasphemy, 
 religious convictions too exalted for their persecutors, and 
 robust living, during the appalling times which the savage 
 Puritans inaugurated immediately before and after the 
 death of that benign ruler, Charles I. Because I know 
 that among these foul Dissenters to-day, among the 
 Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, Low Church- 
 men and their like, there are hundreds who would revel 
 in reviving the cruel practices of Cromwell and of their 
 ancestors in his following, if only the law allowed them 
 to send men like myself to a hell on earth, for the simple 
 
 1 See Edwin Hodder's The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. (1897), 
 p. 2 1 . " Any one who studies the question of the deep misery of the 
 English poor which commenced after the Peace of Paris, increased to 
 an alarming degree after the Reform Act, and attained its maximum 
 during the first years of the present reign [Queen Victoria] will find 
 ample confirmation in general literature, in the pages of fiction, in 
 poetry and, above all, in the cold, hard statistics of Blue Books, as to 
 the state of wom^n and children who worked in factories and mines, 
 and whose condition was so appalling that it cried for legislation." 
 
 54 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 crimes of loving life and of detesting their negative, ugly 
 and devitalising creed. But more of this anon. 
 
 It is no answer to this charge against the industrial 
 abuses in England to point to similar evils in other 
 countries. For, apart from the fact that two blacks do 
 not make a white, in the first place, these evils never 
 attained to the same proportions either in France or in 
 Germany as they did in England; and secondly, these two 
 last-mentioned countries, which I happen to know very 
 well, do not boast, as England invariably does, of humanity 
 and of humanitarian principles. They are even compared 
 by Englishmen themselves, unfavourably to England, pre- 
 cisely in this respect. And there is another consideration 
 which must not be overlooked. England led in the indus- 
 trial, commercial and mechanical world. She, therefore, 
 set the example. As Dr. Cunningham says : " England 
 was the pioneer of the application of mechanism to 
 industry, and thus became the workshop of the world, 
 so that other countries have been inspired by her 
 example." ^ 
 
 Moreover, in so far as the employment of women and 
 children in collieries was concerned, England had under 
 her very nose the constant example of a more humane 
 and more considerate community — the Irish. This was 
 an advantage which other countries did not possess. The 
 Irish, to their credit be it said, allowed neither children 
 of tender years nor females of any age to be employed in 
 underground operations. 
 
 But to show how inextricably sorrow and oppression 
 are entangled with the English commercial man and his 
 influence, let me refer you to the evils of the factory 
 system in India at the present day, where apparently it is 
 easier to evade the home laws.* Let me also refer you to 
 
 1 Op. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 609. 
 
 2 See the excellent work Jrt and Swadeshi, by that profound Indian 
 writer Ananda R. Coonaaraswamy, D.Sc. (p. 20), where, in speaking of 
 the Indian factory system, and after having enumerated its abuses, he 
 says : " It is not that we learn too much from foreign countries. We 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the Putomayo rubber atrocities, at the recent inquiry con- 
 cerning which the British Director pleaded as a justifica- 
 tion for some of the most inhuman crimes of his company 
 that they were under modern Peruvian and not under 
 British law! 
 
 But to return to the question under consideration, one 
 might imagine that these early abuses in our industrial 
 and mining centres lasted only for a decade — that is to 
 say, only for so long as it would take to call the attention 
 of the whole nation to the facts. One might also imagine 
 that, once the horrible conditions were revealed, they were 
 immediately swept away by Act of Parliament. Nothing 
 of the kind! It was a serious outbreak of fever in the 
 cotton mills near Manchester which first drew widespread 
 attention to the overwork and ill-treatment of children in 
 factories in 1784; but it was not until 1833 that the first 
 really important Factory Act was passed — that is to say, 
 therefore, only after the brutal and cowardly torture of 
 helpless children had been knowingly tolerated for half a 
 century. And even when, thanks to the devoted efforts 
 of Mr. Michael Thomas Sadler, a Tory, and the subse- 
 quent untiring work of Lord Ashley, measures were taken 
 to induce Parliament to pass urgently heeded reforms, the 
 representations of the agitators were met with the most 
 bitter and most intolerant opposition. And it is interest- 
 ing to note, en passant, that one of Lord Ashley's most 
 determined opponents in the matter of the Factory Legis- 
 lation was none other than that canting Nonconformist 
 Liberal and democrat, enemy of capital punishmient, 
 church-rates and the Irish Established Church, John Bright 
 — the mill-owner, and the supporter of the Reform Bill 
 of 1866.' 
 
 I need hardly reply to the second part of question four. 
 
 learn too little. If we learnt more, we should not want to repeat the 
 experiments in klsrez-faire of early Victorian England." 
 
 1 Among Lord Ashley's other opponents were : Sir James Graham, 
 Lord Brougham (who, by the by, had taken an active part in the 
 abolition of negro slavery), Mr. Gladstone and Richard Cobden ! 
 
 56 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 For it is obvious that in a country where women, girls 
 and children were allowed to be overworked and brutally 
 ill-treated in factories and mines there was very little 
 chance of any one inquiring into the moral effect on the 
 home of such employment. In fact, this question still 
 remains open at the present day. The effects of female 
 labour upon the home of the workman and the so-called 
 lower middle-class business man still have to be investi- 
 gated. That they are evil must be obvious from the 
 appreciable decline in ability among the young women of 
 the nation in the arts of cooking, nursing, needlework 
 and general domestic thrift and industry. But no one 
 has yet felt that these evils are of any great consequence. 
 How, indeed, could the decline of the art of preparing 
 food be regarded as an evil in a country in which Puritans 
 have persistently taught that the things of the body do 
 not matter ? 
 
 (5) How many of the hereditary rulers attempted to 
 calculate the desirabUity or the reverse of the new type 
 which was bound to be developed among the new and 
 unwieldy urban masses ? 
 
 In reply to this question, we all know what has hap- 
 pened. Nothing has happened! It is only just recently, 
 with the formation of the Eugenic Society-^inspired and 
 organised by commoners — that the question has arisen as 
 to whether the type that is being bred by modern industrial 
 and commercial conditions is a desirable or even promising 
 one. It is only just recently — since, that is to say, 
 Darwin's Evolutionary Hypothesis awakened general 
 interest in such questions as Heredity, Race and Survival 
 — that the grave question of Breeding under unfavourable 
 conditions has so much as been mooted. Almost every 
 one of the hereditary rulers, or people of power in the 
 nation, watched with equanimity the gradual transforma- 
 tion of England from an agricultural and more or less 
 home-industrial nation into a nation of giant cities and 
 factories. (I say " or people of power " in this case 
 
 57 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 because I would entirely endorse the statement of Captain 
 Thomas Drummond, Under-Secretary for Ireland in 1839, 
 to the effect that " property had its duties as well as its 
 rights.") Not a strong, earnest word of protest was raised. 
 And it is only now, in the early years of the twentieth 
 century, that we are beginning to wonder whether the 
 kind of man that is bred and reared among urban and 
 modern industrial conditions is a creature of promise or 
 of danger for the nation. 
 
 The subject of the depopulation of rural districts, its 
 causes, and the grave consequences it involved for the 
 spirit and health of the nation, is too vast to be entered 
 into here in any detail. To any one who has studied the 
 history of the English peasant not only in the Statutes of 
 the Realm, but also in the works of such writers as Garnier, 
 Rogers, Sir Frederick Eden, Sir George NichoUs and 
 others, the long story will have seemed painful and tragic 
 enough. But what must strike him with ever greater 
 force, the more he reads, is the levity, the appalling 
 frivolity, with which a life so healthy, so conducive to 
 fine, manly courage, perseverance and spirit, and, in short, 
 so fruitful in all the most desirable qualities that a nation 
 could desire, should have been allowed to be forsaken 
 by millions of the nations best people for a life which 
 is known to lead in every respect to the reverse of 
 these qualities. And for this change, for this loss in 
 exchange, nobody is more responsible than the British 
 landowner and legislator. 
 
 Garnier says : "If the ethnic idiosyncrasies of the 
 Anglo-Saxon had been identical with those of the African, 
 it is not to be doubted that he would have been more 
 uniformly comfortable under the cordial relationship exist- 
 ing betwixt an indulgent master and a faithful slave, than 
 under that modern business etiquette which now freezes 
 the sympathies between employer and employe." ^ This 
 may be so. It may be true that the Englishman, whether 
 peasant or potentate, has within him that fatal element of 
 1 Op. cit., p. 28. 
 58 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 recalcitrant, liberty-loving independence which makes him 
 a bad and unreliable servant, and a selfish and unthinking 
 master, even in the best patriarchal conditions — and if this 
 be so, then all hope of settlement between servant and 
 master must be for ever abandoned in this country. But 
 I doubt whether even Garnier's study of the British 
 Peasantry itself justifies this conclusion. For what does 
 Garnier himself tell us was the cause of Wat Tyler's 
 peasant rising in 138 1.' Agrarian oppression.^ And of 
 Jack Cade's in 1450? Agrarian oppression.^ And of 
 Kett's in 1549.'' Again agrarian oppression! * Whether 
 it was the slavery of our manorial rents, or the labour 
 laws of the fourteenth century which " tied a man down 
 to starve on a particular spot at a day's wage fixed lower 
 than the current price of his day's bread";* whether it 
 was that farms had been engrossed, " stuff and purveyance 
 for the king's household had not been paid for," " feigned 
 indictments had been brought against poor and simple 
 folk ' that used not hunting,' " and common lands had 
 been enclosed; ° or that encroachments had been made on 
 the common arable field, lands converted from tillage to 
 pasture, and homes of husbandry pulled down; through- 
 out the Middle Ages and the Tudor period, especially 
 after Henry VIII's ruffianly favourites were cast like 
 wolves upon the land, the peasant always seems to have 
 been groaning under some grievance which was more 
 material and more concrete than the mere abstract longing 
 for that liberty and enfranchisement which became a plain 
 and definite cry in recent times. Certain it is that, from 
 the time of Edward VI to the present day, the capitalistic 
 and greedy element in the landed gentry and aristocracy 
 has steadily increased.* 
 
 ^ Op. cit., pp. 59-60. * Op. cit., p. 63. 
 
 » Op. cit., Chapter VIII. * Op. cit., p. 60. 
 
 ^ Op. cit., pp. 62-63. 
 
 ^ " The fresh owners of the Church lands (in Henry VIII's reign) had 
 introduced a commercial spirit into the English soil. . . . Our landed 
 gentry had never before and never since sunk so low in public estimation. 
 
 59 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Why, then, seek so far as the "ethnic idiosyncrasy" 
 of the Anglo-Saxon in order to account for the gradual 
 death agony of those happy relations between peasant and 
 landlord which, if continued, might have meant that 
 England's rural districts would still be thickly populated 
 by an industrious and healthy peasantry, dreading like 
 poison the swollen urban cysts (" wens ") which, however, 
 might be considered good enough for the weaklings and 
 undersized sharpers who would naturally congregate there ? 
 I am ready to acknowledge that, in the heart of the English 
 working man, there is a certain limited and extremely 
 passive spark of liberty-loving independence; but on 
 historical grounds, I refuse to believe that it alone could 
 have been ardent enough to kindle the many conflagra- 
 tions which have ultimately led to the decline of the rustic 
 populations and their industry, had it not been wantonly 
 fanned into flame by a class of people who again and again 
 have shown themselves utterly unworthy of property, 
 power or leadership. For if things are otherwise, if this 
 subversive ethnic partiality for liberty were all that Garnier 
 and the bulk of English historians think it is, it would 
 be impossible to account for the astonishingly protracted 
 periods during which the lower orders have, time and 
 again, patiently endured the most intolerable abuses with- 
 out immediate and spirited protest. That is why I cannot 
 help feeling that, in spite of many faults, which are doubt- 
 less inseparable from the Englishman's nature, the blame 
 for at least three-quarters of the discord between master 
 and man in the British Isles, with all those provoked 
 reactions which we call riots. Trades Unions, strikes and 
 their concomitant distrust, ill-feeling and hatred, ought 
 from every point of view, historical, psychological, ethnic 
 and the rest, to attach to the people who to-day, as well 
 as in the past, have shown themselves incapable of being 
 
 A class or an individual is in dire circumstances when society considers 
 them past praying for. But in the reign of Edward VI the landowners 
 had arrived at that still more desperate stage when they had to be 
 prayed against." — Garnier, op. cit., p. 90. 
 
 60 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 leaders and lovers of men. The English gentleman as a 
 rule understands how to rear the menial; but he seldom 
 understands how to rear and preserve the minion. It takes 
 an artist to convert a menial into a minion, and unless 
 that artist is plentiful in the governing classes of the 
 country there can be little hope either of stability or 
 happiness in the relations between master and man. 
 
 For, to come to more recent times, do we find things 
 very much better.? 
 
 What whim, what passing fancy, are we to suppose led 
 a fine English peasant like William Cobbett to say in the 
 early years of the nineteenth century : " There k in the 
 men calling themselves English country gentlemen ' some- 
 thing' superlatively base. They are, I sincerely believe, 
 the most cruel, the most unfeeling, the most brutally 
 insolent : but I know, I can prove, I can safely take my 
 oath, that they are the most base of all the creatures that 
 God ever suffered to disgrace the human shape." ^ 
 
 Cobbett was not a demagogue; neither was he a Radical 
 Reformer. He was a plain, level-headed English Tory 
 who believed, as I do, in aristocracy, and in a landed 
 aristocracy into the barga,in. He was a man who could 
 honestly say of himself : " My whole life has been a life 
 of sobriety and labour. ... I have invariably shown that 
 I loved and honoured my country, and that I preferred 
 its greatness and happiness far beyond my own." ^ And 
 yet, after a most painstaking and exhaustive examination 
 of the condition of the rural districts during the early 
 years of the nineteenth century, he was able to say on 
 September 29, 1826: "Of all the mean, all the cowardly 
 reptiles that ever crawled on the face of the earth, the 
 English landowners are the most mean and most 
 cowardly." * In his Rural Rides he undertakes to supply 
 the elaborate proof of this statement, but to the inquiring 
 reader such proof is also abundantly accessible in the works 
 
 ^ Rura/ Rides (Edition Dent), Vol. II, p. 46. 
 * liU., Vol. II, p. 187. 8 UiJ., pp. 1 21-123. 
 
 61 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of men whom he may consider more impartial, in the 
 Governmental Reports and Retixrns of the period, and in 
 the evidence given before State Commissions. 
 
 Let me, however, quote what Garnier says concerning 
 the same period. And let it be remembered that if Garnier 
 may be suspected of any bias at all, that bias is in favour 
 of the landed proprietors rather than against them. In 
 his Annals of the British Peasantry the author says : " In 
 fact, towards the close of the last century, he (the peasant) 
 was starving amidst plenty, unable to live except by 
 becoming a beggar, and unable to combine and agitate 
 for higher pay except by becoming a criminal. Not the 
 least bitter drop in his cup of woe was to see on all sides 
 of him his employers enjoying the luxuries of an abnormal 
 prosperity." ^ 
 
 It was thus that these men, the very heart of the British 
 Empire, were treated! — the men who won our victories 
 at Crecy and Poictiers, and later at Trafalgar and Vittoria; 
 for, as Garnier says, " the spirit of the peasant at both 
 epochs was the subject of mingled dread and admiration 
 throughout the armies of Europe. ... The men-at-arms, 
 who came of the mediaeval common fields, carried a quiver 
 which, in the language of Scripture, was an open sepulchre. 
 The man-of-war's man, kidnapped by the press-gang from 
 amidst some group of parochial roundsmen, wielded his 
 cutlass with no less deadly results." ^ These were not the 
 men to clamour for a two-to-one standard against a foreign 
 Power. Their food, and therefore their independence, lay 
 in the land which they cultivated. England required to 
 be populated by a herd of non-producing, undersized clerks 
 and shopmen before this cry of a two-to-one standard in 
 ships of war could become a loud one in the land. 
 
 And now listen to the stirring words of good old 
 Cobbett on the same subject. In addressing a " Landlord 
 Distress Meeting" in Norwich on December 22, 1821, 
 he spoke as follows — 
 
 "What a thing to contemplate, gentlemen! What a 
 
 ^ p. 70- * Op. cit., p. 31. 
 
 62 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 scene is here! A set of men, occupiers of the land; pro- 
 ducers of all that we eat, drink, wear, and of all that 
 forms the buildings that shelter us; a set of men indus- 
 trious and careful by habit, cool, thoughtful and sensible 
 from the instructions of nature; a set of men provident 
 above aU others, and engaged in pursuits in their nature 
 stable as the very earth they till; to see a set of men like 
 this plunged into anxiety, embarrassment, jeopardy not 
 to be described; and when the particular individuals before 
 me were famed for their superior skill in this great and 
 solid pursuit, and were blessed with soil and other circum- 
 stances to make them prosperous and. happy : to behold 
 this sight would have been more than sufficient to sink 
 my heart within me, had I not been upheld by the reflec- 
 tion that I had done all in my power to prevent these 
 calamities, and that I still had in reserve that which, with 
 the assistance of the sufferers themselves, would restore 
 them and the nation to happiness." ^ 
 
 No wonder poor Cobbett thought, as I think, that the 
 nobility were "in a long trance,"'' and no wonder he 
 cried in despair, " "What a system it must be to make 
 people wretched in a country like this! " ^ 
 
 For, in spite of that which this grand old man said he 
 " still had in reserve," * there is nothing to show that his 
 teaching was followed. In the end, as we know, the 
 starvation of the millions was relieved by a capitalistic 
 solution, the Repeal of the Corn Laws; and this was not 
 the triumph, but the defeat, of the farming classes, to 
 the advantage of uncontrolled Industry and Commerce " — 
 that is to say, to the advantage of a type of life and a type 
 of man which never has and never can build up a great 
 empire, although it may accumulate great temporary wealth 
 upon the foundations of a great empire, once the latter 
 has been built up by other and sounder men. 
 
 And though we might suppose that by now the govern- 
 
 1 Op. dt., Vol. I, pp. 55-56- ' Op. dt.. Vol. I, p. 67. 
 
 ' Op. dt., Vol. I, p. 52. * Op. dt., Vol. I, p. 55. 
 
 * See Gamier, Op. dt., p. 338. 
 
 63 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 ing classes had learnt their lesson, and were using every 
 endeavour to revive this ebbing life of the best of England, 
 the agricultural population, nothing could be more dis- 
 appointing or more exasperating than to examine the 
 present state of things in this quarto:. For one has only 
 to peruse the works of a writer such as Mr. F. E. Green 
 in order to be convinced that the state of affairs still cries 
 urgently for drastic reform. I know of nothing more 
 harrowing than his book. The Tyranny of the Country 
 Side, more particularly to one like myself who firmly 
 believes that nothing stable, nothing great, nothing impos- 
 ing, and certainly nothing creative, free and independent 
 can ever be constructed on a purely usurious, commercial, 
 office-bred and ledger-wed population. 
 
 " It would be hard to say," says Mr. F. E. Green, 
 " whether it is the large farmer, in his desire to add field 
 to field and to prevent the agricultural labourer from 
 getting land or living in cottages independent of him as 
 landlord; or the huge landowner, in his insatiable lust to 
 obtain huge pheasant preserves, vast deer forests and 
 multitudinous rabbit warrens, who has done the greater 
 harm to our most virile class of workers, and through 
 them struck a blow at the heart of our Empire." * And 
 Mr. Green concludes a book in which he rightly lays claim 
 to having " established beyond a doubt that agricultural 
 labour is a sweated industry " ^ with the following words 
 of warning : " If reform does not come quickly to repeople 
 our empty country-side, either we shall lose our bold 
 peasantry altogether, and with it our virility as a race, or 
 a swift retribution will overtake the governing classes." 
 
 Like "William Cobbett, Mr. Green also deprecates very 
 strongly the cowardice of the professional classes — country 
 lawyers, parsons and doctors. He shows, just as Cobbett 
 had shown before him (though Cobbett dealt only with the 
 ecclesiastical gentlemen), how sneakishly these public- 
 school-bred and cricket-field-trained " gentlemen " grovel 
 before the potentates of the land, and prefer to allow the 
 1 Op. cit., p. 17. ^ Op. cit., p. 249. 
 
 64 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 most crying evils to remain unredressed among their 
 poorer and more destitute fellows, rather than run the 
 risk of a hostile encounter with their wealthy patrons.^ 
 For, as Mr. Green aptly observes, the lawyer's children, 
 " like those of the parson, must go to a public school," ^ 
 and where should the money come from if not from these 
 wealthy patrons? 
 
 So thus it goes on, year after year. True ruling grows 
 more and more scarce, greed and gain tend more and more 
 to become the only motives actuating all classes of the 
 community, and nobody asks, nobody cares, how the spirit 
 and the physique of the nation is faring. For if what 
 doctors tell us be a fact — that, after three generations, born 
 and bred cockneys become sterile — then it requires no more 
 words of mine to remind the reader of the essential relation- 
 ship between good rule and the voice of flourishing life, 
 on which I laid such stress in my first chapter. No good 
 rule leads to death. When death is the outcome of any 
 system of government or life, it is a sure sign that the 
 voice of flourishing life is no longer audible or obeyed in 
 a nation; it means, therefore, that there is no longer any 
 true aristocracy, and that there has not been any true 
 aristocracy in the land for many years past. 
 
 (6) How many of the hereditary rulers foresaw the 
 dehumanising and besotting influence of the maichine and 
 the modern factory upon the workman f How many of 
 them attempted to " place " the machine — to determine 
 the limits of its healthy development, or to warn the 
 nation against its abuse ? 
 
 The same unsatisfactory reply must be given to this 
 question. In a very interesting article by Mr. Edward 
 Spencer, entitled " The Use and Abuse of Machinery," 
 in the Fortnightly Review of November 191 1, the author 
 argues that the condition of aff^airs at the present day 
 ought to have been foreseen and provided against by the 
 
 ^ See The Tyranny of the Country Side, pp. 25-26 and all Chapter IX. 
 * Op. cit., p. 25. 
 
 F 6^ 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 disciples and friends of such a man as Adam Smith, " for 
 upon the ground plan of an estimate of human nature and 
 its needs such as we find taken for granted in the Wealth . 
 of Nations, it would be unreasonable to expect a better 
 or indeed a different superstructure than that of the 
 present capitalistic system." And then he proceeds to 
 say that " the earlier economists, like ourselves, were 
 hypnotised by the spectacle of the extreme poverty pre- 
 vailing in the lower ranks of labour, and, as a result, they 
 were induced to pursue comfort and hygiene as if they 
 were ends in themselves,^ and as if the whole industrial 
 problem were to be discovered in their attainment." 
 
 Of course these economists were "hypnotised" by the 
 distress in the lower ranks of labour; for they possessed 
 subject minds and could not possibly see deeper than the 
 distress itself. 
 
 When we read in the Majority Report of the Poor Law- 
 Commission that the total cost of poor relief per annum 
 in the British Isles amounts to ^60,000,000, and when 
 we hear that, excluding the sick, the aged, the insane and 
 the very young, 50,000 able-bodied indoor paupers are 
 supported throughout the year at a cost of about • 
 ;^ 1, 3 8 7,23 9,^ and that the number of these able-bodied 
 paupers is rather increasing than decreasing; furthermore, 
 when we learn that these paupers are mostly depraved, 
 undisciplined and hopeless, how can we, as thinking men, 
 divorce their condition entirely from their antecedents.? 
 How can we exonerate ourselves, and those of our pre- 
 decessors who had the requisite leisure and the knowledge 
 for facing problems and solving them — ^how, I say, can 
 we exonerate ourselves and our predecessors from all blame 
 in regard to the lives led by the parents, grandparents 
 and great-grandparents of these characterless and poor- 
 spirited people.'' How can we forget the besotting, the 
 dehumanising, influence of turning a lever all day from 
 
 ^ The italics are mine.— A. M. L. 
 
 * My figures are taken from the Nineteenth Century of November 19 J I. 
 Article : « The Idle Poor." 
 
 60 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 left to right or from right to left in a factory? Or of 
 folding, cutting and preparing the same material for the 
 same machine from one year's end to the other? Who 
 has cared for the character of these people? Who has 
 seen that their spirit should not be hunted out of them 
 1*^ through the generations? ^ 
 
 For, as Mr. Edward Spencer rightly and profoundly 
 observes in the article already quoted, the machine, with 
 all the inestimable advantages it wass supposed to bring 
 to the community at large, has not yet been " placed," 
 either by economists or by the rulers of this nation; and^ 
 he adds very wisely, " to place it to the best human 
 advantage, it is necessary to start from a sound estimate 
 of human character, its needs and its capacities." 
 
 In fact, for nearly two centuries now the lower classes 
 have been absolutely at the mercy of science, and particu- 
 larly mechanical science, both of which have been working 
 quite unscrupulously and indiscriminately, without the 
 [suggestion of a ruler-mind at their backs. My quarrel 
 Iwith modern science, and modern mechanical science par- 
 ticularly, is not based upon the mere fact that they are 
 Complicating life without beautifying or improving it, but 
 [rat, once more, behind science, and mechanical science 
 nove all, there is no ruler-spirit which is able to say, 
 tth the full knowledge of the limits of a certain collective 
 Iman scheme, what place and what power they are to 
 in our midst. 
 
 at any moment an unscrupulous inventor appeared 
 whk had discovered a means of making us travel at fifty 
 timefe our present maximum speed, not a single voice 
 wouM be raised to say, " Before we accept this man's idea, 
 
 ^ Se\ VV. Cobbett, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 1 79, where the author, 
 referring to the workers in the factories in the early years of the last 
 century, expresses himself as follows : " Talk of vassals ! Talk of 
 villains ! Talk of serfs ! Are there any of these, or did feudal times 
 ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor 
 creatures who, in the ' enlightened ' north, are compelled to work four- 
 teen hours iaa day, in a heat of eighty-four degrees ; and who are liable 
 to punishment for looking out at a window of the factory ! " 
 
 67 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 do we know the full consequences that such an invention 
 will be likely to have upon the national character and the 
 national physique, and are these consequences desirable ? " 
 Unquestioningly, unhesitatingly, almost with the assur- 
 ance and seM-comppsure of complete knowledge, practically 
 all innovations introduced since Tudor and Stuart times ' 
 have been acquiesced in as if they must necessarily be 
 improvements. Again and again mere change has falsely 
 been welcomed as Progress; mechanical revolutions have 
 falsely been embraced as desirable evolutions, and uncon- 
 trolled new tendencies have been falsely acclaimed as in- 
 evitable developments. Only when it was too late, only 
 when the evil results of novelties became strikingly 
 obvious, did these novelties begin to be problems. And 
 all this muddle and confusion were sanctified by the 
 doctrine of " experience," which treats as impudence any 
 presbyopic or prophetic glance into the near or distant 
 future. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy says hopefully: 
 "Already it is being recognised in Europe that the 
 general substitution of machines for men must invariably 
 lower the whole intellectual and moral status of the work- 
 ing population, and we need not hope to avoid this result 
 by tinkering at compulsory education."^ But I question, 
 very much whether this is not far too optimistic a state-/ 
 ment of the case. It is very doubtfvil whether even thd 
 sociological thinkers, not to speak of the peoples of 
 Western Europe themselves, are more than half aware 
 of the gravity of this question; and to suppose that thiy 
 would have the courage to solve it as it ought to be solved, 
 even granting they ever faced it fairly and squarely, is 
 quite unwarrantable. For there is a terrible feeling abroad 
 that things have already gone too far.^ 
 
 1 See Dr. Cunningham, op. cit.. Vol. II, p. 295. " Machinery was 
 viewed (in Tudor and Stuart times) with suspicion, not only on account 
 of the quality of the work done, but because of its injurious effects 
 upon handicraftsmen." 
 
 * /irt and Swadeshi, p. 1 9. 
 
 ' The first thinker to express this fear that things had already gone 
 
 68 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 Nor is there the excuse that the legislators had had 
 no warning, nothing to call their attention to the matter. 
 Cobbett's was not the only voice that was raised in 
 England against the evils of machinery. The workmen 
 themselves rebelled, and in a very active manner indeed. 
 During the autumn and winter of 1811, the so-called 
 " Luddite " riots, which broke out among the stocking 
 weavers of Nottingham, and during which machinery was 
 broken up and destroyed wherever the rioters could reach 
 it, ought to have been sufficient to show every thinker 
 among the statesmen of the time that here at least was 
 a problem that ought, not to; be passed over without pro- 
 found reflection. Even supposing they could have been 
 quite impartial in approaching this question, in any case 
 it was not of a nature to be judged purely in terms of 
 wealth, or of immediate profit or loss. For the men who 
 fought in these riots were grim and determined, and 
 hundreds of them were actually starving. There was a 
 psychology of the question, a sociology of the question, 
 apart from its surface aspect as a blow to prosperous 
 industry and commerce. What happened ? Early in 1 8 1 2 
 a Bill was passed making frame-breaking a capital offence, 
 
 too far where machinery was concerned was Samuel Butler. See his 
 letter to "The Press" (Christchurch, N.Z.,June 13, 1863), from which 
 I take the following passage. " Day by day, however, the machines are 
 gaining ground upon us; day by day, we are becoming more sub- 
 servient to them ; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend 
 them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to 
 the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of 
 time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real 
 supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a 
 truly philosophical mind can for a moment question. Our opinion is 
 that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. 
 Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of 
 his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown. . . . 
 If it be urged that this is impossible under the present conditions of 
 human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that 
 our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race 
 of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not 
 only enslaved, but absolutely acquiescent in our bondage." 
 
 69 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 and in November of that year sixteen "Luddites" 
 were executed by sentence of a special Court sitting at 
 York/ 
 
 But in regard to this matter it would be unfair to the 
 aristocratic class I am criticising were I to omit all mention 
 of the wonderful speech Lord Byron delivered in the 
 House of Lords on February 27, 18 12, while opposing 
 the measure making frame-breaking a capital offence 
 introduced by that cold-blooded and matter-of-fact lawyer 
 Lord Erskine. This speech was one of the only three 
 Lord Byron ever delivered in the higher legislative 
 chamber, and it was certainly the best of the three. 
 
 After explaining the difficulties of the unfortunate 
 workmen concerned in these riots — for Lord Byron had 
 recently visited the scene of the trouble in order to acquire 
 first-hand knowledge — and after laying stress upon the 
 poor quality of the work done by the machines, he 
 proceeded — 
 
 "You call these men a mob, degenerate, dangerous 
 and ignorant, and seem to think that the only way to 
 quiet the BeZ/«fl multorum capitum is to lop off a few 
 of its superfluous heads. But even a mob may be better 
 reduced to reason by a mixture of conciliation and firm- 
 ness than by additional and redoubled penalties. Are we 
 aware of our obligations to that mob ? It is the mob that 
 labour in the fields and serve in your houses, that man 
 your navy and recruit your army, that have enabled you 
 to defy all the world, and can also defy you when neglect 
 and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call 
 the people a mob, but. do not forget that a mob too often 
 speaks the sentiments of the people." ^ 
 
 To their credit be it said that Lord Holland, Lord 
 Grosvenor and Lord Qrenville supported Lord Byron in 
 opposing the Bill; but, as we have seen, the measure 
 became law notwithstanding, and the harshness of its 
 
 1 See Tie Political History of England, Vol. XI (by the Hon. George 
 C. Brodrick, D.C.L.), p. 83. 
 
 * Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Vol. XXI, pp. 966-969. 
 
 70 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A 'FAILURE 
 
 application effectually ended the disturbances for a 
 time. 
 
 (7) In the face of the acceleration of life's pace, in the 
 face of the fact that the population was becoming fluid, 
 how many hereditary legislators were cautious enough 
 to foretell that when a population became fluid — since 
 ^^ local'' public opinion is the severest censor of conduct 
 — morality, however stern and rigid it might be, would 
 also tend to become fluid and therefore lax f 
 
 In answer to this question, it may be said that bustle 
 and hurry to nowhere, to nothing, was arrested neither by 
 the hereditary rulers nor by the spiritual guardians of the 
 nation. On the cantrajy, frantic and meaningless haste 
 became the order of the day. People never halted to think 
 or to consider; they merely followed the shortest road to 
 the main chance. Presbyopic views, views concerning the 
 morrow or the future, began to yield before the immediate 
 concern about the best trick, the most expedient ruse, 
 wherewith men could outwit or oust their neighbours. 
 Motion became more rapid; the very increase of motion 
 began to be looked upon as " progress," and to deny this 
 was tantamount to confessing .oneself insane. 
 
 " Every one, indeed," says Mr. Ponsonby, " supposes 
 he is ' doing more ' : because he can move more rapidly. 
 Whereas it would be nearer the truth to say we accom- 
 plish less, because our nervous energy and vitality are 
 being seriously impaired by the whirl and rush of ceaseless 
 mechanical motion." ^ 
 
 And it must not be supposed ' that this feverish rush 
 is characteristic only of the lower classes, where, at least, 
 it is excusable; for, to slaves, time is indeed money. On 
 the contrary, once rapid movement became the ideal, the 
 means to move soon led to moves being made for the 
 sheer love of moving, and the richer you became the 
 faster you moved. The mushroom success achieved by 
 the motor-car is a proof of this. In a better, nobler, 
 ^ Tie Decline of Aristocracy, p. 80. 
 71 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 healthier and more stable age either the motor-car would 
 have remained an undeveloped plaything, or it would 
 have been relegated to trade, where sheer speed is often 
 a means of success. In a vulgar age, however, it arrived 
 sufficiently opportunely to be a huge success, and its 
 adoption by the powerful and the wealthy proves how 
 absurdly vulgar and stupid these people had become. 
 
 " There are people of the highest rank in the England 
 of to-day," says Mr. Ponsonby, "whose existence is as 
 much nomadic as that of Red Indians in the reserved 
 territories of North America. . . . The existence of a 
 monk in a cloister, of a prisoner in a fortress, is more 
 favourable to the intellect than theirs." ^ 
 
 Not one of the members of the governing classes, and 
 least of all the Church, halted in order to inquire what 
 influence this fluid condition of society would tend to 
 exercise over morality, over the sounder traditions of the 
 nation, and over families and other ties. The profound 
 value of local opinion and local censure in maintaining 
 the customs and virtues of a nation was utterly forgotten. 
 Again, from the standpoint of experience, mere travelling 
 was regarded as a good thing in itself. No thought was 
 given to the fact that to a man without backbone or balance 
 and without rigorous principles travelling and varied 
 experience are the unsoundest things of all.* On the 
 contrary, everybody applauded, everybody cried "Pro- 
 gress! " everybody got drunk with the mere sensation of 
 speed — ^until nothing became too stupid, too preposterous 
 or too insane for society to think or to do. Hedonism, 
 blatant and unscrupulous, was left as the refuge of the 
 prosperous — and to the poor. Revolt! 
 
 ^ The Decline of Aristocracy, p. 1 4.0. 
 
 * See W. Cobbett, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 31, where the author says 
 he is " convinced that the facilities which now exist of moving human 
 bodies from place to place are amongst the curses of the country, the 
 destroyers of industry, of morals, and, of course, of happiness. It is a 
 great error to suppose that people are rendered stupid by remaining 
 always in the same place." And Cobbett wrote this on August z"], 
 1826 ! What would he say to-day ! 
 
 72 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 Unfortunately, however, nothing fruitful ever came or 
 ever can come of democratic revolt. Inevitable, reason- 
 able, well-founded as it is, the desire on the part of the 
 proletariat to get the direction of affairs as much as possible 
 into their own hands cannot and will not be any more 
 fruitful than the plutocracy's Hedonism. For it is a mere 
 reaction following upon incompetence in higher quarters. 
 It is not the outcome of the conscious possession of a 
 sound and far-sight«d scheme of organisation, which is 
 the creation of profound ruler wisdom and ruler power. 
 Democratic revolt and cynical Hedonism are but the 
 reverse and obverse of the same medal, and that medal 
 is the sterile fact of impoverished and degenerate life. 
 
 The difference between the two orders of society which 
 are now ranged against one another is, unfortunately, 
 merely a difference of balance at the bank. Give the 
 indignant masses, groaning under the traditional yoke of 
 modern industry, the banking account of those against 
 whom they inveigh, and what would happen.? We all 
 know what would happen. Certainly no constructive or 
 regenerating policy or regime would ensue. The whole 
 crowd would simply rush to provide themselves with cars 
 and cards, and whirl and play away their existence in a 
 round of pleasure. No longer a mere section of society, 
 no longer a mere privileged minority, but everybody 
 would play golf, everybody would sup at the Carlton 
 and the Savoy, and everybody would attend the winter 
 sports in Switzerland. While even from those who were 
 more sober in the enjoyment of their newly acquired 
 leisure, nothing of permanent or genuine value could be 
 expected. And for the simple reason that at the present 
 moment , there is nothing to induce one to believe that 
 the voice of flourishing life — which is the only voice that 
 can possibly lead in the proper direction — is any more 
 alive in the struggling and oppressed masses than it is in 
 the leisured classes. If it is silent above, it is pretty 
 hopeless to seek for it below; because, as I pointed out 
 in the preceding chapter, the conditions below are the 
 
 73 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 very last to create or to cultivate it. In a subsequent 
 chapter I will give an outline of the conditions under 
 which superior spirits may be found or cultivated among 
 the sub-orders of a society, and then it will be seen how 
 few of these conditions are already to hand among the 
 labouring masses. Thus to say that you trust the 
 "People" with a capital P, to put your hand to your 
 heart and shout hopefully that the worm is turning ruler, 
 when it merely turns under pressure, is to be guilty of 
 a kind of optimism which is as empty and foolish as it 
 is romantic; and all those who feel inclined with the 
 modern democrat to declare, " The People are at the helm, 
 all's well with the world ! " not only misunderstand the 
 very principle of prosperous and successful rule as out- 
 lined in my first chapter, but also utterly mistake the true 
 nature of even the healthiest and happiest People. 
 
 But apart from the fact that there is nothing — absolutely 
 nothing either in history, anthropology or psychology — 
 to show that when a people get the rule into their own 
 hands they can be, and are, a substitute for those rare 
 spokesmen of flourishing life whose taste knows what 
 and how to choose; apart from the fact, therefore, that 
 you cannot supply the place of a few artists by a number, 
 however large, of people who are not artists, what grounds 
 are there for supposing that the rule of the people would 
 even be more beneficent than that of the aristocrats — 
 beneficent, I mean, towards those whom they have in their 
 power.? Because I take it that the rule of a people by 
 themselves always must be the rule of a community, 
 difi^erent sections of which are pursuing different aims 
 and different interests, although the whole may be 
 animated by a national idea when an en6my comes on 
 the scene. It may come to pass, therefore, that one section, 
 considering its own interests, as the governing classes have 
 for many generations done in this country, will have 
 power over the other section, or over several other sec- 
 tions. Are there any reasonable grounds for supposing 
 that such a section, simply because they are of the people, 
 
 74 
 
ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE 
 
 would exercise their power more beneficently than a 
 pseudo-aristocratic section has done? Seeing that the 
 people may justly be regarded as the working and busy 
 portion of the population, immersed in the struggle for 
 existence and animated by its keenness, how can they be 
 regarded as a body sufficiently leisured, sufficiently in- 
 structed and sufficiently presbyopic to be guided only by 
 those far-sighted and broadly altruistic motives which 
 glance over a whole scheme, over a whole future and 
 over the whole of the claims of the present and of posterity 
 before acting? Conceding, as I readily do, that the 
 pseudo-aristocracy which has ruled England since the time 
 of Henry VIII has shown, more or less, all the faults of 
 the non-leisured, non-instructed, non-presbyopic or short- 
 sighted body who are immersed in the struggle for exist- 
 ence, what sense is there in supposing that that very body 
 itself will do any better? 
 
 Hear what that philosophic demagogue John Stuart 
 Mill said on this very question — 
 
 "Experience, however, proves that the depositories of 
 power who are mere delegates of the people — that is, of 
 the majority — are quite as ready (when they think they 
 can count on popular support) as any organs of oligarchy 
 to assume arbitrary power, and encroach unduly on the 
 liberty of private life. The public collectively is abun- 
 dantly ready to. impose, not only its generally narrow views 
 of its interests, but its abstract opinions, and even its 
 tastes, as laws binding upon individuals." ^ 
 
 These words, coming as they do from such an inveterate 
 democrat as the writer of Liberty, are particularly signifi- 
 cant, and ought to make every one pause before he speaks 
 too eloquently or too sentimentally about all being well 
 with the world because the People are at the helm! 
 
 Herbert Spencer held the same view. In his Essay 
 on Parliamentary Reform ^ he says : " While we do not 
 
 1 Principles of Political Economy (Ed. 1865), Book V, Chapter XI, 
 
 P- S70- 
 
 ^ First published in The Westminster Review for April i860. 
 
 75 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 see reason to think that the lower classes are intrinsically 
 less conscientious than the upper classes, we do not see 
 reason to think that they are more conscientious. Hold- 
 ing, as we do, that in each society and in each age the 
 morality is, on the average, the same throughout all ranks, 
 it seems to us clear that if the rich, when they have the 
 opportunity, make laws which unduly favour themselves, 
 the poor, if their power was in excess, will do the like in 
 similar ways and to a similar extent. Without knowingly 
 enacting injustice, they will be unconsciously biased by 
 personal considerations, and our legislation will err as much 
 in a new direction as it has hitherto done in the old." 
 
 Here there is no mention of the born artist-ruler, the 
 spokesman of flourishing life. But we should scarcely 
 expect such an idea from Herbert Spencer. Still, the 
 passage shows the hopeless dilemma a nation is in when 
 it has to choose only between its top and its bottom dogs, 
 when there is none superior to the dog in the whole 
 population. 
 
 I, however, maintain that every nation always produces 
 a crop of those who are superior to the top and the bottom 
 dogs, if only those values and those selective means are 
 prevalent within it which lead to the recognition and 
 promotion of such superior men. Confucius knew this 
 fact, and with his doctrine of the superior man he paved 
 the way to its general acceptation by the whole world. 
 
 I am, however, digressing. These considerations belong 
 to another chapter, and for the present I must continue 
 my criticism of the English governing classes, but on 
 another and higher plane, i. e. in the Tutorship of 
 Ruling. 
 
 76 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AS A FAILURE IN THE 
 TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 "The true image of a free people governed by a Patriot King is 
 that of a patriarchal family, where the head and all the members are 
 united by one common interest, and animated by one common spirit." — 
 BoLiNGBROKE, Tie Idea of a Patriot King, pp. 1 40-1 4.1. 
 
 What purpose can I serve by enumerating any more of 
 the sins of omission that can be laid at the door of our 
 governing classes, not to mention that of the Established 
 Church .? To any one who is familiar with the history of 
 the English people during the last three hundred years, 
 the littie handful of facts that I have collected for my 
 indictment of the governing classes of this country will 
 seem meagre and perhaps somewhat inadequate evidence 
 with which to prove my case. I am, however, not an 
 historian. I wish to refer to these things only in order to 
 acquire sufficient warrant to proceed with my general dis- 
 cussion. What concern is it of mine that the kind of fact 
 I have adduced in support of my contention might be 
 multiplied a hundredfold? I simply wish to urge the 
 point that further facts could but substantiate my claims 
 the more. 
 
 In replying to my seven questions, I think I have shown 
 satisfactorily that the rulers of this country have failed 
 time and again in the "craft" of their calling; but in 
 making this point I have also had occasion to refer to their 
 neglect of the "tutorship" of governing. Now, how- 
 ever, in my reply to my next question, I shall be con- 
 cerned chiefly with this " tutorship " of governing, and 
 
 77 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 with the almost total neglect of this pre-eminently 
 important element in the art of ruling. 
 
 If, then, to use the phraseology of that brilliant China- 
 man Ku Hung-Ming, I ask what the governing classes of 
 England have done to guide the taste of the people, and 
 to direct their industry so that it might not be wasted and 
 disheartened in a purely futile accumulation of wfealth for 
 mere Hedonists to squander; if I ask what the governing 
 classes of England have done to "set the tone" in their 
 nation, so that the wholly material industry of the masses 
 might be given a higher purpose and aim, what is the 
 only honest reply that can be given ? 
 
 I have not expatiated at any length upon the simple 
 fact that these governors have failed hopelessly in the plain 
 " craft " of their calling — that they have failed in their 
 duty of protecting and, with their superior wisdom, of 
 controlling for everybody's good the burden bearers of 
 the country. I have taken this point as proved in the main 
 by the few facts I have adduced — facts which j as I say, 
 can be multiplied to any extent. When, however, we 
 come to the question of " tutorship " in governing, the 
 charge against them seems to me to be even more severe 
 than the previous one. 
 
 Speaking of the aristocrats of Great Britain, Mr. Arthur 
 Ponsonby says, " They have never been superior, they 
 have ceased to be governing; is there any reason that they 
 should continue to be noble?" ^ 
 
 There is bitterness in this manner of putting the case, 
 but it is not without some foundation. There can be no 
 doubt that for centuries, almost, the Lords have neglected, 
 or completely forgotten, the principle of flourishing life 
 which reads, "Respect the burden"; and in the rebuff 
 which they received in the summer of 1 9 1 1 , they felt the 
 revenge of Life herself upon* those who scorn her funda- 
 mental principles. I would go further and would say 
 definitely that since the middle of the eighteenth century, 
 but for a few brilliant exceptions, such as the seventh Earl 
 1 The Decline of JHstocracy, -p. \z%. 
 78 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 of Shaftesbury, the voice of flourishing life has been 
 entirely silent in England; and all the confusion and doubt 
 which we now see about us, all the ugliness, vulgarity, 
 misery and uncontrolled Hedonism which now prevail, 
 are nothing but the inevitable outcome of the fact that the 
 voice of impoverished life, of inferior life, has been 
 practically the only guiding voice in our island for one 
 hundred and fifty years. 
 
 There is a misery prevalent to-day which is blacker and 
 more hopeless than any misery that has ever existed on 
 earth before. It is not only the misery of ignoble work, 
 disease and poverty, for that infests all orders of society; 
 but, in the lower orders, it is the misery of countless masses 
 who do menial, characterless and distasteful labour without 
 anything to justify it, or to shed a ray of gold upon it from 
 a height up towards which that work might be looked 
 upon as but a necessary step. And, in the superior orders, 
 it is the misery of those who have lost all sense of a higher 
 aim, all consciousness of a purpose, a goal, or a grand 
 scheme of life, and who are beginning to feel literally 
 uncomfortable and mystified in their position of merely 
 material superiority; because no noble or worthy unravel- 
 ment seems to be promised them for the tangled knot of 
 exploitation, privilege, wretchedness, luxury, pleasure, 
 squalor, comfort, starvation and plenty, which now char- 
 acterises modern life, and in which they happen to be 
 simply fortunate accidents. 
 
 The terrible cynicism of modern times leads many of 
 these materially superior people to say or think, " Apres 
 nous le deluge f'' But the more thoughtful and more 
 sensitive among them are torn in two by doubt and mis- 
 givings, and are beginning to wonder what is the purpose 
 of it all — of their privileges and of their less fortunate 
 fellows' thraldom. 
 
 Beginning with the former kind of misery, and starting ' 
 out from first principles, let it be thoroughly understood 
 that nobody — no man, woman or child from any rank of 
 society — would instinctively recoil before the performance 
 
 n 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of any office, however mean, if the value, power and human 
 fascination alone, of him who demanded it, seemed to 
 justify or glorify that office. Nor does the loving and 
 reverent menial recoil even before pain, if a higher life 
 or a nobler life gives this pain at least some lofty meaning 
 or some lofty purpose. This is the experience of all those 
 patriarchal spirits who have the art of inspiring devotion 
 in their subordinates, and who know it to be one of the 
 duties of ruling to take a tender care of the hearts of their 
 inferiors and to make minions of menials. The burden 
 that is borne in these circumstances by the man below 
 seems to become light through its very significance, 
 through its very human beauty. His labour is glorified 
 by being a fraction of popular endeavour and endurance, 
 helping forward a grand general movement or supporting 
 a grand life, the virtues and achievements of which are 
 sufficiently beyond his power to command his admiration 
 without provoking his envy. This is human. This is 
 positive. This the meanest understand at once. It is part 
 of the most magnificent traditions of mankind. A certain 
 good taste, a certain understanding of the springs of human 
 action, ought even to incline all those for whom menial 
 offices are performed actually to cultivate and preserve 
 that modicum of genuine superiority which alone can 
 permit them to look on without offending their servants 
 while the menial office is being performed. 
 
 But what do we see to-day.? Endless toil, endless 
 misery, black squalor, disease and disgust, without any- 
 thing or any one great enough to justify them or shed a 
 ray of glory upon them, even if they were inevitable. Not 
 only is there nothing^-no grand purpose or grand caste — 
 to give present burden-bearers the feeling that they have 
 something worth living and toiling for; but the very 
 people for whom the meanest and most characterless tasks 
 are performed nowadays are never even seen by the 
 wretched underlings who perform these tasks for them. 
 In this way the menial office is robbed of all its human 
 sanction, beauty and depth, and it becomes merely what 
 
 80 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 it actually is in scientific fact, without emotional glorifi- 
 cation — a dirty job which no money, no pecuniary 
 rewards can cleanse. 
 
 For, even supposing that, like foolish and idealistic 
 Utopians, we could fancy a state of affairs from which 
 hard toil and misery were entirely absent, and in which 
 nothing in the shape of squalor or sordidness necessarily 
 formed part of the lives of the lowest strata of society; 
 nevertheless we could not conceive of a community in 
 which no menial office would have to be performed, for 
 some one or something, were it only the cleaning of a 
 machine. Where, then, could we seek that person or 
 persons who would make us perform even that menial 
 office cheerfully, with love and without rankling indig- 
 nation.? Where could you or I, to-day, hope to find the 
 man for whom we would willingly perform the meanest 
 office.? 
 
 A commercial and industrial age, by founding every- 
 thing upon a money basis, forgot that there was humanity 
 and not machinery behind the exchange of coin for care; 
 and that all the money in the world cannot build up heart, 
 conscience, desire, love, good cheer and contentedness, in 
 the way that a healthy, inspiring and inspiriting human 
 relationship can. 
 
 That is why our domestic servants, that is to say all 
 those servants who come into the closest contact with their 
 superiors, wiU be the last to revolt, especially against those 
 of us who have still preserved enough of the paitriarchal 
 spirit to make them feel that they get more than their 
 money for their work. The action of domestic servants 
 in regard to Mr. Lloyd George's Insurance Act was signi- 
 ficant in this respect. That clause in the Insurance Act 
 which referred to them was a legislative attempt to make 
 the breach which already separates them from the patri- 
 archal care of their employers even wider than previous 
 legislation had already made it; and behind all the 
 economic arguments that were raised against this new 
 negative measure, there was a great deal of conscious and 
 G 8i 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 unconscious opposition to the anti-patriarchal spirit which 
 animated it, as many of the letters addressed by servants 
 to the Press actually proved. 
 
 Stilly what an infinitesimal portion of labour is accounted 
 for by domestic servants alone! And what a vast army 
 of peopk who work for us lie without our gates, where 
 neither our eye nor our voice can reach them, where not 
 even a knowledge either of our purpose, of our aspirations, 
 or of the justification of it all, can ever cheer them; simply 
 because at present there is no such purpose, aspiration or 
 justification. Even the religious meaning of their lives is 
 rapidly departing from them; though this is certainly of 
 less value as a cohering and uniting force than that other 
 meaning which is given them by having glory shed on 
 their lives by the loftiness, the equilibrium, the wisdom 
 and the beauty of those whom they serve. 
 
 That is why the misery of to-day is blacker than any 
 misery that has ever been seen on earth before; that is why 
 the hopelessness and hate of to-day are more real and more 
 profound than all the hopelessness and hate that have ever 
 existed in human life until now; and that is why all forces 
 which at present are tending to make the breach between 
 man and servant greater; all forces, whether demagogic, 
 religious, social or educational, which incline to further 
 and greater separation and personal strangeness between 
 the leisured and the working classes, are the most infernal 
 and most devilish forces of the age. " For," as Boling- 
 broke said, " to divide can never be an expedient for good 
 purposes, any more than to corrupt; since the peace and 
 prosperity of a nation will always depend upon uniting, as 
 far as possible, the heads, hearts and hands of the whole 
 people, and on improving, not debauching morals." ^ 
 
 Thus the minister who rules by dividing, who acquires 
 power by separative and disturbing means, ought by that 
 
 ^ A Dissertation upon Parties (Davies, 1775), p. xxiii of Dedication. 
 See also Disraeli in Coningsby (Langdon Davis Edition), p. 289, where 
 the author ascribes the decline of public virtues to the fact that the 
 various classes of the country are arrayed against each other. 
 
 82 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 one act alone to earn the odiuni and contempt of all parties. 
 To divide is the incompetence of rule, to separate is the 
 cowardice of the desperate legislator. 
 
 And now to speak of the second kind of misery. The 
 material superiors of the present age, the top-dogs — " the 
 upper ten thousand," as they are called — are fully aware 
 of the horrors and terrors at the base of the social edifice; 
 they are also fully conscious of the fact that neither their 
 lives, nor their functions, nor the direction and nature of 
 modern life in general, justify these horrors and terrors; 
 and in consequence of this knowledge they are profoundly 
 ill at ease and their consciences feel intolerably heavy. 
 
 Nobody knows better than the sensitive unit of this 
 upper ten thousand that for many generations now the 
 heart of the people has been spurned and neglected, and its 
 character mutilated. 
 
 The old conscience-stiller, the scientific " Mother 
 SiegePs Soothing Syrup " which Darwin and his school 
 flung to these conscience-stricken " upper ten," by telling 
 them that all this aching misery and cruel struggle at the 
 base led inevitably to the " survival of the fittest," has 
 ceased at last from soothing them, because it is no longer 
 believed. As Thorold Rogers says, " It was inexpressibly 
 soothing to those who had brought about the situation, for 
 it seemed to show that nature, not man, was the cause of 
 it, that it was the result of an inexorable law, and in no 
 sense the result of positive and partial legislation." ^ But 
 it was soon discovered that misery, as Adam Smith had 
 foreseen, was not even the check on population that it was 
 supposed to be; for with Rogers we have discovered that 
 "oppressed people become reckless." Thus the terrible 
 fact gradually came to light that the fittest to survive in 
 this stew of plunder against plunder, exploitation against 
 exploitation, and greed against greed, which is called " un- 
 restricted competition" and ^Haissez-faire" (literally: let 
 
 ^ Tie Industrial and Commercial History of England, p. 57. For a very 
 interesting refutation of the belief that the paupers' struggle with one 
 another leads to anything, see pp. 56-61 of Rogers' book. 
 
 83 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the capitalistic trader have his way, unguided and un- 
 limited) was neither a very desirable nor a very admirable 
 specimen, and the comforting thought that things can be 
 left to themselves — which, by-the-bye, seems to have 
 animated all Victorian thinkers up to the time of Herbert 
 Spencer — is now, thank Heaven ! in its death agony. 
 
 "With the general decline of this belief, it was only 
 natural that charity, which hitherto had been either sporadic 
 or traditionally virtuous, should become feverish, system- 
 atic, methodical, eager and astoundingly munificent. For 
 if charity be a flower, then its most powerful forcing 
 manure is most certainly neither the altruism of spotless 
 innocence nor of guileless simplicity, but the excrementa 
 of an uneasy conscience, or of a vain and purse-proud 
 heart. 
 
 Munificent charity and boundless benevolence are, 
 however, no cure for evils in the social organism. They 
 do not even skim the surface of the fundamental causes 
 of these evils. They do accomplish one thing though; 
 they help to abate the awful self-accusations which tend to 
 rack the hearts of any class or caste which has ceased to be 
 aware of any genuine justification for its peculiar privi- 
 leges, or of any grand scheme of life or politics which 
 might, at a pinch, help it to consider the burden borne 
 by those below it as useful, as necessary, or as sanctified. 
 
 When social evils are prevalent and potent, charity and 
 benevolence are not the counter-agents chosen by rulers 
 or deep thinkers. They are essentially the counter-agents 
 which occur to the shallowest and least thoughtful rriinds. 
 Given the necessary means, any man can be a philan- 
 thropist in the ordinary " charitable " sense, any man can 
 endow hospitals or homes for incurables, or refuges for 
 waifs and strays, or asylums for the blind, the crippled^d 
 the sick. These are " cures " that any vain fool with a 
 banking account can dispense as long as his money lasts. 
 But to attack these evils as enemies, to revise the scheme 
 that has brought them about, to uproot the first principles 
 from which they spring, and to institute such reforms (not 
 
 84 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 patchwork readjustments) as will render their continuance 
 impossible or their justification a thing recognised by all — 
 even the sufferers themselves — requires something more 
 than money can purchase. It requires ruler qualities of 
 the highest order, knowledge covering the widest range, 
 and thought of the deepest kind, correlated with all the 
 leisure that would render these possessions fruitful and 
 operative. 
 
 The fact that the ignorant plutocratic solution of social 
 evils neither impresses the masses nor anybody else, is 
 proved by the irrefutable truth that it is precisely in this 
 very age when, according to all accounts, philanthropic and 
 charitable undertakings absorb greater sums of money 
 than they have ever absorbed before, that Socialism, class- 
 hatred and ingratitude are most rampant and most 
 bitter. 
 
 These ignorant or " subject " methods of redressing 
 wrongs do not therefore command respect; for there is 
 nothing so sensitive to the touch of the experienced hand 
 as the subordinate, whether he be a horse or an inferior 
 unit in a great nation. 
 
 It is important not to overlook this, more particularly 
 when we feel inclined to explain such difficult and recon- 
 dite matters as the action of the people in regard to the 
 Parliament Act of 191 1, by referring in a leisurely and 
 easy manner to artificially stirred-up hatred. 
 
 The quantity of subject movements, alone, which are on 
 foot at present is literally bewildering-— announcements 
 of them come with every post, and they show how con- 
 scious even the unimaginative and unthinking men in the 
 street, even the dull-witted spinsters with their small 
 modicum of learning and leisure, are becoming of the 
 disorder, the misrule and the incompetence in higher 
 spheres to-day. For if you look into these movements, 
 started and supported by the subject mind, whether of an 
 old maid or of an old colonel, you will find that they are 
 chiefly corrective in their nature — that is to say, calculated 
 to patch up certain flaws in the existing social edifice. 
 
 85 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 The Eugenic^ and the Ethical movements are cases in 
 point, as are also all the societies and institutions for the 
 prevention or promotion of this or that; as are also all 
 charitable and benevolent bodies. Any individual subject 
 who happens to recognise what he, from his back parlour, 
 conceives to be an evil, is at liberty to gather a few of his 
 neighbours around him and to set to work to put it 
 right. 
 
 And since the uninitiated subject is, in the majority of 
 cases, neither a deep student of human nature nor a deep 
 thinker in legislative and sociological science, and as there 
 is no general plan or direction prescribed to him from 
 above, he is generally satisfied with effecting certain minor 
 changes which he would call " improvements in the welfare 
 of the submerged, by increasing their material comfort." 
 
 No superior purpose or general idea governs all these 
 subject movements, so that their combined efforts may 
 help to consummate a perfectly definite and preconceived 
 plan. No superior power exists which, with profound 
 knowledge to support it, can lay down its hand and say 
 emphatically " No ! " to any organisation or institution 
 which seems in its purpose to diverge too materially from 
 the general scheme laid down for the nation's collective 
 weal and glory — and for the simple reason that there is no 
 such general scheme ! 
 
 But we should not expect the mind of the subject to 
 do any more than it is doing. We should not expect the 
 mind of the subject to behave like the mind of the ruler. 
 How could a subject mind create a co-ordinating and 
 regenerating scheme? How could it do more than patch 
 and plaster when things go wrong? A nation ought to 
 be only too glad when each of its subject members is so 
 conscious of the specialised knowledge and capabilities 
 required for his own particular business as positively to 
 repudiate any concern with matters beyond, or merely 
 outside, his sphere of power. But what we may and do 
 
 ^ For a criticism of the aims and methods of this movement see 
 Chapter VII. 
 
 86 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 expect is that some one in the position of a ruler, with the 
 knowledge, the traditions, and the leisure of a ruler, should 
 apply his mind to questions of State, and exert it with all 
 the earnestness that the solemnity of the matter would 
 seem to inspire. I am not forgetting the many blots which 
 such ordinary people as Howard, Wilberforce, Romilly, 
 Miss Carpenter, Sheriff Watson and others removed 
 from our legal system; I merely maintain that such work 
 is patchwork, and has no creative value at all. 
 
 Unfortunately, it is precisely when the subject mind, 
 with all its other multifarious and often purely self- 
 preservative preoccupations, is left to concern itself with 
 these questions that things get into such a hopeless 
 muddle; and only correctives or antidotes are prescribed, 
 when a fundamental general scheme or plan alone, which 
 would sweep away the necessity for any correctives and 
 antidotes, is the crying need. 
 
 England, with her long Protestant tradition, is admit- 
 tedly the land of Amateurism par excellence. What does 
 a false note or a false value in politics matter, when we are 
 brought up amid false notes and false values, perpetrated 
 daily in our immediate circle by a legion of amateur 
 singers, pianists, painters and writers ? I say, " England 
 with her long Protestant tradition," because the influence 
 of this last factor in promoting the spirit of Amateurism 
 should not be forgotten. When an Englishman says, 
 " Every man has a right to his own opinion," he little 
 knows how truly Protestant or anarchical this remark is. 
 Apart from its being merely an impudent and foolish 
 platitude, however, it is dangerously untrue. And any 
 one who requires this contention of mine to be supported 
 had better stop reading this book here and turn his mind 
 to more compatible matter. In any case I shall not waste 
 time in supporting it. To those people who really concern 
 me, my attitude on this point will be quite plain. Suffice 
 it, therefore, to say, that the heart of Protestantism and 
 Protestant tradition is this presumptuous and swollen- 
 headed notion that every man has a right to have his say 
 
 87 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 in all things/ The very foundation of Luther's attitude 
 of revolt against a higher authority on Church doctrine, 
 which was the belief that the profoundest things can be 
 made questions for the " individual conscience" to decide, 
 received its highest sanction from that great apostle of 
 anarchy and revolt — St. Paul. 
 
 " Do ye not know," said St. Paul to the Coriflthians, 
 " that the saints shall judge the world .'' and if the world 
 shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the 
 smallest matters.?" (i Cor. vi. 2). No Protestant who 
 was allowed by his Church to become acquainted with this 
 inflammatory doctrine ever doubted that he could judge 
 the smallest matters. And St. Paul proceeds, " Know ye 
 not that ye shall judge angels.? How much more things 
 that pertain to this life? " There is no limit to such 
 impudence, and once it becomes thoroughly absorbed by 
 a nation, there is no limit to Amateurism. Who would 
 dare to set the affairs of earthly government, the affairs 
 of sociology, politics and general state-craft above the 
 judging of angels ? Consequently, if later on we are going 
 to judge angels, sociology, politics and state-craft must 
 surely be child's play now! This is the logic at the root 
 of political Amateurism or Democracy. And Matthew 
 Arnold might have inveighed against this logic until 
 Doomsday, he would never have succeeded in refuting it 
 
 1 This spirit reaches its zenith in Puritanism and its first cousin 
 Scotch Presbyterianism. James I saw this perfectly well, and when he 
 was asked whether he would tolerate a diversity of religious cere- 
 monies — a toleration favourable to the Presbyterians, he said : " A 
 Scottish presbytery agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the 
 devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their 
 pleasure censure me and my councils and all our proceedings. . . . 
 Stay, I pray you, for one seven years, before you demand that from me, 
 and if then you find me pursy and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I 
 will perhaps hearken to you ; for let that government be once set up, 
 I am sure I shall be kept in breath ; then shall we all of us have work 
 enough . . ." — meaning, of course, that anarchy would be rife. — 
 S. R. Gardiner, Tie First Tzvo Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution (1905), 
 pp. 14.-15. 
 
 88 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 had he not first overcome its procreator — the Pauline 
 impudence of the New Testament. 
 
 But although England has gone very far indeed in the 
 realisation of this fatal doctrine, although her evil example 
 is now being followed, just as it was in industry and 
 commerce, by the whole of the civilised world — since she 
 was the first to prepare the machinery for the evil — ^why 
 should she not be the first to put her foot down and declare 
 an end to it? For, despite the fact that the modern 
 democratic state counts — nay, insists upon — an amateur 
 in politics (the average voter) raising his voice as high as 
 that of the serious and deeply thoughtful student of the 
 question; in England, at least, we have been able to pre- 
 serve a class of m*i who are placed in an exceptionally 
 ideal position for the task of ruling and, therefore, of 
 guiding with paternal solicitude the voices (the suffrages) 
 of these amateur politicians and legislators whom the State 
 condemns to incompetent meddling. In the landed aristo- 
 cracy we had the good fortune to possess a body of men 
 who had all the opportunity, the leisure and the self- 
 preservative impulses for becoming deeply human and 
 deeply wise rulers. We, therefore, possessed at least the 
 machinery for that desirable counter-check to the evils 
 that were bound to arise from proletarian politics, in the 
 form of a caste which, by its example, its wise counsel and 
 forethought, its careful scrutiny and censorship of the 
 mental food of the people, its fatherly protection and 
 superior knowledge, and its presbyopic altruism, might 
 ultimately have convinced us of its indispensability, value 
 and power. 
 
 Is it to be supposed, despite the germ of separative 
 anarchy that is thought by some to lie in all Englishmen's 
 hearts, that such a caste, with all the privileges of leisure 
 and wealth it enjoyed — privileges which must be granted 
 if deep study and profound thought are to be made 
 possible — is it to be supposed, I say, that such a caste 
 would have been overthrown if it had shown its fitness for 
 the lofty task tradition had bequeathed to it ? 
 
 89 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 It is impossible to conceive of such a revolution when 
 a caste so placed fulfils all that its inferiors have a right to 
 expect from it. In the simple act of giving to the rest of 
 their fellows a direction, a general purpose or aspiration, 
 alone, such a body of men would have found the means of 
 making themselves both loved and respected. For, as 
 Disraeli observed, " Man is only truly great when he acts 
 from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals 
 to the imagination." * 
 
 But, far from giviiig them a general purpose, direction 
 or aspiration, they did not even see to it that the people 
 should cultivate or even preserve the character diat is 
 required in order to be able to profit from such things when 
 they were given. It is no idle statement to say that such 
 a vast organisation as the Salvation Army (whatever its 
 actual merits or demerits may be) would nave been a 
 superfluous and preposterous piece of subject meddle- 
 someness if the governing classes of England had "with 
 fear and trembling taken care of the heart of the people." 
 And how many other subject movements are there whose 
 aims are similiar to those of the Salvation Army ! 
 
 When factories arose, when the age and youth of the 
 nation began to be herded into the slums and lower middle- 
 class streets of large cities, how many were there among 
 the ruling classes who attempted to organise their social 
 life in such a manner that the deleterious influence of 
 their occupations upon their mind and body might be 
 either neutralised or at least mitigated .'' Simultaneously 
 with the employment of women and children in factories 
 and mines, how many of our rulers saw to it that the 
 precious links in the traditional cultiore of the home which 
 join grandmother, mother and daughter together in 
 healthy and normal families, should not be crueUy sun- 
 
 ^ Coningsby (Langdon Davies), p. 292. Even that dry-as-dust econo- 
 mist, John Stuart Mill, made a most unexpected admission on this 
 point. He said, " It is very shallow, even in pure economics, to take 
 no account of the influence of imagination." — Political Economy, Book II, 
 Chapter X, p. 202. 
 
 90 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 dered? How many fought to preserve the arts of the 
 needle, of the saucepan, and of the besom and wash-tub, 
 when capitalistic sweating threatened to poison all such 
 arts, and all desire for such arts, in the cinaracters of the 
 working masses? Whereas a stupid subject movement 
 under the banner of Temperance was of course made to 
 suppress the drink evil, how many rulers thought of 
 keeping the working man at home by preserving the 
 workman's womenfolk from deterioration? Naturally, 
 stupid subject movements arose for improving the homes 
 of the working classes; but how many of these under- 
 stood or militated against the root of the evil ? How 
 many of the ruling classes sought to shelter the labouring 
 proletariat not only from the cruel and unfair competition^^ 
 but also from the frequently vitiating moral and political 
 influence of all the ruck and scum of Europe, who were 
 allowed to settle down among our fellow-countrymen in 
 the poorer districts of our urban centres? Who foresaw 
 that thrift would gradually be hunted from the character 
 of the so-called submerged, if for generations they were 
 disheartened, demoralised and rendered reckless by a 
 heartlessness and a hopelessness which they could neither 
 understand nor oppose? 
 
 How many of the ostensible protectors of the people 
 took care to ascertain that even the literature which 
 reached the masses should not be in bad taste or demoral- 
 ising? I do not mean "demoralising" in the Puritan 
 sense; for, according to the Puritan, you can perpetrate 
 any piece of literary or intellectual vulgarity in your books, 
 so long as you do not refer, save with horror, to the joy 
 and beauty of sex. I mean " demoralising " in the sense 
 of destroying right and proper ideas concerning humanity, 
 human aims, human prestige and human relationship. 
 
 Who saw to it, then, that if the people had any mental 
 
 1 As this cruel competition was tolerated as a source of profit by the 
 capitalists, the latter must be held directly responsible for all the grave 
 incidental evils that have resulted from the enormous alien population 
 in our midst. 
 
 91 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 culture at all, it should be of a healthy character- and nerve- 
 strengthening kind? In asking all these questions I am 
 not forgetting the many charitable attempts that were made 
 to meet and mitigate the evils consequent upon the last 
 hundred and fifty years of " Progress "; because, as I have 
 pointed out, these were all subject efforts and were not 
 only absurdly inadequate, but constantly very stmpid and 
 superficial. What I mean is that as fast as the evils, or 
 threats of evils, arose, which gave the impetus to charit- 
 able subject efforts, no ruler mind appeared who questioned 
 the whole system at the root of these evils, or who dared 
 to slam the door in the face of an innovation which, togged 
 out in the infernally deceptive garb of "Progress," yet 
 unscrupulously preyed upon the spirit and character of a 
 great nation's social foundation — the working classes. 
 
 To take the question of education alone, let us see what 
 light it can throw upon this stage in the examination of 
 the principle of aristocracy. Before I proceed, however, 
 I should like the reader thoroughly to understand two 
 things: (i) That I do not approve of the present system 
 of education. (2) That I only select it for scrutiny be- 
 cause it is one of the chief departments of state adminis- 
 tration which is concerned with caring for the hearts of the 
 people, and, therefore, despite its misguidedness, as far as 
 method is concerned, presents a measure according to 
 which we can gauge the earnestness of the governing 
 classes in entering upon the task of caring for the hearts 
 of the people. 
 
 To begin with, then, the whole system of National 
 Education in England before the Act of 1870 was a matter 
 merely of state-aided voluntary effort; and in order that 
 the precise extent of this state aid may be realised, the 
 following figures, though few, may be sufficient to support 
 my indictment of those who, during the first seventy years 
 of the last century, were in charge of the nation's character 
 and mind. I should like to caution the reader against 
 believing that I approve of a cash or quantity test in 
 matters of this sort; but, since it is the only available test 
 
 92 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 we have, it must be used simply as a means of measuring 
 the warmth, not necessarily the efficiency or profundity of 
 statesmen's dealings with this matter; while we must also 
 bear in mind that this cash test is so far reliable seeing that 
 it reveals all that the statesmen concerned with it undertook 
 to do in the matter of caring for the character and mind 
 of the people. 
 
 Previous to 1833, Parliament appears to have made no 
 grant whatsoever, save in Ireland,* to the independent 
 voluntary bodies who, in a subject manner, were trying to 
 solve the problem of national education to the best of their 
 limited ability. And even the subject attempts at grap- 
 pling with the problem were shown by Henry Brougham's 
 Commission, started in 1 8 1 6, to be greatly hampered and 
 rendered inoperative by the landlords and clergy of the 
 different parishes. For it was discovered that the charity 
 schools throughout the country were not only monopolised 
 by these gentlemen, but also that the latter were actually 
 embezzling the ample revenues provided for the upkeep 
 of these institutions ! In 1833, " after a long controversy 
 as to whether the Government had any right at all to 
 interfere with education" (!),* with a population of about 
 14,000,000 in England and Wales alone, the first grant of 
 ;^2o,ooo was made to the subject voluntary schools. In 
 1839, with a population of about 15,000,000, this grant 
 was increased to ;^30,ooo; in 1846, with a population of 
 about 16,000,000, it grew to ;^ 100,000; in 1851, with a 
 population of 17,927,609 it was ;^i5o,ooo; in 1853, with 
 a population of about 18,000,000, it became ;^396,ooo; 
 in 1858, with a population of about 19,000,000, it stood 
 at ;^663,400; in 1861, with a popvdation of 20,066,224, 
 it was ;^8i3,400; in 1865, with a population of about 
 21,500,000, it was only ;^636,8oo; in 1870, with a popu- 
 lation of about 22,500,000, it rose again to ^894,000; in 
 1876, with a population of about 23,200,000, it was 
 
 ^ And this was due to anti-Catholic feeling and bitterness. 
 
 * ji Text-Book in tie History of Education, by Paul Monroe, Ph.D., 
 
 P- 733- 
 
 93 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 ;^ij6oOjOOO; and in 1878, with a population of 
 24,000,000, it was _;^2,2oOjOOO. 
 
 Taking this system as we find it without furthesr 
 criticism, the absurd inadequacy of these grants may be 
 realised by comparing them with the present expenses of 
 the Educational Department of State in relation to the 
 population. But the most preposterous featur© in this 
 question, from a ruler standpoint, was the manner in 
 which the supposed rulers of the nation slothfuUy and 
 incompetently preferred to ayail themselves of individual 
 subject effort and initiative, rather than to face the diffi- 
 culty and devise, establish and run an educational 
 organisation of their own. But the action of the English 
 governing classes in regard to this question must not be 
 considered as exceptional. It is characteristic of their 
 whole attitude towards internal politics for the last two 
 hundred and thirty years; and when Sir Joshua Fitch 
 speaks of the provision for the education of the people 
 of England as being practically the product of a haphazard 
 happy-go-lucky system of muddling through somehow, 
 without either mastery or profound understanding,^ he 
 simply provides the formula for a criticism of almost 
 everything that has been done in this country for the last 
 hundred years in the matter of solving social problems. 
 
 In a nation where so little was done for the hearts of 
 the people, it ought to surprise no one to find that next 
 to nothing was done for the care of thdir bodies. If trade 
 and capitalistic exploitation of the laboiarer had been 
 allowed to deteriorate the mind and character of the 
 masses, it could not be hoped that in a Christian country, 
 which places spirit above body, anything would be done 
 to preserve their bodies from similiar evils. No one 
 
 ■*■ His actual words are : " The public provision for the education 
 of the people of England is not the product of any theory or plan 
 formulated beforehand by statesmen or philosophers ; it has come into 
 existence through a long course of experiments, compromises, traditions, 
 successes, failures and religious controversies." See Encycl. Brifanmca 
 (loth Edition), Article : "Education." 
 
 94 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 moved a finger to prevent the deterioration of the bodies 
 of the lower classes through the gradual deterioration of the 
 mothers of these classes. It was soon found that among 
 urban factory girls, for instance, confinements were fre- 
 quently attended not only with great diflliculty but also 
 with great danger. This evil alone ought to have sug- 
 gested not merely a patchwork remedy, but a questioning 
 of the whole system which gave rise to it. Nothing funda- 
 mental was done! With romantic levity it was fondly 
 imagined that a great nation might be maintained on 
 sickly bodies. Even to this day, the problem of the body 
 and its pre-eminent importance has not yet been faced 
 fairly and squarely. Meanwhile, however, we have the 
 impudence to continue sending missionaries to China — the 
 country in whose Book of Rites even the essential qualities 
 of a wet-nurse (for cases in which such a domestic auxiliary 
 cannot be dispensed with) are carefully prescribed for the 
 community, and have been so prescribed for centuries by 
 the presbyopic legislators of the nation. This is true 
 education. All education that does not begin with the 
 suckling's body and its requirements is little more than 
 romantic fooling — dangerous romantic fooling. And 
 when this dangerous romantic fooling is more or less 
 rendered sacrosanct by Puritanical contempt for the body; 
 when it is condoned by the highest sanction of all — the 
 sanction of the State religion, which argues that the 
 salvation of the soul can be impeded or prevented neither 
 by physical disability nor any sickness of the body, how- 
 ever bungled, however botched, inodorous or gangrenous 
 that body may be; but rather that sickness, botchedness, 
 or crippledom are often a passport to Heaven, because 
 they are a trial and a chastisement sent by a loving Provi- 
 dence — then an undue importance is attached to the so- 
 called " soul," beside which the body sinks into perilous 
 insignificance. Sooner or later when such doctrines prevail 
 their consequence must be brought home to those pro- 
 fessing them in a manner which is as ugly as it is inevit- 
 able. In modern Europe we are rapidly approaching a 
 
 95 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 point at which it will be too late, too hopeless, too appal- 
 ling to do anything to arrest the decadent torrent. Is 
 there a panic at this thought? Are our leaders already 
 solemn with dread at the prospect ? Nothing of the kind ! 
 The majority are too used to sickness to see that there 
 is anything abnormal in its prevalence. The minority are 
 too near to sickness, too much compromised by its contact 
 and its cultvire, any longer to feel that instinctive abhor- 
 rence which was undermined once for all when healthy 
 mankind were taught that a pure soul could sanctify any- 
 thing — even foul breath. And, meanwhile, everything is 
 allowed to drift and drift, while rulers studiously ignore 
 all dangers, all grievances and all morbid tendencies which 
 are not pressed upon their attention by a subject agitation. 
 
 What can possibly be expected from such a manner of 
 dealing with vital questions? We can expect only what 
 we see — a nation seething with discontent, a nation 
 packed to overflowing with characterless, spiritless, ugly 
 and degenerate people, and a host of amateur political 
 surgeons and physicians at work day and night, plastering 
 and patching up the tottering though luxurious social 
 organism, while it learns to forget that numbers and 
 wealth are no measure of a great nation, but only a 
 deceptive feature, if its heart, character and body are 
 degraded. 
 
 All this time, however, we have had a caste — a superior, 
 leisured, educated and wealthy class — who enjoyed the 
 privileges of rulers, and who ought to have felt it their 
 duty not to enjoy those privileges for nothing. Every 
 consideration that ever influenced the minds of rulers 
 ought to have conduced to make them face these problems 
 one by one as fast as they appeared, and to meditate upon 
 them until, to use Mr. Edward Spencer's words, they 
 would have "foreseen and provided against" evils which 
 were bound to result from the untested and untried inno- 
 vations pouring in anarchically from all sides. Remember- 
 ing that they were a privileged caste in an ostensibly 
 democratic comniunity, their instinct of self-preservation 
 
 96 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 alone, much more therefore their instinct of perfection, 
 beauty and order, ought to have told them that by 
 neglecting to dwell thoughtfully upon the character and 
 spirit of the people, and by neglecting to preserve that 
 character and spirit from deterioration, they were simply 
 condemning the coming true democracy itself, as well as 
 themselves, to utter ruin. There was no excuse for this 
 neglect; for had not Disraeli, their greatest teacher, told 
 them early in the nineteenth century, " that there is some- 
 thing to be considered beyond forms of government — 
 national character"; whereupon he proceeds, "and herein 
 should we repose our hopes. If a nation be led to aim 
 at the good and great, depend upon it, whatever be its 
 form, the government will respond to its convictions and 
 its sentiments." * 
 
 The fact that this has not been done in all these years, 
 the fact that these problems are not even regarded as 
 problems yet, cannot possibly recoil half so heavily upon 
 the subject's as upon the ruler's head. With but few 
 exceptions, the Lords, in their heart of hearts, have all 
 been democrats and plebeians throughout. A small hand- 
 ful of rare ones apart, among whom it is a joy and a solace 
 to think of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, they have 
 said like the greedy underman who is a constitutional 
 pauper, "I want everything for nothing!" But they 
 ought to have known that their life of pleasure could be 
 no justification for the burdens the lower orders bore. 
 Only a life spent in ruling with a deep concern for the 
 welfare, character and safety of the burden-bearer, only a 
 lifetime spent in the promotion of the glory and good 
 taste of their nation, could be a justification of the burdens 
 of those beneath them. 
 
 It never occurred to them, however, to give something 
 in return (not in kind, but in thought, forethought, medi- 
 tation and wise ruling), for the priceless privileges they 
 enjoyed; and thus they not merely lost the confidence of 
 the community and all confidence in themselves, but also 
 ^ Coningsby, p. 447. 
 
 H 97 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 brought the great order to which they belonged into dis- 
 repute — an act for which all those who, like myself, 
 fervently believe in aristocratic rule, will have some 
 difficulty in forgiving them. 
 
 For this tutorship of ruling, of which I have spoken in 
 the present chapter, involves among the other duties men- 
 tioned, one tremendous responsibility. It involves the 
 responsibility of building up a healthy culture, a culture 
 alluring and powerful enough to knit a whole people 
 together, a culture sufficiently imposing in its grandeur 
 to render its spread over the face of the earth a boon and 
 not a bane to other subject peoples, and one so self- 
 evidently superior as to be able to achieve its victories 
 almost without contest, just as the culture of the ancient 
 Incas conquered and spread. 
 
 It is a great culture that makes a people, or that creates 
 a people out of a hotch-potch of peoples,^ and leads them 
 to regard themselves as one huge organism to be defended 
 and upheld against barbarians. And it is the superior 
 men alone of a nation who can undertake, and who have 
 always undertaken, this task of creating that miraculous 
 leaven and tonic, a great Culture. And what is the sort 
 of culture we at present have to hand on to a people whom 
 we draw or force into our sphere of power ? It is at most 
 the culture of the commercial city and of an exploded 
 superstition; it is at most a culture in which we ourselves 
 are rapidly losing all faith, and which spreads ill-health 
 and misery wherever it goes. 
 
 It is so devoid of all true and self-evident superiority 
 that for over a century now a whole nation like the inhabi" 
 tants of the East Indies have held aloof from it and are 
 
 1 See J. K. Bluntschli, Tie Theory of the State (3rd Edition of 
 Authorised Translation), p. 87. "A mere arbitrary combination or 
 collection of men has never given rise to a People. Even the voluntary 
 agreement and social contract of a number of persons cannot create 
 one. To form a People, the experiences and fortunes of several genera- 
 tions must co-operate, and its permanence is never secured until a 
 succession of families handing dovirn its accumulated culture from 
 generation to generation has made its characteristics hereditary." 
 
 98 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 growing to despise it ever more and more. It is so lacking 
 in convincing value that we ourselves have not the heart 
 to impose it on any one. It is so anarchical and feeble 
 that it has lost all power of persuasion even over ourselves. 
 The Christian portion of it has been assailed again and 
 again; and having been found not only wanting in healthy 
 values, but also untenable in more than one particular, is 
 gradually tottering to its fall and is rapidly losing its power 
 as a moral force. If such a thing as a culture of doubt and 
 indifference be possible in any sense wlutever, this is the 
 culture we now possess; and the only definite principles 
 it contains are principles drawn from the struggle for 
 material success, material comfort and the mechanical com- 
 plication and acceleration of life. Nothing has been done 
 or even attempted by the actual governing classes to 
 create another culture on the moribund body of the ex- 
 piring one. And when we look in their direction for help 
 in this respect, it is rather with despair than with hope that 
 we ultimately turn away. 
 
 The first principle of every sound and healthy morality 
 ought to be this : " Thou shalt not sacrifice the greater to 
 the less; but, if need be, the less to the greater." 
 
 In these three first chapters it may appear to the super- 
 ficial Nietzschean that in laying all the stress upon the 
 duties of the governing classes to the working people, I 
 am subverting this first principle of a sound and healthy 
 morality. This, however, is not the case. At a time 
 when the leisured classes simply live in ease upon the 
 labour of their inferiors without undertaking any of those 
 arduous and profound duties which, as I have tried to 
 show in these three chapters, can be performed only by 
 them (the privileged class), they cease from being the 
 grea-ter portion of a people. And if we are to speak of 
 sacrifice, then it is they who should be the victims. In 
 the eyes of a philosopher, the sacrifice of inferiors, when 
 the ostensible superiors are simply parasites, or very 
 nearly so, is an intolerable evil. It is only when the 
 superiors are leading a grand march, the benefits of which 
 
 99 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 must inevitably conduce to a greater diegree of healthy, 
 flourishing and beautiful life — it is only then that the 
 sacrifice of inferiors can for an instant be tolerated or 
 condoned. It is only then that the weak and those devoid 
 of power, if the necessity should arise, may with the clean 
 conscience of the community, be left to perish by the 
 wayside, or be exploited for the profit of life, the intensity 
 and excellence of life. 
 
 When, therefore, the governing or proprietary classes 
 become mere hedonists, spending their lives in a round 
 of pleasure and neglecting those material and spiritual 
 duties which ail power should suggest to the healthy 
 mind; when this happens, you are sacrificing the greater 
 to the less, if one single individual of the labouring in- 
 feriors dies through any hardship or sickness which can 
 be ascribed to the system under which he is yoked, and 
 which cannot be traced to his own independent choice 
 or crime. 
 
 Let historical pedants and Greek scholars say what they 
 may, the rule of our landed aristocracy in England had 
 every one of the essentials for being the rule of the best. 
 They were the best in so far as material and spiritual cir- 
 cumstances went, and they were the best in respect of 
 opportunity. In order to make themselves intrinsically 
 the best spiritually and physically in the nation, all they 
 required to do was to discipline and refresh or augment 
 their stock with more discrimination and to avail them- 
 selves of their exceptional chances to acquire that deep 
 intellectual ^ and bodily culture which is denied to the 
 parvenu. At one time their prestige alone lent weight to 
 their wildest utterances, and the dignity of their position 
 was in itself a sufficient guarantee of their worthiness. 
 What a history of neglect and wilful squandering of golden 
 chances t/ietr " progress " must have been, for it to be 
 possible for a recent writer with some plausibility to say 
 
 ^ See Ku Hung-Ming, op. cit., p. 58. " Without deep intellectual 
 culture, you cannot have true ideas ; you cannot distinguish false from 
 true ideas. Again, without ideas you cannot interpret facts." 
 
 100 
 
FAILURE IN TUTORSHIP OF RULING 
 
 of them : " They seldom rise above the level of mediocrity. 
 Physically, morally and intellectually they are a species in 
 a steady decline, and there is reason to believe that they 
 are conscious of it." ^ 
 
 If they had been a healthy thinking nobility, an 
 intellectual, inquiring and conscientious nobility; if, 
 instead of falling in with the general commercial and indus- 
 trial stampede for riches and plunder, they had halted to 
 think of the consequences of it all to the national character 
 and capacity, and if only they had paused to give an 
 example of prudence and of ruling wisdom to the less 
 favoured and less cultured among their fellows, how incal- 
 culable would their rewards have been to-day ! 
 
 You may reply that, had they done so, they would only 
 have perished like martyrs, after the fashion of their pre- 
 decessors the Cavaliers, slain by the overwhelming hordes 
 of the vulgar and tasteless upstarts who ushered in all the 
 extremely questionable innovations of the late eighteenth 
 and the early nineteenth centuries. I do not believe that 
 there is a single cogent argument to support this view; 
 for in the nineteenth, unlike the seventeenth century, they 
 would have had the people on their side. It was not 
 known, at least to the well-to-do people in the seventeenth 
 century, that in fighting on the side of Cromwell and so- 
 called " Liberty," they were opening their arms to a race 
 of capitalistic and unscrupulous oppressors. But in the 
 nineteenth many more people than in the seventeenth 
 century would have realised that any portion of the nation 
 that insisted upon respect for the burden, any part of the 
 community who tested, weighed and judged every inno- 
 vation as it arose, must be on their side. Or, if they did 
 not know that, they would soon have learnt it. The 
 Liberals of the, nineteenth century, then as now, like the 
 Parliamentary party of Cromwell's time, may be regarded 
 entirely as people who are "on the make"; their legis- 
 lation in itself , capitalistic as it always has been, is entirely 
 against the people, however much, on the surface, it may 
 1 See Arthur Ponsonby, M.P., Tie Decline of Aristocracy, p. 141. 
 
 lOI 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 seem in their favour.^ Thus during the nineteenth centviry 
 and after, the Tories have had the chance of their lives. 
 Behind them they had the fact, the knowledge of which 
 Charles I's Cavaliers did not possess — the fact that "as 
 the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of 
 the people have disappeared; till at length the Sceptre has 
 become a pageant, and its subject has degenerated again 
 into a serf." ' They could have taken the place of the 
 Crown in England as the patriarchal rulers of the com- 
 munity, and they could have proved that other contention 
 of Disraeli's that " power has only one duty : to secure 
 the social welfare of the People." ^ 
 
 But they missed their opportunity. Probably they 
 did not even see it. For there are some of them even 
 to-day who will be found to declare that such statements 
 as 1 have just quoted from Disraeli are Radical, and not 
 susceptible of adoption by Tories in any way whatsoever ! 
 Thus they allowed things to go their own way, and obeyed 
 the stupid indolent behest "laissez-faire"; and though I 
 say it without bitterness or resentment — for I am myself 
 an ardent supporter of an hereditary noble caste — the fate 
 with which the Lords met in the autumn of 1 9 1 1 was not 
 unmerited. They even deserved to appear as cowards 
 before the eyes of the whole world. And their best friends, 
 rather than conceal the real truth from them, ought to 
 prefer to prove their friendship by telling them the whole 
 of it and showing them how, even at this late hour, their 
 lost reputation may be retrieved. 
 
 ^ This point has been so ably explained by Mr. J. M. Kennedy in 
 his Tory Democracy that I need scarcely burden my pages with a repeated 
 explanation. 
 
 * Disraeli's SyMl, p. 4.88 (Longmans, Green and Co., 1899). 
 
 ' Uiif., p. 312. 
 
 1 03 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 " Commerce, Opulence, Luxury, Effeminacy, Cowardice, Slavery : 
 these are the stages of national degradation." — William Cobbett, The 
 Re^ster (August 1805). 
 
 To the Englishman of average culture, even when he 
 is not biassed by any party or religious feeling, Charles I 
 is little more than a captivating figure of misguided 
 royalty, possessing a considerable measure of romantic 
 charm. With his long hair, his velvet suit, lace collar 
 and long-^maned charger, it is his exterior, and, perhaps, 
 his all too violent death as well, that chiefly endears 
 this unhappy monarch of the seventeenth century to the 
 sentimental Englishman. 
 
 If, however, you say to such an Englishman that there 
 is much more than romantic charm in Charles I's 
 character and rule, he will immediately smile upon you 
 with indulgent incredulity, and regard you as a fanatic who 
 is suffering even more severely than he is hinaself from 
 the seductiveness of bygone dramas and their principal 
 heroes. Indeed, so convinced is he that it is rather the 
 glamour than the sterling quality of Charles, that claims 
 attention, that if this monarch could return to life to- 
 morrow, the only change in his exalted fate that the Eng- 
 lishman, with becoming twentieth-century softness, would 
 make, would consist in deporting the great Stuart to 
 St. Helena, or perhaps to Trinidad, and in sparing his 
 handsottie head. 
 
 Not long ago, for instance, I had the honour of meeting 
 a certain gentleman who is well known in the literary world 
 of London, and who, moreover, enjoys the distinction of 
 
 103 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 being at the head of one of our greatest publishing firms. 
 He informed me that he, too, was a convinced convert to 
 this romantic cult of the most fascinating figure of the 
 seventeenth century, and smiled almost tearfully over the 
 thought that his son, in whom he had implanted a strong 
 adoration for our beheaded sovereign, had once solemnly 
 raised his hat in the presence of Charles I's golden' armour 
 in the Tower of London. 
 
 Hoping, at the moment, that there was something more 
 fundamental and more solid in this gentleman's hero- 
 worship than mere sentimentality and the love of a pictur- 
 esque prince, I suggested to him that there were many 
 rational and very sound reasons for his admiration. In 
 an instant the incredulous smile I had so often seen, and 
 which I confess I had half-dreaded on this occasion too, 
 again spread over the features, even of this hopeful fellow- 
 worshipper, and I was overcome with disappointment. 
 " My son is now fourteen," he said, " and he has been 
 studying history at school. And the other day he declared 
 that I must have been 'pulling his leg' about Charles I; 
 for he had now learnt to esteem this despicable despot 
 at his proper value! " I protested. But I was merely 
 met by a wave of the hand and a deprecating simper 
 of urbane scepticism. His admiration of Charles I 
 was sartorial, romantic, sentimental, school-girlish — in 
 fact, it was merely a foolish and empty pose! 
 
 Apparently it had never occurred to him, despite his 
 undoubted erudition and experience, to ask himself 
 whether, in an age which is in every respect the creation 
 of Charles I's maligners and murderers, a public school 
 history class were precisely the best place in which to 
 hear the truth concerninsf the Stuart King. Seemingly, 
 he had never inquired whether, at a time when vulgarity, 
 trade and hedonism are paramount, a sober judgment — 
 not to speak of a friendly one — could possibly be formed 
 on this vital question. Without hesitation, without a 
 moment's doubt or shrewd suspicion, this apparently scep- 
 tical person had accepted the verdict of a most deceptive 
 
 104 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 and unreliable age, concerning a man who had so little in 
 common with its principles, that in a hopeless endeavour 
 to oppose and defy them, he had heroically given up his 
 life. 
 
 And yet the evidence of this fact is accessible to all. 
 The proof of it can be read by everybody and anybody, 
 at any hour, any day. Only a bias that is friendly to the 
 evils of this age, only a prepossession in favour of our 
 materialistic, mechanical, unscrupulous and supinely irre- 
 sponsible civilisation of "Progress," could so distort the 
 facts as to make Charles I appear as the felon, and 
 the ignoble band of grasping, bigoted and filthy-minded 
 Puritans as the just accusers, in this historical trial and 
 tragedy. 
 
 For in spite of all that the school history book may say, 
 Charles I fought for a cause very much more vital and 
 more fundamental than that of despotism. He fought 
 for the cause of flourishing life against the growing, but 
 already powerful forces of modern capitalistic trade, of 
 democracy, and of mere quantity as distinct from quality. 
 He himself, the whole of his government, and his lieu- 
 tenants were inspired by the watchword " Respect the 
 Burden." Their downfall can be ascribed to the fact that 
 they were no respecters of persons, that they upheld the 
 oppressed against their oppressors, and that they tried, 
 wherever possible, to arrest that vile greed of gain and 
 accumulation, at the mercy of which the lower classes were 
 to be left for evermore, after the opening of the Grand 
 Rebellion. This is not fancy or exaggeration ; it is a plain 
 statement of fact. 
 
 But Charles I had the most dishonest and most un- 
 scrupulous opponents that a man can have. He had to 
 contend with mercenary, vulgar and heartless tradespeople, 
 or with avaricious and unscrupulous men of power among 
 the landed lords and gentry, both of which parties did not 
 hesitate to raise a specious cry of liberty and religious 
 ardour to conceal their true and more material motives. 
 Imagine yourself, for a moment, at war with the most 
 
 105 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 narrow-minded Nonconforniists of the present day, on the 
 one hand, and with greedy plutocrats, on the other. If 
 the two groups together marked you as their quarry, what 
 chance do you suppose you could have? What quarter 
 do you suppose they would allow you? Have you ever 
 lived with Puritans, with Nonconformists, with plutocrats ? 
 I have ! Have you ever tried to thwart them ? Have you 
 ever shown them how much you despise them? Only 
 then can you Fealise who Charles Ps enemies were. 
 Only then can you realise the quandary a distinguished 
 and true aristocrat was in, who attempted to reveal the 
 filth and squalor beneath their brazen cries of liberty and 
 religious ardour. I will show in due course what this 
 liberty and religious ardour were worth ; for the time being 
 let it suffice to point out that to oppose the ignominious 
 herd who decked their low designs with these inflated war- 
 cries, was to run the risk of appearing as a Papist and a 
 slave-driver when a man was neither the one nor the other. 
 
 We know the end of Caesar Borgia, who attempted to 
 rid the Romagna of its oppressors, and to free the people 
 from the bondage of insufferable tyrants. We know how 
 the escort of Colbert's hearse had to grope secretly through 
 the dark streets of Paris in the dead of night, because the 
 corpse of this great man would otherwise have been torn 
 from its shell, by the very mob to whom he had devoted 
 his whole life, in a vain attempt at emancipating it from 
 an insufferable yoke. We also know the fate of Straffords, 
 who was murdered in cold blood without a single voice 
 of alarm or protest being raised among the lower orders 
 he had protected and succoured all his life. It would seem 
 as if the very attempt to protect the people against un- 
 scrupulous oppressors were foredoomed to failure, owing 
 sometimes to the ignorance of the former, and always to 
 the bitter's inordinate pbwer of wealth which triumphs as 
 easily over good taste as it ultimately triumphs over all 
 other obstacles. But, as we shall see, the people are not 
 always ungrateful. 
 
 Who, however, are Csesar Borgia, Colbert and Thomas 
 
 1 06 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 Wentworth compared with Charles I? All four fought 
 greed and oppressive opulence for the sake of the people, 
 and three of them died spurned by their proteges. But 
 Charles staked the highest stake in the cause. He was 
 a king, a crowned and powerful monarch — not a mere 
 illegitimate Jew and itinerant preacher, who had nothing 
 to lose and whose antecedents were, to say the least, not 
 of the most distinguished order — ^but a sovereign who, 
 if he had liked, could have sided with the winning party, 
 the tradesmen and grasping landed nobility, at the cost 
 of the masses for whom he died. 
 
 And now that the tradesmen and landed nobility have 
 triumphed for over two hundred and fifty years, what 
 could be. more natural than that Charles I should be 
 the most reviled of monarchs.? "What could be more 
 feasible than the fact that Thomas Carlyle, that utterly 
 Puritanical and obtuse romanticist and ranter, of the 
 stupidest and vulgarest age in history, should have spoken 
 of this great King's death as follows — 
 
 "Thus ends the second Civil War. In Regicide, in a 
 Commonwealth and Keepers of the Liberties of England. 
 In punishment of Delinquents, in abolition of Cobwebs; 
 if it -be possible, in a Government of Heroism and 
 Veracity; at the lowest of Anti-Flurtkeyism, Anti-Cant, 
 and the endeavour after Heroism and Veracity.^ 
 
 It will be the burden of this chapter to show that this 
 paragraph is a piece of the most utter nonsense and mis- 
 representation that any sentimental scoundrel has ever 
 written. It will be the object of the facts adduced to show 
 not only that Carlyle lied, but that he must have lied 
 knowingly and deliberately in writing these words, and 
 that,^ if it were not for the fact that his opinion, as that of 
 a eunuch, must be taken with pity rather than with 
 censure, the above half-dozen lines ought to be sufficient 
 to discredit him for ever in the minds of all conscientious 
 readers of history. 
 
 1 See Crmmaell's Letters and Speeches (Ward, Lock and Bowden), 
 p. 260. 
 
 107 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 And it was this worst kind of Caledonian fool who, at 
 the very time when the poor of England were groaning 
 under their crushing burden of unredressed wrongs, and 
 crying for an able and fearless spokesman, spent his time 
 spluttering peevishly, bombastically, and above all use- 
 lessly, through several volumes, over an aristocracy that 
 was beyond all help or repair and had been punished and 
 sufficiently chastised by the very events he set himself 
 to relate. 
 
 Is it not, however, a most significant comment on the 
 Puritan and Mercenary Rebellion, that this eunuch takes 
 sides with it against the King? "What could such a man 
 know of Basilican virtue, not to speak of obelisks and 
 such virile things ! 
 
 Charles I was unfortunate in his predecessors, and 
 still more unfortunate in his contemporaries. We have 
 seen that the upstart owners of the Church lands, forced 
 upon the country by that unscrupulous Bluebeard, 
 Henry VIII, had introduced a commercial spirit into 
 the English soil. These parvenus, the majority of whom 
 had been obsequious sycophants in the entourage of that 
 most outrageous specimen of English royalty, were now 
 quite settled on their estates, and were running them on 
 purely mercenary lines with a view to reaping the 
 maximum amount of eain possible irrespective of the 
 comfort or happiness of the inhabitants.^ 
 
 ^ For some of the indirect evils of this change, apart from the direct 
 evils resulting from the oppression of the people's friends, the monks, 
 see Gamier, op. cit., pp. 90, ()i, et seq., while on p. 94 we find this 
 passage : " The dissolution of the monasteries must have rendered 
 home-life unbearable to many of the rural poor in the times under our 
 notice. Rents were increased, cottagers' rents among others . . . The 
 Tudor crofter's or Tudor cotter's messuage was required for the wants 
 of the sheep-hold. Husbands, wives, woful mothers and fatherless babes 
 had to make way for the ewe and lamb, and so the simple goods which 
 had taken the savings of more than one generation to collect, had to be 
 disposed of at a forced sale, and their owners turned out to starve 
 or steal in the highways. If this occasionally was the heartless practice 
 of the feudal lords, what wide-spread misery must there not have been 
 when it became the general practice of the fresh landowners." 
 
 108 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 But there was also another class, that of the successful 
 tradesman, which was now invading the rural districts and 
 buying estates in all parts of the country. This element 
 tended only to intensify the commercial spirit which was 
 now spreading over the whole land and transforming its 
 customs just as much as its temper; ^ while in the towns 
 themselves a great and powerful middle class was rising 
 into prominence, thanks to the fortunes which were con- 
 stantly being amassed in home and over-sea trade. 
 
 The destructive influence which these changes brought 
 to bear upon the patriarchal relationship between the lower 
 and the higher orders — a relationship which, though it 
 was never complete or hearty and never worked smoothly, 
 at least had qualities infinitely superior to those of the new 
 regime — this destructive influence, together with the 
 abolition of the monasteries, and that stiU more heinous 
 crime, the appropriation and confiscation of the Guild 
 funds and lands, gave rise to widespread discontent 
 and considerable unrelieved poverty. The fact that 
 Henry VIII alone put 72,000 thieves to death in his own 
 reign, shows the extremes to which desperate indigence 
 had been driven even in his time. Edward VI and 
 Elizabeth had infinite trouble with the poor, and we have 
 only to examine the numerous statutes dealing with the 
 problem of poverty, passed in the latter' s reign, in order 
 to realise the extent to which the evil must have been 
 increasing.^ 
 
 Now Rogers tells us that " there is no period in Eng- 
 lish history in which the English were poorer and more 
 unenterprising than during the last fifty years of the 
 sixteenth and the first forty years of the seventeenth 
 centuries." * It is important, for my purpose, to note 
 that the last fifteen years of this period constitute the first 
 fifteen years of Charles Ps reign. Moreover Parliament, 
 
 ^ See Gamier, History of the English Landed Interest, Vol. I, pp. 258 
 et seq. 
 
 a See Sir G. Nicholls, K.C.B., op. cit.. Vol. I, pp. 164 et seq. 
 * Ihe Industrial and Commercial History of England, p. 12. 
 
 109 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 which, during James's reign had become practised in 
 hostile tactics against the Crown, was now recruiting a 
 large proportion of its members from the new and mer- 
 cenary class of small landed proprietors, who, as Garnier 
 says, " combined both the haughty pride .of the old 
 Norman aristocracy and the cool calculation and shrewd 
 foresight of the merchant." ^ 
 
 The poverty laws passed in the previous reigns, tenta- 
 tive and imperfect as they were, yet constituted a fairly 
 adequate piece of State machinery to deal with the difficul- 
 ties they were calculated to mitigate. It often happened, 
 however, that the very men who were entrusted with the 
 administration of these laws, were rapacious creatures 
 whose interests were in conflict with the means of relief 
 which these laws prescribed, or persons who were too 
 fearful of offending the great landowners of their neigh- 
 bourhood to dare to complain of their carelessness or actual 
 negligence in regard to the laws in question. Abuses were 
 general ; and though beneficent individuals were to be 
 found, a sharp eye had to be kept on the whole of the 
 administrative body, lest the burden-bearers should go 
 wanting, despite the legislation which existed for their 
 special succour. The ruler of a nation, in these circum- 
 stances, required to be a man who was no respecter of 
 persons. Now Charles was precisely such a man. If he 
 had been different, he would have found more powerful 
 friends in the hour of his trial. His two greatest ministers, 
 Wentworth and Laud, were also no respecters of persons; 
 they made enemies among the highest, through their 
 absolutely rigid sense of justice and of duty. But, as 
 might have been expected, all three — .Charles and his two 
 lieutenants — ^lost their lives in this quixotic struggle 
 against a mob of unscrupulous shopkeepers, and in the 
 end, as we shall see, only the loyal nobles and the poor 
 clustered round their King to defend him. 
 
 Before I go into the details of this struggle between 
 taste and rapacity, duty to the burden-bearer and the 
 
 ^ Jiiffory of tie English Landed Interests, Vol. I, p. 33!, 
 
 no 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 reckless oppression of him, there is, however, one other 
 sign of the times I would fain discuss. I refer to the 
 rising forces of Puritanism. Concerning who the Puritans 
 were and the scheme of life for which they stood, I shall, 
 in the eyes of some readers perhaps have more than suffi- 
 cient to say in the next chapter; for the moment I should 
 like to lay stress only upon the close connection which the 
 commercial element in the nation bore to Puritanism. In 
 addition to the wealthy tradesmen who had wandered into 
 the country in search of a pastoral and gentlemanly exist- 
 ence, and the large number of landowners, after the style 
 of Cromwell himself, whose Puritanism was almost a 
 conscientious justification of their being in possession of 
 lands which had once belonged to the Holy Church, 
 London, in which at that time nearly the whole trade of 
 the kingdom was concentrated, was almost entirely 
 Puritan; ^ whilst practically the only two important towns 
 in the west which ultimately opposed Charles in the great 
 struggle, I refer to Bristol and Gloucester, were both like- 
 wise strong in trade and in Puritanical opinions. It should 
 also be remembered that East Anglia, Kent and other 
 southern counties, had recently been overrun by Flemish 
 refugees and French Huguenots, and although many of 
 these aliens were at first not necessarily extreme Puritans, 
 as tradesmen and manufacturers they threw in their lot 
 with the Puritan party against the King, and thereby 
 revealed that their sympathy with the religious views of 
 the Parliamentary forces was deeper than with those of 
 the Cavaliers. 
 
 This relationship of trade to religion was a most im- 
 portant factor in the struggle between the King and his 
 more powerful subjects. Even in our analytical times it 
 is difficult enough to find people who are sufficiently honest 
 to see clearly into the springs of their actions and desires; 
 but in those days, in which mankind was scarcely conscious 
 
 * Tie Political History of England, Vol. VII, by F. C. Montague, 
 p. 172. For the attachment of London to the Parliamentary party see 
 also Leopold von Ranke, History of England (Oxford), Vol. II, p. 209. 
 
 Ill 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 at all of the multiplicity of motives that may sometimes 
 conduce to bring about an actiort which has all the appear- 
 ance of having sprung from a single desire or aspiration, 
 it was easy — nay, almost inevitable— for the Puritan trades- 
 men to marshal all their mercenary objections to Charles 
 and his lieutenants' paternal and protective government, 
 his beneficent interference with trade, and the check he 
 put upon their rapacious oppression of the lower orders, 
 under two such high-sounding and empty terms as 
 " Liberty " and " No Popery." In this way they appro- 
 priated from the start the two most deceptive and most 
 attractive war-cries which could possibly have been found, 
 to appeal to the masses. And the fact that, despite these 
 seductively alluring devices upon their banner, they failed 
 to draw the non-commercial and poorer classes of the 
 community over to their side, only shows the extent to 
 which Charles I's rule must have endeared him to these 
 portions of the population. 
 
 Speaking of the powerful phalanx of saints or zealots 
 in the Commons in 1625, Lingard says — 
 
 "They deemed it the first of their duties to eradicate 
 Popery, which like a phantom haunted their imaginations 
 by day and night; wherever they turned they saw it stalk- 
 ing before them; they discovered it even in the gaieties 
 and revelries of the Court, the distinction of rank in the 
 hierarchy, the ceremonies of the Church, and the existence 
 of pluralities among the clergy." ^ And then he proceeds : 
 " What rendered the union of the two parties [the zealots 
 and the country party] more formidable, was the specious 
 colour given to their pretences. They combated for pure 
 religion and civil liberty: to oppose them was to court 
 the imputation of superstition and of slavery." ^ 
 
 With the impudent effrontery of extreme Protestants, 
 
 these people who supposed that the Almighty was always 
 
 hobnobbing with them and standing perpetually at their 
 
 elbow, just as the Low Churchmen, Methodists and other 
 
 ^ John Lingard, D.D., History of England, Vol. VII, p. 286. 
 2 Ibid., p. 287. 
 
 iia 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 Nonconformists believe to-day, were not the sort of 
 persons to respect an earthly King, however great. They 
 had harassed poor Elizabeth, who detested them. But, 
 not being strong enough during her reign to defy her 
 openly, they had contented themselves with creeping into 
 corners, allowing their resentment to ferment, and growl- 
 ing that she was an " idle slut " and an " untamed 
 heifer." ^ 
 
 The Puritans were people capable of intolerance so cruel 
 and relentless, that the colonies they formed in America 
 became the scenes of the most shocking abuses and 
 oppression that the world has ever experienced. So bitter 
 were they and so resentful towards those who doubted 
 their bigoted and negative creed, that the inhuman 
 tortures they practised upon their opponents when they fell 
 into their power, equals in brutality anything of a similar 
 nature that history records. But I am anticipating. I 
 have yet to bring forth the proofs of these allegations, 
 and these proofs I am reserving for another chapter. 
 
 Charles I, who was a man of great intelligence as 
 well as insight, detested the animosity and bitterness 
 which arose from discussions of which his minister Laud 
 subsequently remarked that " no human power could 
 decide." He realised the futility of religious controversy, 
 and did all in his power to effect a peaceful settlement 
 between all the various creeds in his realm. In the pro- 
 clamation for the peace of the Church issued on June i6, 
 1626, as also in the Declaration issued in November 
 1628, the idea was "to secure at least outward peace, by 
 enjoining silence in the pulpits on those points on which 
 men never had been and never will be agreed."^ The 
 proclamation, so Dean Hook tells us, " was carefully 
 worded and was valued by the King for its impartiality." 
 
 ^ Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I, hy Isaac Disraeli, 
 Vol. I, p. 474. 
 
 2 See William Laud, hy W. Holden Hutton, p. 59. See also p. 65 
 for evidence of the fact that even in his instructions to the bishops in 
 December 1629, the King intended "restraint on both sides." 
 I 113 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 As Gardiner says, "Charles provided for liberty of 
 opinion," ^ and when Laud became his principal eccle- 
 siastical official, both he and his master always endeavoured 
 impartially to quell religious agitations, and to do every- 
 thing in their power to smooth all asperities. " In their 
 attempts to dose [religious] discussions for ever," Gardiner 
 observes, " Charles and Laud were, at least, impartial. In 
 vain Dr. Brooke, the Master of Trinity at Cambridge, 
 implored permission to publish a book, which, as he 
 affirmed, would . crush the Puritans and recpncile all 
 difficulties at issue." Its publication was forbidden by 
 Laud and the King, and the book never reached the press." 
 In the case of the self-styled Bishop of Chalcedon also, 
 as well as of Montague's book, Apelld Casarem, Main- 
 waring's Sermons, Dr. Potter and Archbishop Abbot, 
 Charles and his adviser's attitude was one of strict and 
 unbiassed justice.^ 
 
 Many other instances could be given of Charles's im- 
 partiality and of his pacific attitude towards the creeds; 
 but the cruelest and most unscrupulous claim that the 
 Puritans put upon him, and one which, in his impartiality 
 and sense of duty to the laws of his nation, he did not 
 evade (save in so far as capital punishment was concerned), 
 was the demand for the severe enforcement of the Eliza- 
 bethan laws against Catholics. Indeed, he went so far as 
 to instruct all magistrates to put the penal laws in force, 
 arid appointed a commission to demand the fines from 
 the recusants. Catholic priests and missionaries were 
 ordered to leave the kingdom, and even the Catholic 
 peers were, on the advice of his Council, disarmed— an 
 act which naturally very much embittered many powerful 
 families. 
 
 Seeing that Charles had just married a young Catholic 
 
 ^ The Personal Government of Charles I, by S. R. Gardiner (1877), 
 Vol. I, p. 21. 
 
 ^ /^/V., p. 164. ^;,^, 
 
 ' Lives of the Arch ps of Canterbury, by Dr. W. F. Hook, Vol. XI, 
 pp. 182, 183. 
 
 114 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 wife, it was the acme of brutality to wring this concession 
 from him. But his Royal letters issued against Papists 
 and Puritans, December 15, 1625, show how early in his 
 reign he tried to embody in a communication to each of 
 the extreme parties, that principle of justice to all, together 
 with a firm and legal support of the Church of England, 
 which remained the chief characteristic of his religious 
 position throughout his reign. 
 
 Every Parliament he met clamoured for ever more 
 severe measures against the hated Papists. The Commons 
 interrupted the discussion on the state of the finances in 
 the First Parliament, to present the King with a "pious 
 petition," praying him to put in force the penal Statutes 
 against Catholics. They behaved in precisely the same 
 way in the Second Parliament when they formed them- 
 selves into three committees, one for religion, a second to 
 consider grievances and a third to discuss evils. And the 
 Committee of Religion once more resolved to enact still 
 more rigorous laws against Popery. The Third Parlia- 
 ment, as Isaac Disraeli observes, was simply " a committee 
 sitting for religion." ^ They declared that " the business 
 of the King of this Earth should give place to the business 
 of the King of Heaven! " and, in addition to the severe 
 enforcement of the laws against Catholics, they were con- 
 tent with demanding nothing short of the immediate death 
 of any priest returning from banishment abroad. In vain 
 did Charles plead that if at any time he had granted 
 indulgence to the Romanists, he had done so in the hope 
 that foreign princes would extend similar indulgences to 
 Protestant subjects. These men were irreconcilable. In 
 spite of the many proofs he had given of his earnest desire 
 to stand firm by the Protestant Church of England, as 
 defined in the statutes, the Puritans looked with a jealous 
 eye upon his Catholic wife, and though her influence in 
 religious matters, far from prevailing with him, never 
 showed signs even of affecting his conduct in the slightest 
 degree, they never ceased from suspecting him and his 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 308. 
 
 "5 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 ministers of Popery.^ But what could be expected of a 
 class of men who were barefaced enough to charge Laud 
 with Papist leanings, and whose ultimate leader, Oliver 
 Cromwell, had the audacity to accuse the Archbishop of 
 "flat Popery! "t-^ lie so flagrant and so unjustified, that 
 a mere perusal of history, apart from the evidence of 
 Laud's own diary, private correspondence and public deeds, 
 is suflicient to refute it ? * Is it to be supposed that so 
 high and impartial an authority as Professor Gardiner 
 would not have recorded some facts in support of these 
 suspicions against Laud, if they had been well-founded? 
 But if the reader still feels any doubt upon this point, let 
 him refer to Hutton's excellent and compendious 
 biography of Laud or to the work by Dean Hook or 
 Heylin. There he will find positive proofs which I cannot 
 give him in this small space, of the unscrupulous shifts 
 to which these Puritans resorted, in order to bring their 
 quarry to earth, and in order to poison the public mind 
 against the King and those who tried for a while to assist 
 him in ruling for the benefit of the subject. 
 
 I have referred to all these matters, not so much be- 
 cause I wished here to state a case for Charles I in the 
 matter of religion, but rather because I desired to give a 
 
 ^ Dean Hook argues that inasmuch as all that the Puritans wanted 
 was to be able to fan into flame the feeling of alarm roused in the 
 first instance by the presence of Charles I's Catholic wife : " It was 
 unfortunate for them that Charles did not give any sign of preference to 
 the Church of Rome. He remained steady to the principles of the 
 Church of England." — Op. cit., p. 92. 
 
 * On the matter of the alleged Catholic leanings of Charles I, Went- 
 worth and Laud, that great and impartial foreign historian, Leopold 
 von Ranke, is perfectly plain and emphatic. In his History of 
 England, Vol. II, p. 52, he writes : "The Lord Deputy [Wentworth] 
 can be as little accused as the King or the Archbishop of wishing to paVe 
 the way for Catholicism. Wentworth was known as a very staunch 
 Protestant. Their thoughts were only directed to the development of 
 Anglicanism expressed in its most rigid form." While on p. 63, he also 
 says: "It was not that Charles I had thought of subjecting himself to 
 the Papacy. We know how far his soul was averse to this." See also 
 p. 8 1 of the same volume. 
 
 116 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 brief account of the temper of the Commons previous to 
 Charles's eleven years of personal government. For it is 
 well to bear in mind that although at first the two parties 
 — the zealots and the so-called patriots — ^were not entirely- 
 united, neither party scrupled to make use of the claims 
 of the other, or to conceal their own personal motives 
 beneath the aspirations of the other, whenever it suited 
 their purpose. Thus Pym, who was very far from being 
 a Puritan, as every one admits, did not recoil from associat- 
 ing himself with the Puritans when he saw that it served 
 his own ends so to do.-^ 
 
 And what was it that the so-called Patriots particularly 
 desired beneath their cry for the liberty of the subject ? 
 
 As Professor Gardiner observes, Wentworth foresaw 
 what the transference of all power to Parliament, as it was 
 then constituted, would lead to. " The rule of the House 
 of Commons meant for him — not altogether without truth 
 — the rule of the landowner and the lawyer at the expense 
 of the poor." ^ And the same author continues : " It is 
 certain that to transfer supremacy to the House of 
 Commons on the terms on which Eliot wished to transfer 
 it, would have been to establish a gross tyranny " ^ — a 
 tyranny, that is to say, of capitalists and tradesmen — the 
 kind of tyranny that grew up and became supreme after 
 Charles I's assassination. 
 
 Now it should be remembered that Charles had the 
 opportunity — nay, that he actually received the advice — 
 to manoeuvre the return of a number of his own sup- 
 
 ^ Isaac Disraeli, in the work already quoted, gives the following en- 
 lightening and interesting anecdote concerning Pym (p. 513, Vol. I) : 
 "When on one occasion it was observed that the affairs of religion 
 seemed not so desperate that they should wholly engross their days, Pym 
 replied that they must not abate their ardour for the true religion, that 
 being the most certain end to obtain their purpose and maintain their 
 influence." To a similar observation Hampden replied : " If it were 
 not for this reiterated cry about religion, they would never be certain of 
 keeping the people on their side" (pp. 330-331). 
 
 * The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Rebellion (1905), p. 76. 
 
 3 Ibid., p. 73- 
 
 117 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 porters to his first Parliament, but that he stalwartly 
 ignored both the opportuaity and the advice. " The jLord- 
 Keeper [Williams] observed that it had been usual to take 
 certain precautionary measures to allow the King's trustiest 
 friends to deal with the counties, cities and boroughs 
 where they were known, to procure a promise for their 
 elections. The King refused the counsel, and Buckingham 
 opposed Williams. With the generous earnestness of his 
 age, Charles had resolved to throw himself unreservedly 
 into the arms of his Parliament." ^ Gardiner praises 
 Charles for having refused to look up to a man " so 
 shifty " as Williams ^; — would that he had maintained this 
 attitude until the end of his reign ! 
 
 It is, however, interesting to observe how curiously 
 Charles's conduct in regard to this refusal to fill Parlia- 
 ment with his friends, contrasts with the conduct of a 
 later King — George III. The money George III spent 
 in corruption in order to get his own friends into the 
 Commons must have amounted, during the whole of 
 his reign, to some hundreds of thousands of pounds. 
 George III, however, was not beheaded — why.? He 
 met with no powerful Puritan opposition. How was 
 this.? Obviously because the moneyed interests of his 
 day, the sharks in the city and on the land, did not find 
 in him so powerful an antagonist to their greed, as their 
 ancestors had found in Charles in the first half of the 
 seventeenth century. 
 
 For Charles I's concept of a King's duties may well 
 be summed up in the words of his chief lieutenant, 
 Wentworth, spoken before the Council of .the North on 
 December 30, 1628^ 
 
 "Princes are to be indulgent, nursing fathers to their 
 people; their modest liberties, their sober rights ought to 
 be precious in their eyes, the branches of their government 
 be for shadow for habitation, the comfort of life." * 
 
 * Isaac Disraeli, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 125. 
 
 * The Personal Government of Gkarles I, Vol. I, p. 13. 
 
 * H. D. Traill, Lord Strafford, p. 4.9. 
 
 118 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 There is no greater modern authority than Professor 
 Gardiner on this period of English history. What is his 
 conception of Charles's idea of kingly rule? He tells us 
 it is expounded in the first part of the Lord Keeper's 
 speech to the judges before they left London for the 
 Summer Assizes on June 17, 1635: "He spoke to the 
 judges of the care which it behoved them to take to do 
 equal justice between rich and poor, to guard against ' the 
 corruptions of sheriffs and their deputies, the partiality of 
 jurors, the bearing and siding with men of countenance 
 and power in their country,' to make ' strict inquiry after 
 depopulations and enclosures, an oppression of a high 
 nature and commonly done by the greatest persons that 
 keep the juries under and in awe, which was the cause 
 there are no more presented and brought in question.' To 
 maintain the right of the weak against the strong was, 
 according to Coventry, the special glory of the Crown." ^ 
 
 And was this only an ideal, or was it actually carried 
 into practice.? As we shall see, it was very much more 
 than an ideal; it was the mainspring of all Charles's rule, 
 and with it he inspired his ministers. But that it was 
 " unpopular " in the eyes of the wealthy minority may 
 easily be understood. For Charles never seems to have 
 succeeded in convincing more than a very select few of 
 the soundness of this principle of government, and the 
 
 ^ The Personal Government of Charles I, Vol. ir, p. 173. The 
 speech here referred to, which occupies five pages of Rushworth's 
 Historical Collections (Part z, Vol. I, pp. 294-298) is certainly a re- 
 markable piece of evidence in support of the contention that Charles I's 
 rule considered primarily the welfare of the masses. In addition 
 to the points alluded to above in the passage from Gardiner, this 
 clause is worth noticing (p. 295) : " Next unto this, let those that 
 be Licensed, be held strictly according to the Law. It hath been 
 observed, and very truly, -that in th« Tavern*, Inns, and Ale-Houses in 
 England, by the falsehood of their measure, and unjust prices, they have 
 drawn more from the guest, than out of the sizes of Ale and Beer is 
 exacted by the States in Holland. A strange thing ! that People for a 
 publick Work, for anything that is Good, should be loth to part with 
 anything ; and yet with open eyes see themselves deceived by such base 
 and lewd people." 
 
 119 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 courtiers who attended at his poor court and who had only 
 a small chance of increasing their wealth at the public 
 expense, were naturally th? last to admire a system of rule 
 which proved so unprofitable to themselves. 
 
 It was to these courtiers and others who infested the 
 city in the hope of sharing in some of the glamour of the 
 royal presence, that Charles appealed when he published 
 that Proclamation to the gentry in 1632, commanding 
 them " to keepe their Residence at their mansions in the 
 Country," and the terms of the Proclamation have an 
 interesting bearing upon my present contention. 
 
 " For where by their residence and abiding in the 
 severall Countreys whence their means ariseth," says this 
 document, " they served the King in severall places accord- 
 ing to their degrees and Rankes in ayde of the Govern- 
 ment, whereby and by their House-keeping in those parts, 
 the Realme was defended, and the meaner sort of people 
 were guided, directed and relieved,^ but by their residence 
 in the said Cities and parts adjoining they have not 
 employment, but live without doing any service to His 
 Majestie or His people," etc., etc. After which it urges 
 them not to earn their substance in one part and spend it 
 in the cities, in luxury and futile amusement; and threatens 
 severe measures to those who disobeyed.* 
 
 It should be borne in mind by those who are too ready 
 to charge the King with " oppressing " his subjects, that 
 nothing of the sort ever really took place at all. England 
 was never so lightly taxed as during the personal 
 government of Charles I. The accusation his opponents 
 were reduced to bringing against him, was not oppressive 
 taxation, but taxation levied without Parliamentary sanc- 
 tion. For even Ship-money was never crushing, and 
 every halfpenny of it was spent upon the Navy.' Nor 
 
 ^ The italics are mine. — A. M. L. 
 
 ^ British Museum Proclamations, 506, h. 12 (8). 
 
 ' Isaac Disraeli, who, in his Commentaries on the Life and Reign of 
 Charles I, went to great pains in order to discover the human 
 motive behind all the ostensible patriotism of the so-called patriots, 
 
 120 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 should it be forgotten that many of the ships which were 
 provided by this detested tax must subsequently have 
 seen action in our " glorious " naval victories under 
 Cromwell. 
 
 The basis of the King's unpopularity among the rich 
 and powerful was, of course, in the first place, osten- 
 sibly of a religious nature. Sir Edmund Verney was 
 deluded enough to suppose that the religious question 
 was fundamental even in bringing about the rebellion ; and 
 Dr. Hutton holds a similar opinion to-day. The true 
 reason, the genuine, though often unconscious, reason was 
 neither a religious one, nor due to the fact that the King's 
 taxation was illegal or levied without the consent of the 
 Commons. An essential part of the real grievance was 
 that the weight of this taxation fell entirely upon the 
 trading and wealthy classes. It reduced the profits of 
 the tradesman and took a percentage from the incomes of 
 the landed gentry. The taxes on food, on the poor man's 
 sustenance, were to be the innovation of a free Parliament 
 a few years later. But Charles was content to tax the 
 profits of trade, and, for the rest, to demand a contribution 
 
 suggested that when John Hampden, in 1637, refused to pay the Ship- 
 money demanded of him at his estate in Buckinghamshire, he was 
 actuated more by his feelings of hostility to the local Sheriff (the out- 
 come of a long-standing feud) than by patriotism. For this suggestion 
 he was violently attacked by Lord Nugent in his book. Some Memorials 
 of John Hampden, his Party and his Times. Lord Nugent pointed out 
 that there was no such feud as the one alleged between the local Sheriff 
 and Hanipden, and challenged Disraeli to show his proofs. In a little 
 pamphlet called Eliot, Hampden and Pym (1832) Disraeli replies to this 
 (pp. zo-24) and other attacks by Lord Nugent, acknowledges the error 
 about the Sheriff, which he ascribes to a slip, and says that it was the 
 Treasurer of Buckinghamshire with whom Hampden was at loggerheads. 
 And he declared that he derived his information from a gentleman who, 
 among other papers in his possession, had once been the owner of the 
 diary or journal of the Treasurer in question. Certainly the ridiculously 
 small sum demanded from Hampden for this tax (20/-) lends some 
 colour to Disraeli's contention. For Hampden was a very rich man, 
 and he would surely not have been so anxious to oppose the tax as many 
 a less wealthy and equally energetic man. 
 
 121 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 to the expenses of government from the wealthy landed 
 classes. 
 
 The nobler among Charles's wealthy subjects under- 
 stood and accepted it. They saw the King daily msJcing 
 sacrifices himself, in order to rule beneficently* They 
 knew that he haxl pledged the Crown jewels and plate, 
 and sold propo-ty to the City of London to the extent of 
 ;^ 1 20,000, at the very moment when he was appealing to 
 the dergy to help him, early in his reign. And they saw 
 that he did not spend this money in idle merriment or 
 wasteful extravaganfce. 
 
 Nor were his most trusted ministers, Laud and Went- 
 worth, very far behind him in their readiness to spend 
 their own private money in the public service. The 
 former presented his most precious treasures during his 
 lifetime to public libraries and to friends; spent over 
 ;^i,2oo himself on the work of restoring St. Paxil's; 
 endowed a Professorship of Arabic at Oxford, and, but 
 for grants of timber from the King, defrayed the whole 
 cost of the building of St. John's entirely alone. As 
 Dr. Hutton observes, " He was a poor man : no Arch- 
 bishop for centuries, it was said, had ever been so poor." ^ 
 
 As for Wentworth's personal contributions to the 
 expenses of his and the King's administration — they are 
 proverbial. When it was a matter of organising his troops 
 in Ireland, " he was able to boast of having sunk /'6000 
 [out of his own pocket] in horses, furniture and arms";' 
 in order to help and promote the Irish linen industry, " he 
 had imported flax seed of a superior quality from Holland 
 at his own expense, and busied himself in bringing over 
 the most expert workmen from France and the Low 
 Countries; " " while towards the expenses of the expedi- 
 
 ^ William Laud, p. 227. For a list of Laud's gifts to St. John's and 
 to the Bodleian Library see p. 107 of Hutton's book ; while for a list of 
 the Acts of Bounty projected by Dr. Laud, Bishop of London, and most 
 of them performed in his lifetime, see Rushworth's Historical Collections, 
 Part 2, Vol. I, p. 74. 
 
 « H. D. Traill,, op. cit., p. 138. » Ibid., p. 137-138. 
 
 122 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 tion against Scotland in 1640 he generously subscribed 
 the handsome sum of ;^2o,ooo of his own money. 
 
 But all this exceptional disinterestedness was of little 
 avail in the sight of enemies who had reasons, more self- 
 centred than patriotic, for overthrowing this unusual 
 administration of men who were obviously " spoiling the 
 game " for others, and who were apparently too foolish 
 to profit by their position of power. 
 
 For all historians are unanimous, at least in one par- 
 ticular, and that is, that Strafford and Laud never once 
 sacrificed the public weal to their own interests. There 
 was peculation and malversation enough among the 
 men in high places, who surrounded Charles I; but 
 neither Strafford nor Laud can be accused of either crime. 
 As Laud truly wrote to Strafford, " I am alone in those 
 things which draw not private profit after them." ^ 
 " Their ends were not the advancement of private in- 
 terests," says Dean Hook of the two friends, "but the 
 promotion of the public good." ^ Professor Gardiner says 
 of Laud, " For himself he had no private ends in view, 
 no desire of pelf or vainglory, no family to provide for, 
 or state to keep up." ' And as for the noble Strafford, 
 whom Ranke declares, "was indisputably one of the 
 greatest of the administrators who rose up among the 
 English before they gained possession of India," * no 
 historian, however hostile, has yet been able to accuse him 
 of defrauding or robbing the people in his charge, either 
 for his master's ends or for his own. Macaulay stupidly 
 refers to him as "this great, brave, bad man;"* but even 
 with such a prejudiced Puritan as the pompous Thomas 
 Babington, it is not for Strafford's dishonesty in the public 
 service that this absurd epithet "bad" is applied in the 
 case of so noble a nature, but, rather, for his so-called 
 
 1 W. Holden Hutton, op. cit., p. 5 1 . 
 
 * Op. cit., p. 259. In regard to Strafford see also pp. 259 and 260. 
 ' Personal Government of Charles I, Vol. II, p. 163. 
 
 * Op. cit., p. 1 84. 
 
 ^ Article on John Hampden, Edinburgh Review, December 1 8 3 1 . 
 
 123 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 " apostasy." When, however, I began to enumerate some 
 of Laud's and Strafford's deeds, the present contention 
 that they were both honest, self-sacrificing and incor- 
 ruptible officials, in an age when occupiers of high places 
 were anything but honest and incorrupt, will be found to 
 be more than adequately substantiated. For the present I 
 must return to the consideration of their great master. 
 
 As I make no pretence in this work of recounting 
 all the incidents of Charles I's reign, enough has been 
 said to give the reader some idea of the spirit of the 
 Commons during the whole of the three sessions which 
 preceded Charles's personal rule. It would have been 
 impossible for any responsible ruler — and no ruler was 
 more keenly alive to his responsibility than Charles I 
 — I say it would have been impossible for any respon- 
 sible ruler to have dared to hand over to Parliament 
 at that time all the power and influence it demanded. 
 The leaders of the Commons were not in a temper for 
 tolerance; they were by no means ready to exercise their 
 power beneficently — nor does history, from 1649 ^° t^® 
 present day, prove that their successors were ready for it 
 even hundreds of years after Charles's time — and they 
 were too self-seeking and too unfeeling to be let loose as 
 rulers upon the country. No monarch desirous of pro- 
 tecting the people, would ever have consented to hand his 
 subjects over to the mercy of a body which was led by 
 men of the stamp of Sir John Eliot. And as soon as 
 Charles felt himself supported in his attitude by a man of 
 such insight and intelligence as Wentworth, it was only 
 natural that he should venture upon the hazardous plan 
 of dispensing with such a turbulent, subversive and 
 vindictive assembly. 
 
 Speaking of the Parliament of those days, Professor 
 Gardiner says: "In Wentworth's eyes it only partially 
 represented the nation, if it represented it at all. The 
 lawyers and country gentlemen of whom it was composed 
 were not to be trusted to govern England. The lawyers, 
 with their quirks and formulas, too often stood in the way 
 
 124 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 of substantial justice. The country gentlemen, too, often 
 misused the opportunities of their wealth to tyrannise over 
 their poorer neighbours. Wentworth, therefore, would 
 appeal to the nation outside the House of Commons. . . . 
 The King was to do judgment and justice fairly and 
 equally for rich and poor. So would come the day when 
 Parliament would meet again." ^ 
 
 This is a fair statement of the resolve with which the 
 King in March 1629 embarked upon his career of a British 
 Sovereign ruling without a Parliament. And we have no 
 better proofs of the earnestness of this resolve than the 
 attitude and quality of the two ministers whom he chose 
 to elect as his principal advisers, almost from the very 
 moment when he abandoned all hope of working in 
 harmony with the Commons.^ In one of his communica- 
 tions, so Traill tells us, Wentworth " pledges himself, not 
 only not to fail in any point of his duty to his master, 
 but fully to 'comply with that public and common pro- 
 tection which good kings afford their good people.' " * 
 And of Laud, Dr. Hutton says, "the benefit of the 
 governed was the thought that underlay all his statements 
 of political doctrine." * 
 
 What was Charles to do? He refused to leave his 
 people to the tender mercies of their oppressors, as they 
 were to be left by later sovereigns. Nothing, however, but 
 cruel intolerance and bigoted persecution and exaction 
 would please the Commons, therefore the Parliament 
 which refused to grant Charles even the means for carry- 
 ing on his government without his making concession after 
 
 ^ Personal Government of Charles 1, Vol. 1, pp. 168, 169. 
 
 * Gardiner further declares (p. z8i) : "It was one day to be the 
 evil attendant upon the victory of the Parliamentary system, that the 
 territorial aristocracy were to make use of the forms of the constitution 
 to fill their own pockets at the expense of the nation, and to heap 
 honours and rewards upon their own heads. Against such a degradation 
 of the functions of the State, Wentworth struggled with all his might. 
 The depository of the national authority, he held, must be above all 
 persons and all parties, that he might dispense justice to all alike." 
 
 * Op. cit., p. 60. * Op. cit., p. 125. 
 
 125 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 concession to their avarice and their hatred of all sects 
 save their own — this Parliament and all like it must end.^ 
 
 We know the words of one of his last appeals to his 
 Third Parliament — 
 
 " Every man must now do according to his conscience; 
 wherefore if you (which God forbid) should not do your 
 duties in contributing what this state at this time needs, 
 I must, in discharge of my conscience, use those other 
 means which God hath put into my hands ta save that 
 which the follies of other men may otherwise hazard to 
 lose. Take not this as threatening (I scorn to threaten any 
 but my equals), but as an admonition from him that both 
 out of nature and duty hath most care of your preserva- 
 tion and prosperities : and hopes (though I thus speak) 
 that your demeanours at this time will be such as shall not 
 only make me approve your former counsels, but lay on 
 me such obligations as shall bind me by way of thankful- 
 ness to meet often with you : for, be assured that nothing 
 can be more pleasing unto me, than to keep a good 
 correspondency with you." ^ 
 
 And how did the Commons respond to this fine appeal .'' 
 They forthwith entered upon g, debate on the old topic of 
 grievances, then supplies, and finally prepared a petition 
 to enforce the laws against recusants! 
 
 ^ The comment upon this decision, made in the Cambridge Modem 
 History, is of great interest. On p. 274, Vol. IV, we read : " To later 
 observers this appears a hazardous, even a hopeless, experiment ; it did 
 not seem so then. Long periods had elapsed in Elizabeth's reign 
 wfithout Parliaments ; longer still in the reign of James I. The 
 parliamentary system was far from being regarded as essential to good 
 government. In Spain it had practically disappeared. In France the 
 States General had not met since 16 14, and was not to meet again till 
 1789. In Germany the Diet was already little more than a diplomatic 
 council. Holland was a Republic, and therefore out of court. Why 
 should not England follow the way of France and Spain ? All that 
 seemed requisite was the adoption of a pacific policy abroad, the 
 improvement of administration at home, and the gradual extension of 
 autocratic control over the national sources of supply. Such was the 
 policy which the Government now attempted to carry out." 
 
 2 See Parliamentary History of England, Vol. II, p. 218. 
 
 126 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 They did evefything in their power to harass and to 
 thwart their sovereign. Not understanding him in the 
 least, regarding his artistic tastes as mere foppery, longing 
 to confirm their base and utterly false suspicions concern- 
 ing his leanings to Popery, and detesting his patriarchal 
 concern for the welfare of the people, to oppress whom 
 they thirsted for " liberty " and a free Parliament, they 
 could not forgive a man who, while he was discerning 
 enough to dismiss a cad like WilHams and to befriend an 
 honest ' genius like Wentworth, was yet not sufficiently 
 penetrating to see that if only he would join them— them, 
 the elect of God, the possessors of almost all the wealth of 
 the nation, and the backbone of all the trade — he would 
 be safe and sound as the Georges were ultirnately to be; 
 but upon the rotten foundation of a crushed though patient 
 people. 
 
 When, therefore. Professor Gardiner says of Strafford, 
 " there can be no doubt that he had thrown himself on 
 the wrong side in the great struggle of his day," ^ surely 
 a curious note is struck by this great and otherwise 
 impartial historian. If the unsuccessful side is always 
 going to be the wrong side; if the loser in a struggle is, 
 on that account alone, always to be the delinquent, then 
 of a certainty nobility and heroism are at an end. For 
 where success is the sole measure of value — which, I admit, 
 it unfortunately is to-day — then martyrdoms, crucifixions 
 and heroic sacrifices are indeed quite valueless. I am only 
 surprised that Professor Gardiner should have given his 
 great authority — as he seems to have done in the above 
 passage — ^to so regrettable a credo. 
 
 Thus, although Charles was reduced to unparliamentary 
 means for the collection of at least some of the expenses 
 of State, he did not flinch for one moment from the task 
 of pursuing his bold and patriarchal policy. He realised 
 then the truth which Cromwell was to acknowledge later 
 (in 1655, for instance), that the England of his time could 
 be properly governed only by a single ruler capable of 
 ^ The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Rebellion, p. 1 09 . 
 127 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 directing able assistants.^ In all directions the doctrine 
 was re-echoed, that there was to be no respecting of 
 persons but only justice done. Church lands and property 
 illegally and greedily appropriated by his powerful sub- 
 jects, poor-funds filched by unscrupulous nobles and 
 country magnates, were restored as far as possible to their 
 proper owners and applied to their proper purposes. In 
 Ireland the King, by granting to the clergy all the Crown 
 impropriation, himself set a noble example to his subjects 
 which seems, in some instances, to have borne fruit. 
 Following in his father's footsteps, he turned his attention 
 to Scotland, and resorted to drastic measures for mitigate- 
 ing the "grave social and political evils attendant upon 
 the vast absorption of Church revenues by the high 
 nobility,"^ and upon the rapacious nature of the tithe- 
 owners. The fortuitous and salutary arrangement which 
 he was ultimately Jible to effect "weakened," as Pro- 
 fessor Gardiner tells us, " the power of the nobility, and 
 strengthened the prerogative in the only way in which the 
 prerogative deserved to be strengthened, by the popularity 
 it gained through carrying into effect a wise and beneficent 
 reform. Every landowner who was freed from the 
 perpetual annoyance of the tithe gatherer, every minister 
 whose income had been increased and rendered more 
 certain than by James's arrangement, knew well to whom 
 the change was owing." ^ 
 
 Naturally such a policy created powerful enemies, and 
 when Charles sought to impose Laud's conformity upon 
 Scotland, it cannot be doubted that such of his formidable 
 opponents as the Earls of Rothes and Loudoun, were 
 
 1 Dr. W. F. Hook, in speaking of Cromwell's sagacity, says : " That 
 same sagacity led Cromwell to see that, as the country then existed, it 
 must be subjected to the rule of one. He himself became that one, 
 but by doing so he endorses, to a certain extent, the polipy for up- 
 holding which Charles, Strafford, and Laud were brought to the block." 
 — Op. cit., Vol, XI, p. 357. 
 
 * Gardiner, Personal Government of Charles I, Vol. I, p. 347. For a 
 full account of the King's good work in Scotland see pp. 330-362. 
 
 » /W., Vol. I, p. 351. 
 
 128 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 actuated by the memory of these beneficent reforms of the 
 King. 
 
 At home Commissioners were appointed to inquire into 
 the laws for the relief of the poor. They were to see that 
 the country Justices of the Peace did their duty, and did 
 not omit to act in accordance with the law, even where 
 their duties clashed with their own interests. Abuses were 
 to cease. Reports were demanded periodically, and local 
 magnates were constrained to maintain a high standard in 
 the administration of their authority.-"^ 
 
 A body of Commissioners was also appointed to come 
 to terms with the creditors of prisoners imprisoned for 
 debts amounting to less than ;^2oo, and whom the judge 
 who had tried them regarded as cases deserving of mercy. 
 And yet another Commission was appointed " to inquire 
 touching Depopulations and conversions of Lands to 
 Pasture," — an evil which, as we have already seen, pressed 
 heavily upon the poorer inhabitants of all rural districts. 
 Charles was very severe upon this class of delinquency, 
 and Sir Anthony Roper was fined no less than ;^3 0,000 
 for committing Depopulations.* 
 
 The King was, however, just as solicitous of the welfare 
 of the spirit as of the body of the people, and wherever 
 he was able he firmly resisted all Puritanical attempts at 
 depressing the national temper. The first act of his first 
 Parliament had been to suppress all games on Sunday, on 
 penalty of a fine, and to insist on Sunday observance. 
 Again, owing to the influence of the Puritans, in 1628, 
 by the Act 3 Charles I, cap. 2, all carriers, waggoners, 
 wainmen and drivers were prohibited from travelling on 
 Sunday. In 1633 Charles I, to the intense annoyance 
 of the Puritans, repealed the Sunday observance laws, 
 which he felt were taking the spirit out of the working 
 people, who had but that day upon which to play and 
 enjoy themselves, and he ordained that, after attending 
 
 ^ For a full account of the work of this Commission see Sir G. 
 NichoUs, K.C.B., op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 252-255. 
 
 2 Rush worth's Historical Collections, Part 11, Vol. I, p. 333. 
 K 129 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 evening prayersj everybody should be allowed to amuse 
 himselt in any decent way he might choose. 
 
 As a matter of fact, in doing this he did but re-issue 
 his father's Book of Sports, which was first published in 
 1618. On his return from Scotland in 161 7 James I 
 had had a petition presented to him by the people, 
 chiefly consisting of the lower classes, who were desirous 
 of having Sunday amusements; and in spite of opposition 
 from the clergy and the middle classes, the King had 
 granted them their wish. 
 
 In his preamble to the re-issue of this declaration, 
 Charles I said : " Our Deare Father of blessed memory, 
 in his return from Scotland, coming through Lancashire, 
 found that his subjects were debarred from Lawful Recrea- 
 tions upon Sundayes after evening Prayers ended, and 
 upon Holydays. And he prudently considered, that if 
 these times were taken from them, the meaner sort who 
 labour all the weeke, should have no Recreations at all 
 to refresh their spirits." And from the concluding passage 
 I take the following : " Now out of a like pious Care for 
 the service of God, and for the suppressing of any humours 
 that oppose trueth, and for the Ease, Comfort and Recrea- 
 tion of Our well deserving People, We doe ratify and 
 publish this Our blessed Father's Declaration : The rather 
 because of late in some Counties of Our Kingdom We 
 find that under pretence of taking away abuses, that there 
 hath been a generall forbidding, not only of ordinary meet- 
 ings, but of the feasts of the Dedication of Churches, 
 commonly called Wakes." ^ 
 
 Charles was no less active in other directions in trying 
 to secure the welfare of his people. In addition to com- 
 bating the fighters for parliamentary supremacy, which, 
 as we have seen, was simply coveted for the liberty which 
 it gave to those in power to indulge their lusts of private 
 gain and private greed, undeterred by a ruler who, while 
 standing apart from all factions, could rule for the benefit 
 
 ^ King Charles I's DecUratioti to his Subjects concerning Lawful 
 Sports to be used on Sundays (October 18, 1633). 
 
 130 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 of all; there were two other forces which were beginning 
 to make themselves felt at this time — mechanical science, 
 with Its contrivances of all kinds calculated to increase the 
 rapidity ot production without concerning itself in any 
 way about tne character of the workmen who were to 
 control these contrivances or machines; and capitalistic 
 industry, which had begun to rear its head as early as the 
 sixteenth century, and which, with the unscrupulous stress 
 it laid upon the mere gain of the producer, and the lack 
 of responsibility it often allowed to the moneyed employer, 
 heeded neither the people it employed nor the consumers 
 for whom it catered. While, correlated with the rise of 
 mechanical science and capitalistic industry, there was that 
 growing hostility to beauty, love of life, good spirits, joy 
 and abundant health, all of which qualities, when they are 
 regarded as inviolate and sacred, tend to become formid- 
 able obstacles in the path of the two forces in question. 
 
 With regard to this hostility to beauty, love of life, good 
 spirits, joy and abundant health, I shall, in the opinion 
 of some people, deal more than adequately in my next 
 chapter. For the present I shall concern myself only 
 with the rise of the two forces just described. 
 
 It is well known that the Tudors were consistently 
 opposed to the introduction of all engines and machines 
 which tended to prove injurious to handicraftsmen, or to 
 deteriorate the quality of the articles produced.-^ Edward 
 VI and Elizabeth were both equally vigorous in their 
 attitude towards mechanical innovations, and the case of 
 the gig-mills in the former's reign and that of Mr. Lee's 
 stocking loom in the latter' s reign, are too well known 
 to be dwelt upon here. The course which these two 
 
 ^ See Gamier, Annals of the British Peasantry, p. 176. "The 
 Government for a long period seems to have regarded machinery with 
 the same hostile views as did the Luddites in subsequent times. In- 
 ventive genius was termed ' subtle imagination,' and any substitute for 
 the ' manufacture by hands and feet ' was regarded as conducive to the 
 ' final undoing of the industry concerned.' For this reason, the fulling 
 mill in 1482, the newly-invented gig mill in 1 55 1, and the tucking 
 mill in 1555 were discountenanced." 
 
 131 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 monarchs had inaugurated, however, James and Charles 
 continued with even greater vigour. But, in the reigns 
 of the last two monarchs, the men who firmJy believed 
 that mechanical innovations per se, quite irrespective of 
 whether they improved or deteriorated man, constituted 
 " Progress," were beginning to lose patience and to grow 
 in number. They could no longer brook this paternal 
 control from on high. To them any thought of directing 
 or limiting the march of mechanical science amounted 
 to intolerable interference, insufferable tyranny. They 
 scoffed when James I prohibited the use oi a machine for 
 making needles; but they scoffed still more when Charles 
 reinforced the Tudor enactments, and also upheld his 
 father's attitude in this struggle against the besotting 
 machine. Their surprise, however, must have been great 
 when the noblest of the Stuarts, on June 15, 1634, not 
 only issued a proclamation against " that great annoyance 
 of smpak which is so obnoxious to our City of London," 
 but also carried his concern about the beauty and happi- 
 ness of this city so far as actually to recommend the use 
 of a new and special furnace calculated to mitigate the 
 evil. 
 
 Incidentally, it is obvious from this royal proclamation 
 that the great Stuart King was not blindly suspicious of 
 innovations as such; ^ otherwise he would have looked 
 askance even at a furnace calculated to mitigate the evil 
 of smoke. 
 
 As Dr. Cunningham observes : " The chief object which 
 James and Charles set before themselves in regard to the 
 industry of the country, was not the introduction of new 
 
 * As another proof of this contention, Charles's attitude towards the 
 Commons in the matter of the constructional reforms in London is 
 very interesting. Among the grievances of the Commons in 1625 
 there is a complaint about the building of all houses in London in one 
 uniform way, with a face of brick towards the street. (Bricks had 
 recently been introduced for building by the Earl of Arutidel,) To 
 this complaint Charles replied that this reform in building was a good 
 reform, and he was determined to allow the work to proceed. 
 
 132 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 forms of skill; they were much more occupied in providing 
 for the supervision of the existing industries, so that the 
 wares produced might be of good quality." ^ 
 
 But one does not require to be a deep student of the 
 vulgar and unthinking class of mechanical innovators, to 
 understand the kind of exasperation to which such an 
 attitude on the part of the ruler would soon give rise in 
 their ranks. Big-sounding, bombastic phrases, such as the 
 " Forward March of Humanity," " The Progress of the 
 Race," welled up in their foolish and sentimental throats 
 and caused them to look with rankling indignation at 
 that superb figure in lace and velvet whose consummate 
 taste preferred to cling devotedly to Beauty rather than to 
 their absurd and inhuman idea of advancement! 
 
 There was, however, a deeper and perhaps more un- 
 conscious hatred in Charles I and his father against 
 mechanical innovations than the mere hatred of their 
 threatened deterioration of both the handicraftsman and 
 the quality of the goods produced. There was the pro- 
 found suspicion that machinery implied expensive and 
 elaborate installations which must necessarily lead to the 
 extinction of the poor home-worker, or even of the artisan 
 of moderate means, and the yielding up of his liberty, his 
 power and his gifts to a more unscrupulous and less desir- 
 able taskmaster than the buying public, i. e. the capitalistic 
 traders, out for personal gain. For machinery and capital- 
 ism are plighted mates and are necessarily allies. 
 
 The strongest objection advanced against this attitude 
 towards machinery can be stated in a few words. It is 
 this : Man is essentially a machine- and instrument-using 
 animal. All his advancement, if advancement it may be 
 called, is due to the fact that he was the only one, among 
 all the species of quadrumana, to realise that there is no 
 limit to the extra external organs he can create for him- 
 self. Thus an arrow, as a machine for death, is more 
 formidable, more treacherous and more efficacious than all 
 the stealthy and sheathed lions' claws, and all the reptilian 
 
 1 Tie Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Vol. II, p. 195. 
 
 133 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 poison on earth. As an extra organ added to man's struc- 
 ture, the arrow with the bow that drives it becomes a 
 magnificent step from a position of subjection to beasts 
 of prey, to a position of mastery over them. From the 
 arrow to the locomotive is a long jump; still, it is difficult 
 to draw the line anywhere, and you cannot point your 
 finger at any particular stage in the evolution of machinery 
 and say, " Here it should have stopped and proceeded no 
 further." 
 
 All this is perfectly true, but for the last passage, and 
 my reply to that is, that I can and do put my finger upon 
 a particular stage in mechanical evolution, and that I do 
 cry : " Here it should have stopped and proceeded no 
 further." That is to say, I do undertake to perform what 
 the average Englishman always regards as a task too diffi- 
 cult even to approach, namely, " to draw the line some- 
 where." / say that the line of demarcation between benefi- 
 cent and deleterious machinery is to be found at that point 
 where machines begin to cease from developing desirable 
 qualities in the characters and bodies of those who use 
 them, or where they begin to develop positively bad 
 qualities. 
 
 This I believe to have been the Stuart and the Tudor 
 view, and it is absolutely unassailable from every stand- 
 point. 
 
 Now turning to the second force, that of rising capital- 
 istic industry — again we find that the Tudors preceded 
 the Stuarts in their hostility to the spirit of greed and gain 
 which seems to have characterised this form of industry 
 from the very first. 
 
 As Dr. Cunningham assures us, " Edward VI was quite 
 prepared to oppose that anybody should ' eat up another 
 through p-r^ediness,' " ^ and Gamier declares that, " the 
 aim of Elizabeth's advisers was to disperse and distribute 
 the national wealth, instead of allowing it to accumulate 
 in a few hands." * The necessary concomitant of greed — ' 
 
 1 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 560. 
 
 * jinnak of the British Peasantry, p. 98. 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 the tendency, that is to say, of neglecting quality in work- 
 manship so long as a rapid and plentiful supply can be 
 produced to meet the demands of the market, was also 
 opposed by the Tudor sovereigns, and their assiduous 
 supervision of manufactures, such, for instance, as the 
 pewterer's, brasier's and cooper's trades, shows the extent 
 to which they carried this principle into effect.-' 
 
 " The Tudor government," says the reverend historian 
 of English industry, " backed by public opinion, took a 
 very strong line as to the duty of capitalists, either as 
 merchants or employers under such circumstances [fluctua- 
 tions of trade]; it was thought only right that they should 
 bear the risk of loss, which arose from increasing their 
 stocks while there was no sale abroad, rather than condemn 
 the workmen to enforced idleness." ^ 
 
 But the attitude that theTudors only initiated the^Stuarts 
 maintained with their customary energy and augmented 
 zeal. They regarded speculation with suspicion, and con- 
 sidered it as mere " private gain " accruing to individuals 
 who performed no public service in return for their 
 advantage. And in 1622 and 1623, during the great 
 depression in the clothing industry, James insisted by 
 proclamation upon the clothiers continuing to employ the 
 weavers as they had done at the time when trade flourished. 
 In 1629, again, under Charles I, the Justices came to 
 the rescue of the Essex weavers, and forced their 
 employers to give them better terms than those to which 
 the mere automatic action of "free competition" gave 
 rise. 
 
 The measures resorted to after the bad harvest of 1630 
 were also very characteristic of Charles and his whole 
 policy. Every possible step was taken to prevent any 
 rise in the price of corn. Unlike the Georges, Charles 
 could not bear the thought that one or two individuals 
 should speculate and grow rich upon the starving bodies 
 of the poor and their children; and, like Cobbett, who was 
 
 1 See Cunningham, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 513. 
 * Ibid., op. cit.. Vol. II, p. 50. 
 
 135 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 subsequently to express his loathing of the wretched 
 Quakers who drew profit in times of scarcity from having 
 kept back large stores of grain,^ Charles went to elaborate 
 pains in the crisis to prevent anything of the sort occurring. 
 The Irish, who had not suffered from any dearth, were 
 requested to send to England all the grain that was not 
 absolutely required for their own purposes; Justices of the 
 Peace in counties where there happened to be a sufficiency 
 of corn were instructed to provide for their less fortunate 
 neighbours. Nobody was allowed to sell wheat at more 
 than seven shillings a bushel, and the storing of grain for 
 re-sale was prohibited. Even starch-makers and maltsters 
 were reminded that their produce was not so necessary to 
 human life as was the raw material of their industry." 
 And thus the crisis was overcome without either too much 
 hardship or too much disorder. 
 
 Another instance of the same attitude on the part of 
 Charles I is to be found in the proclamation of May 4, 
 1633, affecting the price of victuals, and directed " against 
 the intolerable avarice of Bakers, Brewers, Innholders and 
 Butchers, who not contented with a reasonable profit in 
 uttering and selling Victuall within Our Dominions, and 
 especially within the Verge of our household, unlawfully 
 exact and demand unreasonable and extreame prizes for 
 Victuals, Housemeat, Lodging, and other necessaries, 
 above the prizes they were sold at before our coming to 
 those parts." ' 
 
 Concurrently with this vigilance in regard to the grow- 
 ing spirit of greed and gain in the country, Charles was, 
 moreover, persistently interfering in trade, whenever and 
 wherever abuses were practised by those engfaged in it. 
 At one time he is found legislating against frauds in the 
 sale and packing of butter,* at another against fraud in 
 the drapery trade,' and anon against the abuses of the 
 
 ^ Op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 163-164. 
 
 ' Gardiner, Personal Government of Charles I, Vol. I, p. 199. 
 ' British Museum Proclamations, 506, h. 12. 
 * November 13, 1634. " April 16, 1633. 
 
 136 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 Gardeners ^ of London, or the makers and purveyors of 
 counterfeit jewellery.* 
 
 Much capital has been made by the Puritan opponents 
 of this great monarch out of the scandal of his govern- 
 ment's interference with the soap trade; but, as Gardiner 
 points out, it was Portland who was responsible for this. 
 It was Portland who enriched his friends at the cost of 
 the soap-makers, and Laud was horrified enough when 
 he discovered the dishonesty of the whole affair.^ 
 
 In any case, as far as Charles was concerned, it was his 
 earnest endeavour to preserve a good standard in the 
 quality of the goods produced by the manufacturers among 
 his subjects, and though his interferences naturally gave 
 rise to discontent, more particularly among the rapacious 
 Dissenting mercantile classes of London, he never refrained 
 from enforcing his high standard of quality and honesty 
 whenever he felt justified in so doing. The case of the silk 
 trade is a good instance of his perseverance in this respect. 
 Three times did Charles attempt to suppress the frauds 
 and adulterations in this trade. He began by incorporat- 
 ing the silkmen in 1632 for the purpose of supervising 
 one another. As this company, however, upheld the 
 abuses, he placed the responsibility of search in the hands 
 of the London Company of Dyers. These, it was found, 
 also connived at the frauds, and in 1639 Charles accord- 
 ingly established a government office, where the silk was 
 inspected, stamped and declared to be of an adequately 
 good quality.* After which matters seem to have pro- 
 ceeded more satisfactorily. 
 
 As Cunningham observes : " Under the Stuarts, strenu- 
 ous efforts were made to organise a system of industrial 
 supervision on national lines, and thus to maintain a high 
 standard of quality for goods of every kind, manufactured 
 for sale either at home or abroad." ' But it will be readily 
 
 1 December 3, 1634. * April 18, 1636. 
 
 ' Personal Government of Charles I, pp. 165-169. 
 * See Cunningham, op. ci't., Vol. II, p. 300. 
 » Vol. II, p. 296. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 understood that such action on the part of a sovereign, 
 in the midst of a nation which was rapidly moving towards 
 the vulgar shopkeeping ideal, was not of a kind to breed 
 good-will between the government and the governed. 
 
 The traders of London were all savage at this arbitrary- 
 imposition of the virtues of honesty and the love of quality 
 upon themselves and their fellows.-^ Such ideals were 
 incompatible with greed and gain; they were, moreover, 
 irreconcilable with the stout-hearted British love of 
 "Liberty! " and a "Free Parliament! " 
 
 And, in truth, when we begin to enumerate in a single 
 passage all the deeds of Charles's patriarchal and popular 
 government — his opposition to the grasping Lords and 
 country gentry; his intolerance of the filching of the 
 Church and poor-funds by provincial magnates in Eng- 
 land, Scotland and Ireland; his firm resolve to maintain 
 the spirit of the labouring classes and to keep the Puritans 
 from depressing them; his hostility to the introduction of 
 besotting machinery; his determined stand against the 
 growing lust of gain and profit at all costs; not to mention 
 his love of beauty, flourishing life, and the rest — ^we are 
 
 ^ Among other interferences in trade not already mentioned, I may 
 refer to Charles's proclamation of June 20, 1629, concerning the 
 making of starch and avoiding annoyance thereby ; his proclamation 
 of June 7, 163 1, for preventing " Deceipt in the Importation of 
 Madder"; his proclamation of January 12, 1632, for regulating the 
 buckle-making trade; his proclamations of February 18, 1632, of 
 January 20, 1633, of January 20, 1634, °f February i, 1635, ^'^^ 
 of January 20, 1636, for the "Prizing of Wines" ; his proclama- 
 tion of March 14, 1634, for dealing with the supply of salt ; his 
 proclamation affecting the fisheries and forbidding the use of an engine 
 called a Trawl?, April 2, 1635 ; his proclamation of September 6, 
 1635, for the prevention of abuses by lawyers and lawyers' clerks ; and 
 his proclamation of July 9, 1636, for the "due execution of the 
 office of Clarke of the Market of Our Houshold, and throwout Our 
 Realme of England and Dominion of Wales : And for the surveying 
 and seeling of the constant Rule appointed to be used by all Clothiers, 
 and workers in cloth and yarn ; and for the increase of the poores wages 
 labouring therein." — British Museum Proclamjitions, 506 (Rush worth's 
 Historical Collections, Part z. Vol. I). 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 less surprised at his tragic end than at the fact that it came 
 so extraordinarily late. To behave as he behaved at the 
 time when he reigned, required not only insight, but 
 dauntless courage and a fearless and almost desperate sense 
 of duty.^ His conduct aggravated his opponents the more 
 because he gave them no handle, either in his private life 
 or his public deeds, wherewith to bring him more rapidly 
 into their power. The only accusation they could bring 
 against him during his eleven years of personal govern- 
 ment, was the levying of taxes, which, by the by, were 
 never oppressive, without the consent of Parliament — a 
 last shift to which they themselves had forced him. And 
 even this they could not have regarded as so terribly 
 remiss, seeing that they were quite willing to overlook the 
 whole of this apparently " awful " crime in the Short 
 Parliament. But of this anon. I must now say a few 
 words concernini? Charles's ministers. 
 
 In Chapter XXIII of his Prince, Machiavelli says : 
 " Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, 
 whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the 
 prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good 
 counsels." 
 
 ^ The character that F. C. Montague gives of Charles in Tie 
 Political History of England, Vol. VII, p. iz6, is worth quoting in this 
 connection as the opinion of an important historian who, on the whole, 
 is as fair as any one can expect in his estimate of the Stuart period. 
 Mr. Montague says : " Charles was personally brjve, ;ind he had many 
 of the virtues that dignify private life. By his strict fidelity to his 
 queen he set an example as rare as it was praiseworthy among the 
 sovereigns of that time. He was sincerely religious without the theo- 
 logical pedantry of his father. He was industrious in the routine of 
 kingship." Leopold von Ranice, as a foreign historian of considerable 
 weight, is also worth reference on this point. On p. 65, Vol. II, of his 
 Histort of England, the author says : " In the world which surrounded 
 him Charles always passed for a man without a fault, who committed 
 no excesses, had no vices, possessed cultivation and knowledge to the 
 fullest extent, without wishing to make a show in consecfaence ; not, 
 however, devoid of severity which, hdwever, he tempered with feelings 
 of humanity . . . Since the death of Buckingham he appeared to 
 choose his ministers by merits and capacity and no longer by 
 favouritism." 
 
 139 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Personally I am content to regard this statement of 
 Machiavelli's as an axiom. I am perfectly content to 
 believe that the wisdom of a prince's advisers is always 
 the prince's wisdom, in cases in which he has had to cho\Dse 
 his counsellors from among the public servants surround- 
 ing his person. But there is this obvious difficulty to be 
 remembered, namely, that " to be honest, as this world 
 goes, is to be one man picked out of a thousand," and 
 that, after all, when a wise prince has exhausted the small 
 crop of honest men in his entourage, no " choosing," no 
 " discrimination " on his part can possibly create honest 
 men where there are none, especially when we remember 
 that the range of men who are prepared to undertake a 
 public duty is always limited. 
 
 To Charles's credit, be it said, that he selected for his 
 closest and most trusted advisers two of the most honest 
 men that England then contained, Wentworth and Laud; 
 but for the rest, like poor Napoleon with his admirals, 
 he had to do the best he could with the material that a 
 merciful though sparing Providence placed in his hands. 
 
 Men such as Portland, Cottington, Windebanke, 
 Weston, though necessarily used and required by Charles, 
 never attained to that high degree of disinterested devotion 
 to their duties which characterised both Laud and Went- 
 worth. There can be no doubt — in fact the proof of it 
 appears again and again — that all four practised pecula- 
 tion on a small or large scale, according to their opportuni- 
 ties, and alwavs sought their own interests before those 
 either of the King- or the people. Still, it is impossible 
 to conceive how Charles could have got on without them; 
 and if, as is no doubt the case, they contributed in no 
 small degree towards making his government fail, it should 
 be borne in mind that where they departed from the path 
 of strict honesty and justice, they were neither in sympathy 
 with Charles's main policy, nor inspired by his precept and 
 example. 
 
 The best proof of this lies in the fact that the ministers 
 who were nearest and dearest to Charles, were as disin- 
 
 140 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 terested as he himself was in promoting the cause of the 
 governed, and no act of corruption, malversation or 
 peculation was ever proved, even by their bitterest foes, 
 against either of them. I speak, of course, of Laud and 
 Wentworth. 
 
 Inspired by the King and the only men of his period 
 who were worthy of him, these two ministers pursued with 
 undaunted courage the policy which he set up as his ideal; 
 and when ultimately they were brought to the block it 
 was by the enemies they had bravely created in their sup- 
 pression of abuses practised by the powerful and the 
 mercenary. For, like Charles, they were neither of them 
 respecters of persons. 
 
 Of Laud Professor Gardiner says : " His hand was 
 everywhere. Rich and poor, high and low, alike felt its 
 weight. . . . Nothing angered him so much as the claim 
 of a great man to escape a penalty which would fall on 
 others. Nothing brought him into such disfavour with 
 the great as his refusal to admit that the punishment which 
 had raised no outcry when it was meted out to the weak 
 and helpless, should be spared in the case of the powerful 
 and wealthy offender." ^ 
 
 No bishop or archbishop before or after him was ever 
 more zealous in discovering and punishing abuses against 
 Church property; and as these were plentiful, and always 
 the acts of powerful people, the enemies poor Laud 
 ultimately had to meet were numerous and formidable 
 indeed. 
 
 His eye, too, was always fixed with honest reproach 
 upon the immediate entourage of his master; and the 
 frequent acts of corruption and peculation which he had 
 to witness caused him no small amount of sadness. Un- 
 fortunately, in trying to suppress some of the wholesale 
 robbery that was constantly being practised close to the 
 throne, he embittered some of the most powerful men of 
 the kingdom against himself. As Dean Hook observes, 
 his hostility to the avaricious and unscrupulous courtiers 
 ^ Personal Government of Charles I, Vol. II, p. 205. 
 141 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 "who robbed the King to enrich themselves," resxxlted 
 in the fact that " he [i^ud] found among the coiirtiers 
 adversaries as bitter, though for fear of offending the 
 King not so openly abusive, as he had found among the 
 Puritans." ^ 
 
 His life work, as an able Anglican Churchman, was a 
 noble struggle against the growing anarchy in religion. 
 The Puritans, with their impudent assumption of omni- 
 science, were rising in all directions. They knew what God 
 felt, liked, wanted and appreciated, just as the Dissenters 
 and Low Churchmen know these things to-day. They 
 even had the downright insolence to declare that Christ 
 himself was one of them — a Puritan ! No one knew better 
 than they the path to Paradise. And they were prepared 
 to murder, mutilate, sell into slavery, torture, burn or 
 poison, any one who dared to doubt their extravagantly 
 impertinent claims and creed. 
 
 Laud saw through their impudent theology. He fore- 
 saw the anarchy that must necessarily follow their triumph, 
 and with a patient tolerance, that did him and all his 
 sympathisers great honour, while he defended the legal 
 attitude of the Church of England, he was never either 
 oppressive or cruelly hostile to these revolutionaries. 
 
 There is no finer appeal against the anarchy of settling 
 deep religious questions by the individual conscience than 
 his letter to Sir Kenelm Digby, quoted in full in Dean 
 Hook's biography.* But the words of this letter are not 
 those of a narrow fanatic; nor are they the words of an 
 implacable and resentful foe. They express the senti- 
 ments of an earnest, scholarly and highly intelligent man 
 who was anxious to establish order where chaos threatened 
 to reign. 
 
 I have already alluded to Charles Ps fairness in his 
 treatment of all the religious agitators of his reign. 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 355. See also p. 226. "The courtiers whose pecula- 
 tions he [Laud] had resisted, were enemies to him, almost as bitter as 
 the Puritans." 
 
 * See pp. 274-282. 
 
 142 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 But in this fairness he was ably seconded by his eccle- 
 siastical lieutenant. I have referred to the just manner 
 in which controversy was quelled — that is to say, that 
 both sides were silenced, and not merely the side opposed 
 to the Church of England. And I have attempted to show 
 that this attitude towards controversy was tar more the 
 outcome of a desire for peace and order than of a fanatical 
 dislike of the enlightenment that may come from discus- 
 sion. For Charles was neither a pedant nor a fanatic. 
 Laud, however, was equally just in his efforts to quell 
 factious preaching. As Dean Hook observes, these efforts 
 of Laud's were " not aU on one side : and the Calvinists 
 had no just ground for their assertion that none but they 
 were prohibited, or that the opposite party went off 
 unpunished." ^ 
 
 It is ridiculous to charge this man with bigotry and 
 narrow-minded bitterness as some have done. A man who 
 could deplore the violent discussions concerning religion, 
 because "few things in religion are demonstrable,"^ 
 was not a man to entrench himself behind a rigid dog- 
 matic defence, when it was a matter of vindicating his 
 position. 
 
 But Laud sinned in the same way that Charles sinned, 
 and in the same way as Wentworth sinned. He was no 
 respecter of persons. Although he was no more active 
 than any of his colleagues in the sentencing and punish- 
 ment of culprits brought up before the High Commission 
 Court, the very names of those who were arraigned by 
 this assembly during his term of office for acts of im- 
 morality that no healthy State could afford to overlook, 
 reveal how strongly the fearless influence of Charles made 
 itself felt. 
 
 "Persons of honour and great quality," says Dr. 
 Hutton, " of the Covirt and of the country, were every day 
 cited into the High Commission Court, upon the fame of 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 194. 
 
 * Words used in the magnificent letter to Sir Kenelm Digby, to 
 which reference has already been made. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 their incontinence, or other scandal in their lives, and 
 were there prosecuted to their shame and punishnient." ^ 
 
 Among those of high position who were thus cited, I 
 may mention Frances Coke, the wife of Lord Purbeck, 
 Sir Qiles Alington, Lady Eleanor Davies and Bishop 
 Williams — the latter for subornation, perjury, and for 
 revealing the King's secrets, contrary to his oath as a 
 councillor. 
 
 The treatment Laud received at the hands of the Long 
 Parliament and their vile instrument Prynne, surpasses 
 anything that can be imagined in brutality, injustice and 
 dishonesty.^ I cannot enter here into all the nauseating 
 details of the long trial and imprisonment of this honest 
 man. Suffice it to say, that the charge against him was a 
 mass of the grossest falsehoods that all his enemies to- 
 gether were able to concoct, and that they were naturally 
 quite unable to substantiate a single clause of the indict- 
 ment. In spite of this, they sentenced him to death, 
 tormenting him until the end, and even sent Sir John 
 Clatworthy to bully and irritate him on the scaffold.^ 
 
 A significant and touching clause is to be found in his 
 will, which shows more than any words of mine could 
 how devoted this simple man still remained in adversity 
 to the great master in whose service he had met his death — 
 
 " I take the boldness to give my dear and dread 
 Sovereign King Charles (whom God bless) ;^iooo, and 
 I do forgive him the debt which he owes me, being ;^2ooo, 
 and require that the two tallies for it be given up." 
 
 I now turn to Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. 
 But I might as well save myself the pains: for all his- 
 torians, oiF any worth at all, are unanimous in their praise 
 
 ^ Op. cit. 
 
 * Dr. Hutton (qp. cit., p. 207) declares that "never in English 
 history, it may truly be said, was there a more monstrous violation of 
 justice and good feeling in the trial of a capital charge." 
 
 ' For details of this last act of villainy see Dean Hook's biography, 
 p. 381. 
 
 144 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 of this great man. Like Charles and Laud, he sinned in 
 a way which the rapacious, vulgar and heartless spirit 
 of the times could iU forgive. He was determined to 
 administer justice, suppress abuses and alleviate the 
 oppression of the people,^ without any regard for the rank 
 or wealth of the individuals he opposed; and as one of the 
 splendid triumvirate which once ruled over the destinies 
 of England, he pursued his policy with the greatest degree 
 of ability, pertinacity and courage. 
 
 Even his bitterest opponents ultimately had to acknow- 
 ledge the magnificent gifts of this dazzling personality, 
 and more than half of the anger and hostility created by 
 his conversion to the King's cause in 1628 was the out- 
 come of his late colleagues' profound appreciation of his 
 powers. No group of men ever accuse another person 
 rancorously of apostasy if, on leaving their party, he does 
 not impoverish it. On the contrary, they are only too 
 glad that the counsels of a fool should jeopardise their 
 opponents' cause. Do but read, therefore, of the anger 
 that Wentworth's desertion of his party roused, and you 
 will be able to form an approximate estimate of his 
 value. 
 
 Like Charles, Wehtworth was a handsome man. Com- 
 pare Charles's face with Cromwell's, and Wentworth's ^ 
 with Hampden's,^ and if you are a believer, as every 
 great people and most great men have been, in the message 
 of the face and body, you will be able to dispense with 
 all historical inquiry, and to conclude immediately that 
 Charles and his friend Wentworth were on the right side, 
 and not, as Gardiner seems to suppose, on the wrong side, 
 of the great struggle of the seventeenth century. 
 
 ^ " His accession to the Privy Council," says Professor Gardiner, 
 " was followed by a series of measures aiming at the benefit of the 
 people in general, and the protection of the helpless against the pressure 
 caused by the, self-interest of particular classes." — Personal Government of 
 Charles I, Vol. I, p. 197. 
 
 ^ I refer to the portrait belonging to the Duke of Portland. 
 
 * The portrait belonging to Earl Spencer. 
 
 L 145 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 This evidence of the featiares and of the body is, 
 however, insufficient nowadays to convince the average 
 European possessed only of mgderate health and spirits : 
 that is partly why I have written this essay. 
 
 I shall not enter into the question of Wentworth's 
 so-called apostasy. Nothing definite seems to be known 
 about it, and it is just as much open to the Furitans to 
 say that he was bribed by honours to join the King's party 
 — a thing they do not hesitate to assert concerning this 
 noble man — as it is for me to declare that Wentworth, 
 after fourteen years of close association with the Puritan 
 party, was at last forced, in spite of his honest nature, 
 not prone to suspect evil in others, to recognise the 
 absolute unworthiness and prurience of his whilom com- 
 rades. At any rate he was never a Puritan; ^ and, in view 
 of the hold Puritanism began to take of the Parliamentary 
 party in the struggle with the King in 1628, I can see 
 nothing surprising in the fact that a man of Wentworth's 
 stamp should suddenly be caught at the throat with a 
 feeling of uncontrollable nausea, and should seek purer 
 and more congenial air in the neighbourhood of a sovereign 
 such as Charles I. 
 
 It is true that Charles employed him in high and respon- 
 sible duties almost immediately; but then, as Traill has 
 shown, Charles had liked and admired Wentworth long 
 before the act of so-called apostasy was even contemplated- 
 There are not now, and there were not then, so many 
 men in England of Wentworth's singular ability as to 
 leave a monarch for long in hesitation as to whom he 
 should entrust his highest charges. Once, therefore, 
 Wentworth had declared himself on the King's side, it 
 is not surprising that he should have been almost imme- 
 diately given the most exalted duties. Charles has been 
 accused of many things, but he was certainly no fool. He 
 
 ^ See The Political History of England, Vol. VII, by F. C. Montague, 
 p. 155, where the author, speaking of the so-called popular party in the 
 Commonsj says : "They were Puritans, but Wentworth was not, and 
 he therefore lacked the strongest bond of sympathy with his fellows." 
 
 146 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 had the old-world trust in the message of the face and 
 the body, and his discerning eye would not have missed 
 the reading of Wentworth's character from the look of 
 the man. 
 
 The choice was, at all events, not a bad one. For, as 
 President of the Council of the North and as Lord Deputy 
 in Ireland, Wentworth was soon to distinguish himself as 
 a ruler not merely beneficent, but also extremely able. 
 
 Speaking of Strafford, Gardiner says : " Justice without 
 respect of persons might have been the motto of his life. 
 Nothing called forth his bitter indignation like the claims 
 of the rich to spegial consideration or favour." * And 
 it must not be supposed that he was a mere upstart or 
 a demagogue who held the modern socialistic view of 
 wealth. He was the descendant of a very old family, 
 which had been seated on the manor of "Wentworth in 
 Yorkshire since the Conquest, and he was, moreover, for 
 his time, exceedingly rich. He knew that wealth, like 
 any other form of power, involved sacred duties, and he 
 hated to see it used as an instrument of oppression or of 
 injustice. 
 
 There is no doubt that he had the greatest contempt 
 for the body of upstarts that the rising commercial class 
 and the new landed " gentry " had imposed upon the 
 nation; and when he spoke of the "Prynnes, Pyms and 
 Bens, with the rest of that generation of odd names and 
 natures," ^ it was not with the acerbity of a jealous rival, 
 but rather with the natural proud disdain of a gentleman 
 of ancient lineage. 
 
 Like the Kihg, he was loath to see the people handed 
 over to the mercy of this upstart rabble of lawyers and 
 country "gentry"; and, like his master and Laud, he 
 met his doom trying to protect the Crown, the Church 
 and the people from spoliation by these sharks. 
 
 As he said in his defence before the Privy Council in 
 1636, when he was called upon to justify his conduct in 
 
 ^ The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Rebellion, p. 76. 
 ^ Life of the Earl of Strafford, by John Forster, p. 194. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Ireland owing to the clamour of protest that had been 
 raised by those who before his time had been allowed to 
 rob and filch in perfect peace : " For where I found a 
 Crown, a Church and a people spoiled, I could not imagine 
 to redeem them from under the pressure with gracious 
 smiles and gentle looks; it would cost warmer water 
 than so." ^ 
 
 And, indeed, it did cost " warmer water than so." In 
 dispensihg justice and restoring robbed treasure he had 
 to meet and oppose the most powerful in the land. In 
 addition to the host of minor military and civil officials 
 whom, owing to their incompetence, he weeded out of 
 the service to make way for better men, among the persons 
 of real influence whom he reduced to reluctant and savage 
 submission was the Earl of Cork, whom he discovered to 
 have misappropriated large tracts of Church lands. And, 
 incidentally, in fearlessly attacking Cork he estranged both 
 the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Salisbury, who did 
 " their best to save Lord Cork." ^ Lord Wilmot was 
 another magnate whom he brought to justice for *' taking 
 Crown property to his own use," while Lord Clanricarde 
 and his son. Lord Tunbridge, were full of rankling hatred 
 for the honest Lord Deputy who had expropriated them 
 from estates filched from the Church. 
 
 The case of Lord Mountmorris is too well known to be 
 discussed in detail here; suffice it, therefore, to say that 
 it was his constant petty peculations and malversations as 
 Vice-Treasurer of Ireland that originally incensed Went- 
 worth against him. And it was certainly Wentworth's 
 intolerable vigilance and irksome disinterestedness that 
 first incensed Mountmorris against his superior 
 
 When we rfemember that these Irish noblemen had 
 friends in England, it can easily be seen that the extent 
 and power of the hostility generated against the Lord 
 Deputy of Ireland was formidable indeed. For if Lord 
 Clanricarde's case alone could account for the hatred 
 
 ^ The Earl of Strafford's Letters and Despatches, Vol. II, p. 20. 
 ' Gardiner, Personal Government of Charles /, p. 132. 
 148 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 inspired in the Earl of Essex for Wentworth, how can 
 we reckon the legion of lesser men than Essex who also 
 were friends of " gentlemen " suffering from the Lord 
 Deputy's zealous honesty in Ireland? ^ 
 
 The fact that Wentworth's rule proved to be a miracle 
 of beneficent reform in a country that for many years had 
 been the bugbear of all British statesmen is not contested 
 by any historian of note. Under, his stewardship the 
 finances were put in order. The annual deficit of ;^24,ooo 
 was converted into a surplus of ^85,000, and in three 
 years the revenue was increased by ;^ 180,000. 
 
 The depredations of pirates which harassed all the 
 shipping on the coast were not only abated, they were 
 totally suppressed. As regards the manufactures of the 
 country, through the encouragement already referred lo 
 above, the prosperity of the linen industry was, as we 
 know, promoted and perfected. Meanwhile, " justice was 
 dispensed ' without acceptation of persons,' " and " the 
 poor knew where to seek and to have relief without being 
 afraid to appeal to His Majesty's Catholic justice against 
 the great subject." ^ Nor was the Army or the Church 
 neglected. I have already referred to the Church; and 
 Gardiner, speaking of the Army, says : " The officers 
 were startled to find that the new Lord Deputy, who, 
 unlike his predecessors, was General of the Army as well 
 as Governor of the State, actually expected them to attend 
 to their duties. His own troop of horse soon became a 
 model for the rest of the Army." ^ 
 
 To the students of human nature, however, it will not 
 be difficult to see that all this honest zeal and untiring 
 energy demanded from people who hitherto had indolently 
 
 1 See The Political History of England, Vol. VII, by F.X!. Montague, 
 p. 198. Speaking of Wentworth's administration in Ireland, the author 
 says : " Courtiers, parasites and place-hunters found at last a lord 
 deputy who could and would balk their appetites. The revenue 
 which he had so greatly increased he expended honestly and frugally." 
 
 * Traill, op. cit., p. 139. 
 
 ' Personal Government of Charles I, Vol. II, p. 123. 
 
 149 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 allowed things to go along pretty well as they liked, pro- 
 vided they themselves were not the losers — it will not be 
 difficult to see, I say, that all this did not tend to make 
 the Lord Deputy popular, save with that uninfluential 
 portion of the community, the labouring masses, whose 
 voice cannot save their protector once he is assailed by 
 more powerful agents. As Gardiner observes : " Privy 
 Councillors and officers of various kinds looked upon their 
 posts as property to be used for the best advantage, and 
 would turn sharply upon the man who required from them 
 the zealous activity which he himself displayed." ^ 
 
 As we know, they did " turn sharply upon the man," 
 
 and with just as little mercy for his honesty as he had 
 
 shown for their despicable villainy. Lingard calls the 
 
 impeachment of Strafford " the Vengeance of his 
 
 enemies." * It was undoubtedly no more and no less 
 
 than this; for not only were the sorest sufferers under 
 
 his honest rule — men like the Earl of Cork and Lord 
 
 JMountmorris— called to bear witness against him, but the 
 
 very charge which in the end proved most damning to 
 
 his case (the charge of having urged the King to employ 
 
 an Irish army to reduce England to submission) depended 
 
 upon an arbitrary interpretation of words which he was 
 
 alleged to have used in Committee of the Privy Council, 
 
 when all the while the words themselves were attested by 
 
 only one witness, and not confirmed by any other member 
 
 present at the Committee before which thejt were alleged 
 
 to have been uttered. When, moreover, we find that 
 
 this member was a man who bore Strafford no small 
 
 amount of ill-will, we cannot help feeling, with Traill, 
 
 that this piece of evidence was of a kind which " any 
 
 judge at nisi prius would have unhesitatingly directed a 
 
 jury to disregard." * All other members present at the 
 
 Committee, including the King himself, denied having 
 
 heard the words, although they distinctly recollected the 
 
 other portions of Strafford's speech; and we must remem- 
 
 ^ Persona/ Government of Charles I, Vol. II, p. 1 18. 
 * History of England, Vol. VII, p. 470. * Op. dt., p. 180. 
 
 150 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 ber that there was one man present when the fatal words 
 were supposed to have been uttered who, next to Laud 
 and Strafford, was the most honest personage in England 
 at the time — Bishop Juxon. 
 
 But Sir Henry Vane, who loathed Strafford with all the 
 loathing that a mediocre creature always feels for that 
 brilliant exception, the man of genius, declared that he 
 had heard the words, and this was enough for the body 
 of irate religious Tartuffes who then filled the benches of 
 the House of Commons. 
 
 What mattered it that Sir Henry Vane had coveted the 
 Barony of Raby at the time when it had been conferred 
 upon Strafford? \yhat mattered it that Sir Henry Vane 
 was still full of rankling hatred against Strafford, because 
 the latter, recognising Vane's mediocrity, had once opposed 
 his promotion to the Secretaryship of State? 
 
 The Long Parliament was not a body of decent men, 
 it was merely a pack of mercenary Puritans. They under- 
 stood and sympathised with rankling hatred as none but 
 Puritans can. Sir Henry Vane's evidence was embraced 
 with alacrity. It was twisted into a charge of treason 
 against the unfortunate victim of the now powerful party, 
 and nothing but a death sentence would satisfy them. 
 
 Strafford's judges, however, would not pass this sen- 
 tence. They refused to admit that the charge of treason 
 had been proved. They had looked on unmoved at a 
 trial which had been refined in the cruelty meted out to 
 the prisoner by the committee of managers; they had 
 allowed Strafford, broken in health as he was, to be tor- 
 mented, harassed and baited in a manner unprecedented 
 in the annals of English justice; but to this last act of 
 savage unfairness they would not go. 
 
 What did the Commons do? They dropped the 
 Impeachment, feeling that it was hopeless to compass 
 Strafford's death in that manner, and they proceeded 
 against him by Bill of Attainder.^ 
 
 ^ Lifigard (op. cit., p. 477) makes an interesting comment on this 
 stage of Wentworth's misfortunes : " It is singular," he says, " that 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Nothing more nauseating and utterly base could pos- 
 sibly be imagined than this running of the noble Went- 
 worth to earth by a pack of hypocritical villains who, until 
 the end, endeavoured to conceal their all too personal 
 " reasons " beneath a semblance of legal procedure. They 
 had not the honesty of an Italian tyranny; they had not 
 the daring villainy to kill him outright with poison, or 
 even with a stab in the back. No; they must consummate 
 his doom with the cold-blooded deliberation of toads with 
 guilty consciences. 
 
 Lord Digby, who was himself one of the managers of 
 the impeachment, and who, moreover, as a son of the 
 Earl of Bristol, had "reasons" for being hostile to the 
 Court party, rose in the House of Commons, and, in a fine 
 speech full of an honesty and manly courage which did him 
 credit, declared that he could not vote for the Bill. 
 
 " God keep me," he exclaimed, " from giving judgment 
 of death on any man, and of ruin to his innocent posterity, 
 on a law made a posteriori." ^ 
 
 But even this hostility to the Bill on the part of one 
 of the former managers did not impress the brutal Puritans, 
 and this scandalous measure was passed. At its third 
 reading before the House of Lords only forty-five mem- 
 bers were present; to the rest the work of murder was 
 still either too distasteful or the danger of openly opposing 
 it seemed too great; " and the measure became law by a 
 small majority of seven. 
 
 these ardent champions in the cause of freedom should have selected for 
 their pattern Henry VIII, the most arbitrary of our monarchs. They 
 even improved on the iniquity of the precedents which he had left 
 them ; for the moment that the result became doubtful they abandoned 
 the impeachment which they had originated themselves, and to insure 
 the fate of their victim, proceeded by Bill of Attainder." 
 
 ^ Rushworth, Tie TryaS e/ Thomas Earl of Strafford (1680), p. 52. 
 
 * The latter alternative seems more probable. Cobbett tells us in 
 his State Trials (Vol. Ill, p. 1,514) = "The greatest part of his friends 
 absented themselves upon pretence (whether true or supposititious) that 
 they feared the multitude, otherwise his suffrages had more than 
 counterpoised the voters for his death." 
 
 152 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 And now I come to the saddest part of this terrible 
 tragedy. I should have mentioned that nine days pre- 
 viously the King had made a personal appeal to the House 
 of Lords, denying the charges against his friend Strafford, 
 and, in the hope of saving him, going so far as to pledge 
 himself never to employ the late Lord Deputy again., even 
 as a constable. It must have cost the King a good deal 
 thus to humble himself, even before the noble rabble of 
 the House of Lords, on behalf of an old and trusted 
 friend, and why almost all historians condemn him for 
 doing this I cannot understand. No one, save perhaps 
 Juxon, ever knew what Charles must have gone through 
 at this time. Even if we suppose that this personal appeal 
 was a mistake, it was at least the sort of mistake which 
 only a loving and faithful friend would have ventured 
 upon in a moment of acute and intolerable anxiety. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, the Puritans, these past-masters 
 at rousing artificial agitations, had fomented all the ruck 
 and scum of London, in order that a popular clamour 
 might be raised for Strafford's head. Leopold von Ranke 
 shows how they used even tlie pulpits of the metropolis 
 to prejudice the minds of the people against the Earl,^ 
 with the result that a threatening mob soon mustered 
 outside the Houses of Parliament and in Palace Yard, 
 shouting for "Justice! " — ^justice, after all that had 
 happened ! 
 
 How the King was ultimately persuaded by the dis- 
 reputable Bishop of Lincoln to sign a commission for 
 giving the Royal Assent to the Bill is now too well known 
 to be discussed here. But why is it that so much stress 
 has been laid on this Jesuitical argument on the part of 
 Williams.? I feel convinced myself that no sophistry of 
 which a man like Williams was capable would ever have 
 moved a man of Charles's character. But with the clamour 
 outside, with the convincing though bogus pageant of 
 London's "righteous indignation" beneath his very 
 windows, and the consciousness of the fact that everything 
 1 Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 265. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 was tottering to its doom — for the mob did not hesitate 
 to cry, "Strafford's head or the King's!" — it is more 
 than probable that Charles was well convinced not only 
 of the necessity for Strafford's death, but for his own as 
 well. 
 
 Staggered by the diabolical malice of the rising so-called 
 popular party, he must have felt that his time had indeed 
 come. And, severed from every one whom he could trust, 
 save the honest Juxon, it must have been with a feeling of 
 fateful hopelessness that he consented to the murder of 
 his great comrade and supporter. As it was, he would 
 willingly have died, there ahd then, with Strafford^ if he 
 had only been able to convince himself that his act of 
 self-sacrifice would affect him alone. 
 
 ** If my own person only were in danger," he said, with 
 tears in his eyes, as he announced his resolution to the 
 Council, " I would willingly venture it to save Lord 
 Strafford's life. . . . My Lord of Strafford's condition 
 is more happy than mine." ^ 
 
 I could not conclude this short sketch of Strafford's 
 career in a manner more fitting than by quoting the last 
 words of the noble Earl's appeal to the King to sigh the 
 death warrant. They are a tribute alike to their author 
 and to him for whom they were written. For to write 
 such a letter one must be a great man, but to inspire it 
 one must be an even greater one.^ 
 
 "With much sadness," wrote Straff of d, "I am come 
 to a resolution of that which I take to be the best becoming 
 me, to look upon that which is most principal in itself, 
 which, doubtless, is the prosperity of your sacred person 
 
 ^ Gardiner, History of England, Vol. IX, pp. 366-367. 
 
 * As a proof of what the true feeling of the masses was, towards the 
 rule of the great triumvirate, it is interesting, pending the more sub- 
 stantial demonstration I shall give later, to refer to John Forster*! 
 account of Strafford's fro^ress to the scaffold. John Forster is not by 
 any means partial to the Court party ; yet, in his biography of Strafford 
 he says : " Strafford, in his walk, took off his hat frequently and saluted 
 them [the people, 10,000 of whom were gathered on Tower Hill] and 
 received not a word of insult or reproach," p. 409. 
 
 154 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 and the common wealth, infinitely before any man's private 
 interest* 
 
 " And, therefore, in a few words, as I feel myself wholly 
 upon the honour and justice of my peers, so clearly as 
 to beseech your majesty might pleased to have spared 
 that declaration of yours on Saturday last, and entirely 
 have left me to their lordships; so now, to set your 
 majesty's conscience, etc. at liberty, I do most humbly 
 beseech you, for the prevention of such mischief as may 
 happen by your refusal, to pass the bill, by this means to 
 remove, praised be God, I cannot say this accursed, but, 
 I confess, this unfortunate thing forth of the way towards 
 that blessed agreement, which God, I trust, shall ever 
 establish between you and your subjects. 
 
 " Sir, my consent herein shall more acquit you to God, 
 than all the world can do besides : To a willing mind is 
 no injury done; and as, by God's grace, I forgive all the 
 world, so, sir, I can give up the life of this world with 
 all cheerfulness imaginable, in the just acknowledgment 
 of your exceeding favour; and only beg, that, in your 
 goodness, you would vouchsafe to cast your gracious 
 regard upon my poor son and his sisters, less or more, 
 and no otherwise than their unfortunate father shall 
 appear more or less guilty of his death. God long preserve 
 your majesty. 
 
 " Your majesty's most humble, 
 
 " most faithful subject and servant, 
 
 " Strafford." ^ 
 
 I now come to the concluding scene of this harrowing 
 tragedy, in which, as I have shown, TaSte, quality and the 
 most genuine aristocratic tradition of ideal rulership were 
 pitted in an unequal struggle against the overwhelming 
 and ruthless forces of rapacious vulgarity, quantity and 
 trade. I have gone to some pains to show how intolerable 
 Charles and his two leading ministers had made themselves 
 
 '^i Rushworth, The Tryall of Thomas Earl of Sttaptd {i6%o), pp. 743- 
 744' 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 to the party which was going to effect the fatal turning- 
 point in England's social history, and to stamp her spirit 
 and her physique until this very day with its loathsome 
 mark. I have endeavoured to demonstrate how surely 
 but resolutely the road was made clear by these advocates 
 of " Liberty " and a " Free Parliament " for all that heart- 
 less oppression and high-handed robbery and corruption 
 which reached its high-water mark at the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century; and now I have only to record, 
 in a few short sentences, the most salient features in the 
 last phase of this ghastly drama. 
 
 It is quite certain that when the Short Parliament was 
 called in 1640, the less estimable portion of the country 
 — that part of it which is the direct parent of all our 
 present chaos, misery, ugliness and ill-health — was exas- 
 perated beyond endurance with the policy Charles, Laud 
 and Wentworth had pursued. The determined stand 
 which these three men had made against greed and the 
 lust of gain, against quantity as opposed to quality, and 
 against vulgarity, cant and that myopic selfish hedonism 
 which has been so characteristic of the governing classes 
 ever since — this determined stand must be suppressed at 
 all costs! Nevertheless, at the time of the calling of the 
 Short Parliament, the consciousness of Charles's beneficent 
 rule was still a little too strong to render a violently 
 hostile attitude to the Court quite plausible. Before 
 agitators like Pym, Cromwell, Hampden, Vane, Essex, 
 Bedford, Holland and Prynne could engineer a genuine 
 public upheaval, something a little more reprehensible 
 than mere patriarchal government must be included in 
 their charge against the Court. For as Mr. F. C. Mon- 
 tague says in speaking of Charles I's eleven years of 
 personal government — • 
 
 " England enjoyed profound peace; taxation was not 
 heavy; justice was fairly administered as between man and 
 man; and the government showed reasonable considera- 
 tion for the welfare of the common people. Trade still 
 flourished, large tracts of the fens were reclaimed, and 
 
 156 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 the tokens of wealth and luxury were seen on every 
 side." ' 
 
 It is true that the most was made of Ship Money; but 
 even this imposition the Short Parliament were ready to 
 overlook, provided only that Charles would consent never 
 to levy it again without their leave, and they went so far 
 as to offer to grant supplies if he pledged himself to this 
 arrangement. In fact, it is quite certain that not only 
 was Charles quite willing and even desirous of coming 
 to terms with his Parliament, but also that the majority 
 in the Commons in April 1640 were quite prepared to 
 come to terms with him. Such an agreement, however, 
 would never have suited the extremists of the so-called 
 popular party, and there is every reason to believe that 
 Vane the elder, who, as we have seen, had only one desire 
 — the compassing of Wentworth's doom — was the chief 
 instrument in wrecking the promised happy relations 
 between the King and Parliament. 
 
 By his messages, as Secretary, to the Commons from 
 the King, and by his reports to the King of progress in 
 the Commons, with an ingenuity which was monstrous 
 in its diabolical selfishness and malice — ^for it finally put 
 an end to all hope of peace between the Covirt and the 
 Commons — ^he so contrived to embitter the King against 
 Parliament, and vice versa, that in the end, to the con- 
 sternation of all the more moderate members of the 
 so-caUed popular party, Charles I dissolved the Short 
 Parliament on May 5.^ 
 
 Here, then, together with the religious trouble up in 
 Scotland, was a sufficient grievance to inflame the less 
 
 1 Tie Folitical History of England, Vol. VII, p. 202. 
 
 * An interesting and illuminating account of this Parliament and of 
 the dastardly part that Vane played in wrecking it, is to be found in 
 Traill's Biography of Strafford (pp. 162-166). For a confirmation of 
 Traill's account of Vane's perfidy and of the manner in which he opposed 
 Wentworth's sober advice to Charles, with the object of rendering all 
 agreement between Parliament and the King impossible, see Gardiner's 
 History of England, Vol. IX, p. 113. For Vane's lie to the King about 
 the temper of Parliament, see especially p. 117. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 vindictive members of the so-called popular party against 
 the King; and, in the hands of able intriguers ajid 
 agitators, it wa? wrought into a superb weapon of 
 sedition. 
 
 When the Long Parliament met on November 3, 1640, 
 there was no longer any question of an agreement between 
 the King and the popular leaders, and step by step all the 
 powerful men on the King's side were either murdered 
 or forced to flee the country, 
 
 The Commons now became supreme in the land, and 
 an end was put to that patriarchal rule which, if it had 
 only been able to inspire a larger niunber of the noblemen 
 of the period, would have been the means of altering the 
 whole face of history from that time forward, and the 
 aristocracy of England would still be standing, not as a 
 suspected and semi-impotent body of rulers, but as a caste 
 enjoying the accumulated popular gratitude of two cen- 
 turies, and a prestige second not even to that of the ancient 
 Incas of Peru. 
 
 It is true that in the final struggle a majority of the 
 House of Lords joined the King's side; we know, how- 
 ever, that many took this step reluctantly, and we mu?t 
 also not overlook the fact that when war was ultimately 
 declared a very difi^erent situation was created from that 
 which had existed when Charles, Wentworth and Laud 
 were ruling England. At the opening of the Grand 
 Rebellion many of the aristocracy felt that they stood or 
 fell with Royalty, and in their extremity joined the King's 
 side. During Charles's personal government, however, 
 when every opportunity was at hand for joining the King 
 in preserving and protecting the rights, the health, the 
 spirits and the happiness of the people, they showed an 
 indifference and often a hostility to the Court policy which 
 must have given great encouragement to the baser sort 
 in the Commons to press forward their ignominious 
 designs. 
 
 One thing, however, is perfectly certain, and that is 
 that the poorer people, the masses who had felt the warmth 
 
 158 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 and paternal care of Charles's government, joined the King 
 whole-heartedly in the struggle with the Party which most 
 histories have the impudence to declare was fighting for 
 the people's liberties! 
 
 What is liberty to the working man if it is not freedom 
 from undue oppression and molestation, while he earns 
 his living and rears his family What can the working 
 man care for this "liberty" which the Parliamentary 
 forces purchased on the fields of Edgehill, Marston Moor 
 and Naseby, if there is no one to protect his health, to 
 preserve his creature comforts, and to see that he is not 
 robbed of the wherewithal to rear his children ? ^ Read 
 English history from the time of the Grand Rebellion, 
 and see the appalling misery this so-called liberty conferred 
 upon the working masses! 
 
 Even that inveterate democrat Jeremy Bentham could 
 detect the cant of this cry of liberty when it was raised 
 in a country in which the burden-bearers were respected. 
 " Many persons," he says, "do not enquire if a State be 
 well administered, if the laws protect property and persons, 
 if the people are happy. What they require, without 
 giving attention to anything else, is political liberty — 
 that is, the most equal distribution of political power. 
 Wherever they do not see the form of government to 
 which they are attached they see nothing but slavery, and 
 if these pretended slaves are well satisfied with their con- 
 dition, if they do not desire to change it, they despise 
 and insult them. In their fanaticism they are always 
 ready to stake all the happiness of a nation upon civil 
 war for the sake of transferring power into the hands of 
 those whom an invincible ignorance will not permit to use 
 it except for their own destruction." ^ 
 
 ^ In his Autobiography Gibbon makes a shrewd remark relative to this 
 very point. He says : " While the aristocracy of Berne protects the 
 happiness it is superfluous to enquire whether it be founded in the 
 rights of man." — The World's Classics Edition (Henry Frowde), p. 217. 
 
 * An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Le^slation, quoted by 
 Tom Mann in a speech delivered before Parliament, May 3, 1895. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 But we know that this cry for " Liberty ! " was only 
 cantj unless it meant "liberty to oppress the people." 
 For the one fact that stands out with almost amazing 
 inconsistency in this last phase of Charles Ps unhappy 
 career is that in a struggle against the monarchy which 
 was ostensibly to reclaim the liberties of the people, the 
 real uncorrupted people themselves, whose " trade " 
 interests had not been threatened by a tasteful patriarchal 
 ruler, sided with the King. 
 
 " In the struggle between Charles and his Parliament," 
 says Thorold Rogers,^ " a line drawn from Scarborough to 
 Southampton would give a fair indication of the locality 
 in which the opposing forces were ranged. The eastern 
 district, of course including London, was on the side of 
 Parliament, the western, with the exception of some im- 
 portant towns, such as Bristol and Gloucester, was for the 
 King. The resources of the Parliamentary division were 
 incomparably greater than those of the Royal region." * 
 
 Thus it is quite obvious that the poorest counties, which 
 were the northern and the western, espoused the Royal 
 cause, while the vealthier, including the trading districts, 
 were in league with Parliament. Garnier, commenting on 
 this fact, says, " it is a curious circumstance." " But 
 surely, after what we have seen, it is exceedingly com- 
 prehensible. Two other facts, however, should be borne 
 in mind : first, that East Anglia and Kent, which were for 
 the Parliament, had recently been flooded with Flemish 
 and French refugees, who were all engrossed in trade, and 
 who cared little either for the King or for the fate of the 
 country of their adoption, provided only that they could 
 
 ^ j4 History of Agfriculture and Prices in England, Vol. V, p. 1 1 . 
 
 * The continuation of this passage is worth quoting, as throwing 
 further light upon the course of the Grand Rebellion : "The military 
 resources of the King were far supl;rior to those of his rivals, except 
 in one important particular, the means of paying his troops. Cromwell, 
 by the new model, soon trained his soldiers, and the resources of 
 Eastern England enabled him to pay them Regularly." See also 
 pp. 73 and 159-160 of this same work, Vol. V. 
 
 * History of the English Landed Interests, Vol. I, p. 333. 
 
 160 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 accumulate wealth in peace; and, secondly, that of the 
 landed gentry, it was the recently imported and more 
 mercenary blood that joined the Parliament,^ while the 
 older families sided with the King. 
 
 In the Grand Rebellion, therefore, we see the curious 
 anomaly of a powerful minority of agitators, supported 
 by a large contingent of aliens, landed upstarts, town 
 tradesmen and thousands of deluded followers fighting 
 against the poorer people ^ and the King, for the " liberties 
 of the people." Only unsuspecting spinsters or modern 
 democrats, however, could ever believe such a tale; and, 
 when we know what followed, when we read of the 
 oppression and slavery to which the victory of the Parlia- 
 mentary party prepared the way; when, moreover, we keep 
 steadily before us the facts of Charles I's reign, we not 
 only suspect, we know, that there were other, more 
 personal, less disinterested and far less savoury motives 
 behind the so-called popular party, than a desire to 
 vindicate the " liberties of the people." 
 
 The triumph of Parliament did not mean the triumph 
 of the liberties of the people. It meant the triumph of a 
 new morality, a new outlook on life, and a new under- 
 
 ^ Gardiner gives an interesting remark of Windebank's relative to 
 this element in the Parliamentary forces; Speaking to Ponzani in 
 1635, Windebank said : " O, the great judgments of God. He ever 
 punishes men with those means by which they have offended. That 
 pig of a Henry VIII committed such sacrilege by profaning so many 
 ecclesiastical benefices in order to give their goods to those who being 
 so rewarded might stand firmly for the King in the Lower House ; 
 and now the King's greatest enemies are those who are enriched by 
 these benefices." — Personal Government of Charles I, Vol. II, p. 241. 
 
 * When one considers that the poorer districts, as I have shown, 
 were for the Royal cause, with the bulk of the non-industrial and 
 non-mercantile jpopulatio% one may well speak of the English people 
 as being on the side of the King ; for all the pure characteristics of 
 England's noble peasantry were there, and no distortion of the facts 
 can ever prove that the new middle-class, Puritan^ trade and alien 
 element, which constituted the forces of the other side, possessed the 
 then-vaunted virtues of the English nation, although they are certainly 
 typical of the Englishman now. 
 
 M 161 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 standing of what life was worth. It meant the triumph 
 of the morality of unrestricted competition, of uncon- 
 trolled and unguided trade, and of a policy of neglect in 
 regard to all things that reaUy mattered. 
 
 Rogers tells us that " the war between King and Parlia- 
 ment is the beginning of the modern system of finance," 
 but it was more than that. 
 
 "The success of Puritanism," say's Cunningham, 
 "meant the triumph of the new commercial morality, 
 which held good among moneyed men; capitalists had 
 established their right to secure a return for their money, 
 and there was no authority to insist upon any correlative 
 duty, when they organised industrial undertakings and 
 obtained a control of the means of production." ^ 
 
 This was what the Grand Rebellion achieved, and this, 
 in the main, was the sole object of the Grand Rebellion. 
 With consummate craft and ingenuity, transcendental 
 motives were woven into the general scheme to blind the 
 eye and to distract the detective glance of critics; and it 
 might even be said that in a large number of cases the cry 
 of religion from the Puritan side was raised with a sincerity 
 which baffled even the most suspicious. But it must be 
 remembered how readily ignorant and grasping men in- 
 volve their deity in their own quarrels, and how uncon- 
 sciously they confound the injuries done to their own 
 interests with injuries done to their God. This pheno- 
 menon had occurred before. The Old Testament is full 
 of examples of God being on the side of a party who had 
 something to gain in a war. The sincerity of some, at 
 least, of the Puritans need not, therefore, surprise us. 
 Only clean and thoroughly lucid minds can be accused of 
 insincerity when they mix up religious with mercenary 
 motives. But the commercial canaille that fougkt under 
 Cromwell and Hampden were quite capable of being 
 sincere in their religious cry, without being in the least 
 conscious of the mercenary motives that inspired them 
 to raise it. 
 
 1 Op. cit., Vol. II, p. zo6. 
 162 
 
PURITANISM, TRADE AND VULGARITY 
 
 In any case, as Cunningham says : " The victory of the 
 Parliamentary forces over Charles I turned out to be an 
 important step in the direction of latssez-faire; " ^ and 
 from that time forward the Vulgar spirit concerned with 
 gain and greed as ends in themselves was unloosed on this 
 unhappy island, never to be effectually controlled or held in 
 check again. And Charles I knew that this would be so. 
 He actually said as much, and he certainly felt as much. 
 
 Dr. Hutton would have it that Charles died a martyr 
 to religion. He writes, " when the last struggle came he 
 [Charles] still refused to save his life, as there can be little 
 doubt he covdd have done, by surrendering and deserting 
 the Church of his fathers. In this sense it is that Charles 
 was, and that Laud made him, a martyr." ^ 
 
 Now I should not like to be thought to have anything 
 but the sincerest respect for Dr. Hutton's judgment — I 
 have quoted him suthciently often to show the reliance 
 I place on it — but really, on this one point, I feel that I 
 must disagree. I am perfectly willing to admit that 
 Charles might have saved his life in the end, by renounc- 
 ing something so loathsome to the Puritans as the Church 
 of England; but surely this, though an important matter, 
 was not the only point at stake. A far greater issue de- 
 pended upon whether Charles yielded or maintained his 
 ground, and this was, whether the governing classes in 
 Parliament, unfit as they were for the duty, were to become 
 the sole masters of the destinies of the people, or whether 
 the latter were still to find in one who was above all self- 
 interest, a protector, a tasteful, paternal guide and a friend 
 solicitous of their welfare. 
 
 This was the issue. The question of the Church was 
 only part of it. And while in support of my view I can 
 point to the whole of Charles I's and Wentworth's policy, 
 I also have Charles's own words on the scaffold. Surely 
 these can no longer leave us in any doubt upon this one 
 point; and with these noble sentences I shall draw the 
 present essay to a close. 
 
 1 Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 1 8. « Op. cit., p. 236. 
 
 163 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 " For the people," said the King, " and truly I desire 
 their Liberty and Freedom as much as any Body whom- 
 soever, but I must teU you,, that their Liberty and Freedom 
 consists in having of Government, those laws by which 
 their Life and their Goods may be most their own. . . . 
 Sirs, it was for this that now I come here. If I would 
 have given way to an Arbitrary Way, for to have all Laws 
 changed according to the Power of the Sword, I needed 
 not to have come here; and therefore I tell you (and I 
 pray God it be not laid to your charge) that I am the 
 martyr of the people." -^ 
 
 ^ Rushworth, Part IV, Vol. II, p. 1,429. See also part of his speech 
 before the Court that sentenced him to death : " This many a day all 
 things have been taken away from me, but that that I call dearer to 
 me than my Life, which is my Conscience and my Honour. And if 
 I had a respect to my Life more than the Peace of the Kingdom, and 
 the Liberty of the Subject, certainly I should have made a particular 
 Defence for myself; for by that at leastwise I might have delayed an 
 u^ly Sentence, which I believe will pass upon me. Therefore certainly. 
 Sir, as a Man that hath some understanding, some knowledge of the 
 World, if that my true Zeal to my Country had not overborn the care 
 that I have for my own preservation, I should have gone another way 
 to work ^han I have done." — Ibid., p. 1,422. 
 
 164 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN OF THE 
 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 " Beautie is no helpe nor furtherance, but a great impediment unto 
 chastitie." — W. Prynne : The Vnlovelinesse of Lovelockes, i6z8. 
 
 It will seem to some, perhaps, that I have dealt at 
 unnecessary length with Charles I and his system of 
 government. I^ is, however, difficult in a work intended 
 for the general reader to avoid doing this, particularly 
 when it is a matter of emphasising and substantiating a 
 point of view which is neither universally taught, nor 
 universally held, concerning this great Stuart monarch. 
 For, despite what many may consider to be a fair criticism 
 of this and the foregoing chapter, I myself can never 
 regard them as an attempt to "whitewash" Charles I, 
 as the journalistic jargon has it. 
 
 I had a much more important purpose to serve in writing 
 them than the mere *' whitewashing " of a man, however 
 
 freat, who has been dead for well over two centuries, 
 or what purpose these acts of " whitewashing " are ever 
 accomplished I cannot understand, unless, belike, they 
 slake a sentimental thirst in the " whitewasher's " throat 
 for justice on behalf of a dead hero. 
 
 I, at all events, am moved by no such empty purpose. 
 I care little for the reader''s opinion of Charles I as a hero 
 or as a m.artyr. My chief concern, however, the matter 
 which I really do take to heart, is rather to call attention 
 to the last stand which was made in England against every- 
 thing which to-day makes life so ugly, so wretched, so 
 spiritless and so unhealthy. It is not my object to urge 
 
 165 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 admiration for our beheaded sovereign, but to show that 
 his death meant also the death of a hundred things for 
 which we are madly hungering to-day, and which all the 
 ingenuity of the finest legislator would find it diflScult to 
 restore to us, after all these years, during which they have 
 been absent from our midst. And among these coveted 
 treasures of a bygone generation, of which all trace has 
 now vanished, I refer to taste, the love of quality above 
 quantity, the care of health and spirit and the hatred of 
 such empty aims as mere wealth, speed, " pleasure " and 
 change, where no culture, no superior purpose or aspiration 
 guides them for the general weal or even for the true 
 elevation and glorification of a worthy minority. 
 
 It was my object in writing this and the preceding 
 chapter to give at least the outlines of an answer to a 
 question which will soon be on all people's lips, the ques- 
 tion as to when all the muddle and futility of our present 
 civilisation began : what it was that has made it possible 
 for every Englishman of to-day contentedly to point only 
 to the exports and imports of his country, and not to her 
 national beauty, culture, health, spirit or character, when 
 called upon to indicate wherein her greatness lies. Apart 
 from the fact that almost all this beauty, culture, health, 
 spirit and character are dead, whv is it that it would never 
 occur to the average sane Englishman to imagine that it 
 is necessary to refer to something more than trade returns 
 to prove a nation's greatness? 
 
 The answer to this question involves the wielding of 
 such enormous masses of material that it would be absurd 
 for me to pretend to give them all here. But that the bare 
 outlines of it are drawn in these two chapters is certainly 
 mv earnest hope; while the fact that these outlines not 
 only throw light on the principle of aristocracy, but also 
 necessitate the discussion of Questions kindred and essential 
 to it, is an adequate excuse for giving them at this stage 
 in the present work. 
 
 Bv far the most impressive feature of our modern 
 civilisation in England, is the unanimity with which certain 
 
 1 66 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 opinions concerning the greatness of a nation, are held. 
 It is not only the Londoner, or the inhabitant of a large 
 provincial city, who measures England's greatness by the 
 square-mileage of her colonies and the huge figures of 
 her imports and exports — every Englishman does this, 
 whether he be a scholar, a painter, a doctor, a lawyer, a 
 grocer, or a farmer. Those Englishmen who do not do 
 this, constitute the exceptions, and they, as a rule, with- 
 draw to the English colony in Florence, Bruges or some 
 other continental city, if they have the means. If they are 
 poor, they sit at home and bewail the fact that they were 
 not born in another age. 
 
 For this unanimity of opinion to have been imposed 
 like a religion upon a nation, something in the nature of 
 a grand feat of sacerdotal ingenuity must have been prac- 
 tised upon the English people. For, it should be borne 
 in mind that the bulk of a nation do not create opinions, 
 they simply accept them ready made. If, therefore, for 
 the time being, we imagine a large priesthood deliberately 
 inculcating upon a submissive people the doctrine that 
 large trade figures and large colonies, alone, are the 
 essential attributes of a great nation, under what circum- 
 stances are we to suppose that such a doctrine was sub- 
 missively accepted.? 
 
 It is one thing to say that opinions are not created by 
 the majority of a people, but merely accepted by them, and 
 quite another matter to suppose that all opinions once 
 created are accepted by the bulk of the people. The first 
 proposition is true, the second is false. For, the essential 
 pre-requisite to the general acceptance of an opinion, is the 
 readiness of the mental soil on which it is to be planted. 
 Preach it, on the other hand,, to a nation of women 
 whose men are unworthy of the smallest sacrifice or of the 
 smallest honour, and even if these women are free from 
 undue arrogance or impudent self-esteem, their hearts will 
 prove an unfavourable soil for this new moral plant. 
 Preach it, on the other hand, to a nation of women 
 thoroughly convinced of the genuine superiority, high 
 
 167 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 value and inestimable worthiness of their men, and it will 
 spread and be accepted very rapidly.^ 
 
 Before, therefore, the doctrine could be accepted that 
 mere bulk and large trade-figures alone constituted the 
 greatness of a nation, the mental soil of a people had to 
 be prepared, tilled, manured and broken up, in a manner 
 calculated to enable it to accept and prove favourable to 
 this doctrine. Not only that, but the political attitude of 
 mind which is favourable to the doctrine had also to be 
 reared. For this doctrine is not one which is natural to 
 healthy, mankind. It is much more natural to liealthy 
 mankind to admire beauty, greatness of character, strength 
 of will, spirit and body. It is much more natural to 
 healthy and spirited mankind to admire health, grace, 
 prowess and skill. 
 
 The peasants who fought and won Cr^cy, Poictiers and 
 Agincourt would have been completely at a loss to under- 
 stand what you meant had you told them that England 
 was great because she could count her trade returns in 
 so many hundreds of millions, and because the sun never 
 set on her Empire. They would have felt that while such 
 things might constitute greatness, if the ideals, the hearts, 
 the health and the spirit of the nation were not great as well, 
 they would mean nothing apart from these other attributes. 
 
 To-dav, however, we can look on our vulgar culture of 
 automobiles and general " smartness," we can contemplate 
 our weak-kneed, lantern-jawed, pale-faced clerks and 
 typists, we can inspect the ugliness of our huge cities, our 
 slums, our hospitals, our factories and our lunatic asylums. 
 and still say that England is great. Why is England 
 
 ^ In regard to this question of the Suttee, it is interesting to note 
 why and how it was prohibited "by the English rulers of India. To 
 the modem Eiiropeaii it is rightly inconceivable that he should con- 
 stitute so magic, so great, so valuable a part of any woman's life, that 
 her self-immola-tion on his tomb could ever be a justifiable aot of 
 desperate sacrifice. Thus, to him, all such self-immolations of women 
 on their husbands' tombs must be bad and unjustifiable. Therefore 
 he rules the custom out of existence, as a futile superstition, because in 
 his part of the world it would inde'"d be a futile superstition. 
 
 i6« 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 great under these circumstances? "Because," says the 
 glib modern man, " she is the market of the world, the 
 counting-house of Europe, the workshop of five conti- 
 nents, the wealthiest nation on earth ! " 
 
 " But," objects the man of taste, the man who knows, 
 " these things do not last, they are not necessarily great, 
 and they do not lead to a powerful race." To-day, how- 
 ever, the man of taste has not only a powerful minority 
 to contend with, as Charles I had, he has a whole nation, 
 which knows its lesson so well, that every 'bus-conductor, 
 cobbler, peer, duke, stockbroker, priest, artist, doctor, 
 grocer, butcher, or architect, in it, says the same thing and 
 believes the same thing about this doctrine of trade and 
 bulk and wealth. 
 
 As I say, this unanimity of opinion is impressive. 
 Can it be possible that it is the outcome of something in 
 the nature of a religious faith ? 
 
 It has often been said, and, I believe, with some reason, 
 that the true religious spirit resides in the East, that the 
 genuine religious founder is essentially an Oriental, and 
 that the Occident understands little of the machinery 
 needful for establishing a creed in the hearts of a people. 
 Certainly, if we examine the methods of Manu, Moses 
 and Mahommed — those arch-geniuses in the art of the 
 pia fraus — w6 are amazed at the thoroughness and subtlety 
 with which they contrived to weave a- religion into the 
 food and hygiene of a people so as literally to build up a 
 fresh human physique that miffht with justice be called 
 either a true Brahman, a true Israelite, or a true Mahom- 
 medan. No detail is overlookied. The follower of the 
 true religion has everything prescribed for him, even his 
 meditations. 
 
 And I think it would be quite wrong to suppose that 
 the pious fraud was in each case a conscious deception. 
 It is far more probable, in fact, certain, that Manu, Moses 
 and Mahommed were unconscious of the twist they were 
 giving: to the weapon religion, and to the disciplinary 
 thought of God, when they used both in order to separate 
 
 169 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the goats from the sheep, the great from the small, the 
 unhealthy from the healthy, the work-day from the holy- 
 day, the desirable food from the undesirable, and the good 
 man (or the ideal man of the race) from the bad man (the 
 degenerate or incompatible man). And this unconscious 
 use of religion and of God to effect a deep racial or 
 sociological act of consolidation is all the more potent and 
 all the more irresistible from the very fact of being 
 unconscious. 
 
 I do not mean to suggest, as Wilkinson does, that the 
 pious fraud as practised upon the people by the ancient 
 Egyptian priesthood, was wrong or necessarily reprehen- 
 sible because it was conscious, or that, on the other hand, 
 the unconscious pious fraud is always right and proper 
 simply because it is unconscious.^ I merely submit that 
 there are many reasons for supposing that in the majority 
 of cases the pious frauds of the past have been uncon- 
 scious, and that they were all the stronger and all the 
 more irresistible for being so. The characteristic which 
 has always been common to them all, however, apart from 
 their consciousness or unconsciousness, has invariably been 
 that their object was to consolidate some race, community 
 or group of communities, and to bind it by an internal 
 relationship, based upon the most elaborate prescriptions 
 for general conduct, diet, hygiene and spiritual occupa- 
 tion, until ultimately this internal relationship was stamped 
 upon the faces and the bodies of the people. 
 
 Now it is precisely this art of the pia fraus which is 
 said to be indigenous to the Orient, and which some would 
 deny to the Occident in any form whatsoever. 
 
 It will be the object of this chapter, however, to prove, 
 not only that the art of the pia fraus has also been practised 
 with consummate skill in the West, but that this strange 
 event happened as recently as the seventeenth century, 
 here in Ensfland. Whether it was completely unconscious 
 or not, I should not like to say, as I believe it would be 
 possible to show that some of the greatest among its per- 
 ^ Tie Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Vol. I, p. 178. 
 
 170 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 petrators, such men, I mean, as Pym and Cromwell, were 
 the most abandoned hypocrites. But that, on the whole, 
 the rough work of effecting the pious fraud was wrought 
 entirely by unconscious agents, believing themselves to 
 be wholly in the service of God, I do not doubt. It is 
 precisely this element that gave the last pious fraud on a 
 grand scale which has been perpetrated in modern times 
 all its formidable power and irresistible momentum. 
 
 For, in this particular instance, it was again a matter of 
 consolidating a scattered and more or less disorganised 
 body of men, and of forming them into a solid phalanx 
 which could not only wring submission from the rest of 
 the nation, but also convert the rest of the nation to its 
 own persuasion. 
 
 Thus, if the Anglo-Saxon becomes famous at all, and 
 not. merely egregious to posterity, it will be as a man of 
 such religious ingenuity, of such mastery in the art of 
 establishing a creed in the hearts and the bodies of a 
 people, that his compeers will have to be sought among 
 those very geniuses of exalted falsehood, such as Manu, 
 Mahommed, Moses, and the rest of that ilk, who hitherto 
 have enjoyed an exclusive and uncontested position of 
 supremacy in the art of framing a lasting faith. 
 
 For a great problem presented itself to the soul of the 
 British nation during the sixteenth and even more during 
 the seventeenth century — a problem with which conscious 
 legislation battled and strove in vain, and one over which, 
 in my private opinion, our greatest monarch, Charles I, 
 forfeited his head. 
 
 The question to be decided was not only whether it was 
 good to transform England from a land of agriculture and 
 of homecrafts, into a capitalistic, commercial and factory- 
 ridden countty; but it was also necessary to discover a 
 method whereby the people could be reconciled to the 
 change most satisfactorily arid thoroughly. We have seen 
 how the Tudors and Stuarts fought against the first signs 
 of the change, and how they sought to suppress the un- 
 scrupulous spirit of gain arid of greed which sought to 
 
 171 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 promote it. And we have seen how enthusiastically the 
 people supported them. 
 
 But it was as if the most powerful element in the nation 
 were bent upon having this new life, this new ideal — the 
 ideal of the giant urban population, with its smoky 
 factories, its slums, its exploitation and its misery. And 
 it was as if the old guardian angel of Great Britain forsook 
 her for a while, in order to leave her to the tender mercies 
 of the new religionists, the new fashioners of her fate, the 
 Puritanical Traders. 
 
 For, if I dare to place these unconscious leaders beside 
 Manu, Moses and Mohammed, it is because the object 
 which their religion accomplished, could have been 
 achieved by no other means. 
 
 It was a matter of making trade, commercialism, 
 factories, capitalism and general shop-keeping, as we now 
 know them, pararnount and triumphant. To effect this 
 change, however, it was essential that legions among the 
 population of the British Isles should be depressed, reauced 
 in body and spirit, rendered pusillanimous, weak, servile, 
 anaemic, asexual, and in fact sick. It was necessary to have 
 a vast army of willing slaves who would not be merely 
 satisfied and content, not merely pleased and happy, but 
 who would actually reach the topmost wave of their being, 
 so to speak, in balancing themselves all day long, like 
 stylite saints, upon office stools, in turning over the leaves 
 of ledgers, invoice books and registers, or in manipulat- 
 ing the lever of a punching, a cutting, a rolling or a rocking 
 machine. 
 
 Not only must their highest aspirations be towards 
 asceticism, their very bodies must be converted into 
 machines "below par" in vigour, sanguinity, energy and 
 sexuality. Their ideals, their pleasures, their love of life 
 must be transposed to a lower, sadder, more stoical and 
 less spirited key. Work — ^will-less, unattractive, thankless 
 work, must be mechanically performed, without hope, 
 without joy and without respite; save on the miserable and 
 soul-deadening sabbath. They must learn that beauty 
 
 172 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 which leads and lures to life, to the joy in life and to the 
 multiplication of life, is neither essential nor helpful either 
 to the factory, the office,, the mine, the slum or the tin 
 chapel; therefore beauty, by being merely an irrelevant 
 disturber of the daily round, is bad, and to be connected 
 only with fast women, fornication and hell-fire. 
 
 Now, even in the towns, the population was stiU too 
 spirited, too healthy and too tasteful, to accept with heart 
 and soul the conditions necessary for creating modernity, 
 as we modern Europeans know and understand it. While 
 among the agricultural population, large numbers of 
 whom were soon to be forced into the cities, things were 
 even worse, from the standpoint of the new desiderata. 
 
 What, then, was the profound problem with which Eng- 
 land began blindly to grapple in the seventeenth century .'' 
 In essence it was this : to discover the religion essentially 
 allied to trade and commerce! Which was the religion 
 whoise prescriptions concerning conduct, diet and hygiene, 
 dovetailed most naturally with the requirements of the 
 triumph of capitalistic industry .i* All great religions 
 hitherto had, by means of a system of conduct, diet and 
 hygiene, consolidated a certain scattered race, community 
 or tribe. Which was the religion that would con- 
 solidate the masters and rear the slaves for that form of 
 trade which is the characteristic creation of the last two 
 centuries ? 
 
 With the marvellous insight of the unconscious religious 
 founder, the solution was discovered in the whole-hearted 
 acceptance and promotion of Puritanism. 
 
 For though Puritanism had existed long before the 
 middle of the seventeenth century — though, indeed, it 
 might be said that it had always existed, sporadically, 
 locally and individually, all over the world like a disease 
 or a mental idiosyncrasy — it was not until the seventeenth- 
 century in England that the circumstances of life were 
 propitious to its identification and union with a certain 
 well-defined and perfectly distinct class of men and 
 occupation — the rising employers and employees engaged 
 
 173 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 in the trade and manufactures which were destined to 
 stamp the face of the futvu-e. 
 
 And it was certainly more than mere chance which led 
 to this union and identification of mechanical manufacture 
 and trade pursued merely for gain and greed with Pvu-itan- 
 ism. For trade and mechanical manufacture, unguided 
 and uncontrolled, have many ideals in common with 
 Puritanism, and even if the events of the seventeenth 
 century had turned out differently, the union of these 
 two elements in the nation could not have been long 
 delayed. 
 
 Strictly speaking, although the modern factory does 
 not necessarily covet sickly, ugly and spiritless creatures 
 for its working hands, robust health, beauty and high, 
 unbendable spirits are not at all essential to its require- 
 ments; in fact, they may very often thwart its purpose, 
 seeing that beauty lures very strongly to preoccupations 
 quite irrelevant to the hopeless drudgery of ministering 
 to machinery; while high spirits and robust health are 
 notoriously hostile to that demand for meek submission 
 and to confined and stuffy industry which the exigencies 
 of a factory imply. 
 
 It is quite unessential to this demonstration to refer 
 to the thousands and thousands of healthy English families 
 among the proletariat who actually have been rendered 
 sickly, and sometimes crippled, through factory work. All 
 I need show is that the work of the factory and the ideals 
 of the factory are as little concerned with the sacredness 
 of beauty, robust health and high spirits, as are the ideals 
 of the little tin chapel. It matters not to the employer, 
 who is out for gain, and who has an almost unlimited 
 supply of unskilled labour from which to draw his factory 
 hands — it matters not to such a man what the actual 
 physical and spiritual conditions of his employees are like, 
 provided only that they are just able to do his work. 
 Neither is he concerned with the kind of children they 
 bring into the world. The unskilled labouring proletariat 
 — and even the skilled, for that matter — are but so much 
 
 174 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 material which he uses pro tern, to amass his wealth. If, 
 under the system of laissez-faire, he is uncontrolled and 
 unguided in his use of this material, who is to say that 
 the ideals of beauty, health and high spirits must neces- 
 sarily guide him in the selection of his life-principles and 
 in his treatment of the life that is in his power? The 
 working people belong to another class than that to which 
 he belongs; to all appearances, they belong to another 
 race. Under anything but a patriarchal government, such 
 as that which was overthrown by the Puritan Rebellion 
 against Charles I, who is to prevent him from fostering 
 those very ideals concerning beauty, robust health and 
 high spirits which are most inimical to the true welfare 
 and the true prosperity of the race.? 
 
 For a whole body of people to submit to the awful 
 ugliness, unhealthiness, hopelessness and squalor of town, 
 coupled with factory life, it is almost a necessity that their 
 spirits should be broken, that their best instincts with 
 regard to beauty, the joy of life, the love of life, and the 
 sacredness of robust health should have been corrupted or 
 completely suppressed. They must not even taste of the 
 happiness of a real, full and inspiriting existence; even 
 their rest days must be gloomy, colourless, silent, shorn of 
 beauty, bereft of high spirits and generally depressing; so 
 that their appalling drudgery may not seem too intolerable 
 by comparison. But a substantial portion of high spirits 
 and of energy and vigour lies in the sex instinct, and 
 in all the efforts and passions to which it gives rise. 
 Sexuality, therefore, must not be either encouraged or 
 fostered or even preserved in these working slaves; on 
 the contrary, they must be taught that sex is horrible, 
 that even dancing is, as Calvin taught, a crime equal to 
 adultery. 
 
 And doctrines which apply to the factory or to the 
 mine hand hold good with even greater force in the case 
 of the office-clerk, the book-keeper, the office-worm 1 To 
 these men who have to perch on a leather-covered stool 
 all day, and the top wave of whose being is attained in 
 
 175 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 tvirning over the pages of a ledger or an invoice book,, 
 robust liealth,. beauty and high spirits would not only be 
 a hindrance, they would be a pronounced source of dis- 
 comfort. While a high degree of healthy sexuality would 
 be an obstacle so fatal that it would mean the renounce- 
 ment of a business life. Observe all these moist-fingeredj^ 
 pale-faced, round-shouldered men who work side by side 
 with girls in the big counting-houses of large stores, in 
 the large emporiums of the linen-drapery trade, and in 
 factories. Do you suppose that a strong sexual instinct 
 would be any good to them.'' It would prove their 
 undoing ! The basic instinct of all life would be a source 
 of infinite trouble to them, if it were powerful or even 
 moderately healthy. 
 
 I do not require any outside confirmation for this 
 description of the spiritual and physical pre-requisites of 
 the factory and office slave; for the evidence of what I 
 have written lies all about us to-day, and we need move 
 very little further than to the High Street of our par- 
 ticular town or city, or city quarter, in order to realise to 
 the full the unquestionable truth of the above statements. 
 Still, an interesting and absolutely independent confirma"- 
 tion of my views came into my hands the other day, and 
 as it raised no murmur of protest in the paper in which 
 it was published, I have decided to quote it here — not,^ 
 mark you, as an authoritative substantiation of my attitude 
 in this matter, but rather as evidence of the fact that my 
 contention is not disputed even by the friends of commerce 
 and capitalistic industry themselves. 
 
 In Reynolds's Newspaper of February i6, 19 13, Mr. 
 Herbert Kaufmann wrote as follows — 
 
 "Cromwell was one of the ugliest men of his time. 
 Pierpont Morgan has never been mistaken for Apollo. 
 
 " We don't look for achievement [we know what these 
 business men mean by ' achievement '] in pink cheeks 
 and classic features. 
 
 " We are pleased to behold clean and attractive men — 
 but we can't declare dividends on pulchritude. 
 
 176 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 " All things being equal, we prefer handsome employees, 
 but when we scan the weekly balance sheet and check 
 accounts the only thing we can see is results [mark you! 
 the only thing these business men can see is "results"], 
 and then a squinting hunchback who shows an improve- 
 ment in his department seems beautiful in contrast with 
 a Beau Brummel who hasn't earned his salt.'' 
 
 This requires little comment. It is perfectly com- 
 prehensible. Certainly " a squinting hunchback " is more 
 lovable to the business man than a handsome, well-built, 
 healthy youth. Health, beauty and the high spirits that 
 usually accompany them are difficult to reconcile with the 
 requirements of a hideous office and its emasculating work. 
 But the already emasculated cripple is a predestined plant 
 for such an environment. And is the average anaemic, 
 round-shouldered and moist-fingered clerk so very far 
 removed from the emasculated cripple.? 
 
 And now let us tiorn to Puritanism in order that we 
 may see at a glance how veritably it is the plighted mate 
 of the industry and commerce of the modern world. In 
 order to do this satisfactorily, however, it would be 
 useful, in the first place, to understand who and what 
 the Puritan is. 
 
 The Puritan is primarily and essentially a man " below 
 par " either in vigour, in health, in sound instinct or in 
 bodily wholeness; and that is why I say that, although 
 Pviritanism did not become an organised and powerful 
 force until the seventeenth century in England, the 
 Puritan, as such, has always existed sporadically, indi- 
 vidually and locally, just as sick animals represent a certain 
 percentage of all the animals born every year. 
 
 There are two conditions in which a man may be 
 suspicious and distrustful of life, and in which, therefore, 
 he may enter into existence with a bodily prejudice against 
 life. These two conditions are : first, ill-health and any 
 kind of physiological botchedness; and, secondly, a state 
 of disharmony, discord, violent disunion or anarchy of the 
 passions. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Let us examine these two conditions separately. 
 
 The Puritan, as a sick man, is the man who, after 
 having discovered by self-examination that the taking of 
 any share in the full life of the passions, with all its violent 
 thrilling joys and appetites, invariably leads to a state of 
 painful debility and self-reproach (for morbid physical 
 fatigue and a sickly condition of the body after any 
 indulgence in the full joys of life are always interpreted 
 by the mind of the sufferer in the terms of moral self- 
 reproach), transfers this 5eZ/-reproach to the whole of 
 humanity, by arriving at the simple though erroneous 
 dictum that " the joys of the flesh are bad." 
 
 He has not the healthy honesty to say "the joys of 
 the flesh are bad for me "; he says more bitterly and more 
 vindictively — ^for there is a spark of envy in every invalid 
 — -"the joys of the flesh are bad for, all! " With the 
 incredible selfishness of a sick, plague-stricken crow, he 
 suspects the whole world of possessing his impoverished 
 blood and vigour, and lays down the law for the universe, 
 when the law in question applies only to his own repulsive 
 body and to those that are like it. 
 
 Calvin, for instance, who did so much to entrench the 
 power of Puritan Nonconformity after the Reformation, 
 and who complained so bitterly to the Duke of Somerset 
 concerning the " irnpurities " and "vices" of delightful, 
 voluptuous, sleek and, alas! irretrievable " Merrie Eng- 
 land," was a miserable, god-forsaken invalid who, racked 
 with fevers, asthma, gout and the stone, dragged his foul 
 body through this life as if the world were a mausoleum, 
 and himself the gangrenous symbol of the death of all 
 human joys. 
 
 What could such a belching, dyspeptic and badly 
 functioning human wreck know about what was impure 
 and what was vicious.? To him any indulgence of the 
 healthy and life-giving instincts, however slight, was a 
 danger he dared not approach. To him all love must be 
 the vilest and most deadly fornication; all healthy eating 
 and drinking, the most loathsome of vices; and all merri- 
 
 178 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 ness and joy, all dancing and singing, a barefaced outrage 
 against the God of the sick, the bungled and the botched ! 
 
 And now let me turn to the other kind of Puritan, 
 i. e. to the man who, though apparently in good health 
 and possessed of a robust and vigorous frame, still suspects 
 life and casts the blight of his distrust upon it. 
 
 This is a man who, like Socrates, is conscious of having 
 a whole host of evil demons pent up in his breast, and 
 who has had neither the traditions of culture and of 
 control, nor the necessary antecedents of regular living 
 and healthy harmony, which would be favourable tc 
 imposing a measure upon his instincts. This is the man 
 who has no practice, no bodily skill in imposing a limit, 
 a sort of " no-f urther-shalt-thou-go ! " upon his passions, 
 and who, therefore, can see no difference between ordinary 
 indulgence and excess. And, indeed, to him there is no 
 difference between ordinary indulgence and excess; 
 because he has not the wherewithal in his system to draw 
 the line between the two. He has not the taste and 
 instinctive discrimination of the healthy man which say 
 "Stop!" when he has enough. His cure, then, his 
 remedy, his only resource, in fact, if he would survive, 
 is inhibition, prohibition, castration, or its equivalent in 
 a milder form — the blue ribbon of abstinence. Instinc- 
 tively he joins hands with the first kind of Puritan who 
 brings him his credo and morality cut and dried; and 
 thus, in spite of his apparent health and vigour, you see 
 him stalking through history, arm in arm with the sick 
 Puritan and the man who is beneath all share in the joys 
 of life. But the interesting point and the one which 
 really concerns us here is that, from two totally different 
 starting places, these two kinds of men arrive at precisely 
 the same conclusion; and as in a nation as recently raised 
 from barbarism as England was in the seventeenth century 
 there is bound to be a very large number of men of the 
 kind I have just described, it will' easily be seen that once 
 the more intelligent and more penetrating sick animals, 
 like Calvin, took the lead and expounded the credo, the 
 
 179 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 second order of Puritans — those who were apparently 
 healthy, but had no long tradition or culture behind them 
 to enable them to harmonise their instincts — ^were quick 
 to follow suit and join their anaemic and less vigorous 
 brethren. 
 
 The mental characteristics of the second kind of Puritan 
 are these : Jike Maeterlinck, he is unable to portray a 
 feast that is not an exhibition of the most uncontrolled 
 gluttony; therefore, all feasting must be bad. Like Knox, 
 he will be unable to think of women without picturing 
 all the degradgition and pollution to which excessive sexual 
 intercourse leads; therefore all women must be bad. Like 
 Maeterlinck, again, he will be unable to think of laughter 
 and revelry without seeing the addled, imbecile condition 
 to which excessive merriment may lead; therefore all merri- 
 ment is bad. And like the Long Parliament of the seven- 
 teenth century, he will want to make man virtuous by 
 legislation and by forbidding all those things which, while 
 they make life worth living, do not belong to the category 
 of pleasures in which the members themselves could 
 indulge without making hogs of themselves. 
 
 The second kind of Puritan, therefore, is essentially a 
 hog who has acquired a moral standard of judgment, and 
 who wishes to transfer the necessary constraints he puts 
 upon his unbridled passions to the whole of mankind. 
 And in this he differs fundamentally from the man of 
 sound and cultured tradition, whose instincts are both 
 healthy and controlled, who can even allow himself, and 
 does allow himself, a certain margin for feasts and bouts, 
 and even orgies, at times; because he knows full well that 
 his inner balance, his inner harmony, which is the outcome 
 of generations of regular and disciplined living, will 
 recover completely from any such occasional luxury. To 
 this man there is nothing evil in the joys of the flesh. He 
 incurs no danger when he indulges his natural appetites, 
 and it is difficult for him to understand the frenzied 
 hatred of the flesh which characterises the attitude of the 
 Puritan. 
 
 i8o 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 It was obviously inevitable that the two kinds of 
 Puritan described above should unite and constitute the 
 breath and body of a single religious creed; and when, 
 in addition to the physical factors which determined their 
 union, there also arose the interests of the private purse 
 and of the counting-house, their coalescence became so 
 complete as almost to defy analysis. 
 
 The fact which it is essential for every one to remem- 
 ber, however, is that, springing though they did from 
 two totally different causes — ^in the one case ill-health, 
 and in the other a lack of harmony in the instincts — 
 they both agreed in suspecting life, and in casting a slur 
 upon even the healthy manifestation of her most funda- 
 mental instincts. And, as a result of this attitude, they 
 naturally despised all such things as beauty, gaiety, high 
 spirits and voluptuousness, which lure to life and to her 
 joys, and which stimulate the functions of her most 
 fundamental instincts. 
 
 Nor did they confine this hostility to the manifestation 
 of beauty in the human body alone. They were literally 
 incapable of any appreciation of beauty in the productions 
 of the human mind and hand. Too ignorant to know 
 how deeply high art and social order and permanence are 
 related, and too tasteless in human matters to have any 
 regard for things merely accessory to human life, the love 
 of beautiful things was to them an incomprehensible vice, 
 a morbid mania. Charles I, whose thoroughness in the 
 art of governing found its inevitable counterpart in his 
 nature in a consummate refinement of discrimination 
 where artistic matters were concerned, was to them a 
 monstrosity — a dangerous eccentric. It has been said 
 with reason that Charles " had a better taste in the fine 
 arts and in elegant literature than any King of England 
 before or since." ^ In any case it is certain that whatevef 
 power England has shown in the graphic arts has been 
 due entirely to his initiative, and the pictures and statues 
 which he was never tired of collecting throughout his 
 1 TAg Political History of England, Vol. VII, p. 126. 
 ill 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 anxious reign formed the first grand art treasure that this 
 nation has ever possessed. The fact that it was dispersed 
 after his mvirder by the Puritan party shows how slight 
 could have been the latter's sympathy even with the King's 
 hobbies. There can also be no doubt that had Whitehall 
 Palace been completed as it was contemplated by Charles 
 and conceived by Inigo Jones, " the Louvre and the 
 Escurial would have found in our calumniated island a 
 more magnificent rival ";V while even the exceptional 
 beauty of men and women's dress after the reign of 
 James I has been ascribed by one historian, Dr. Traill, 
 to Charles I's refined taste.* But to all those who would 
 like fuller, stronger ahd more convincing evidence of 
 Charles's taste and knowledge in sculpture, architecture, 
 music, literature and painting, I cannot do better than 
 recommend the chapter on the Royal Martyr in Blaikie 
 Murdock's wonderful little book ^ on the Stuarts, and 
 Chapter XXXI of Isaac Disraeli's profound work on 
 Charles I.* 
 
 No wonder, however, that this aspect of Charles's 
 character made no appeal to his enemies. For men who 
 could cast a picture by Rubens into the Thames, who 
 could smash the glorious painted windows and the images 
 of Westminster Abbey and St. Margaret's, and perform 
 other "untold deeds of barbarous iconoclasm all over the 
 country, were scarcely the sort to ask themselves whether 
 a monarch with taste were a rarity worth keeping. And 
 the Puritan who in 1651 published the book called The 
 Non-such Charles probably expressed the general impres- 
 sion, when he accused Charles of having squandered his 
 money on " braveries and vanities, on old rotten pictures 
 and broken-nosed marbles." 
 
 Now it requires no subtle ingenuity nor wilful bias to 
 recognise the peculiar sympathy, the basic relationship, 
 
 ^ Isaac Disraeli, op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 400. 
 
 2 See Social England {&di\x.. 1903), Vol. IV, pp. 229-230. 
 
 * The Royal Stuarts in their Connection with Art and Letters. 
 
 * Op. cit. See also pp. 56-58, Vol. I, of Ranke's History of England. 
 
 182 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 which, from the beginning, must have drawn the Puri- 
 tanical outlook on the world into close and intimate touch 
 with that view of life which is essential to the kind of 
 industry and commerce now prevalent and triumphant 
 among us, and it Would be absurd to suppose that it is 
 due merely to coincidence that Birmingham, for instance, 
 in the time of Charles I, should have been noted for its 
 ironworks as well as its Puritanism. 
 
 We have seen no less an authority than Dr. Cunning- 
 ham proclaim the Puritan rebellion as the beginning of 
 the commercial morality which is still supreme in the 
 modern world, and I need only refer the reader back to 
 my enumeration of the aims of this commercial morality 
 for him to realise how inevitably it became and remained 
 united with the morality of Puritanism. 
 
 Think of how much they had in common ! A profound 
 suspicion of flourishing, irrepressible, healthy and robust 
 life; indifference and even antagonism to beauty — ^whether 
 in the human body or in art; hostility to strong sexuality 
 and the high spirits it involves; a preference for mildness, 
 meekness, inferiority of vigour, vitality and general 
 viability; and above all a deteriorated love of life and 
 of the joy of life, which would render millions not merely 
 resigned and submissive, but actually content in town, 
 factory and office surroundings. 
 
 With these elements in common, and with the uncon- 
 scious desire behind them to pursue gain and wealth 
 undisturbed by any higher, more tasteful or more national 
 considerations, how could they help but wed, and fight 
 hand in hand to exterminate the last vestige of patriarchal 
 beauty, culture and solicitude for the people's welfare, 
 which still clung to the social organisation of expiring 
 Merrie England.'' 
 
 But it is when we examine one by one the leaders and 
 some of the most important agitators at the back of the 
 Pviritan Rebellion that we become convinced of this infal- 
 lible association of Calvinistic proclivities with the shop, 
 the factory, the warehouse or the office. For, although 
 
 183 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 we have seen how Charles was opposed by the upstart 
 landed gentry, townsmen, alien merchants and manufac- 
 turers, native tradesmen and other office ofFal, marching 
 under the banner of Puritanism, we have not yet become 
 personally acquainted with this grasping and counter- 
 jumping rabble. 
 
 Allow me to introduce them to you! 
 
 From two sources — Buckle's History of Civilisation in 
 England, Vol. 11,^ and an old volume, published in 1665, 
 called The Loyall Martyr ology,^ by William Winstanley 
 — I have been able to collect a few names among the 
 leaders of the Parliamentary and Puritanical party, together 
 with the occupations their owners pursued, which, in 
 addition to substantiating my contentions, ought to prove 
 of interest to the reader; and these I shall now proceed 
 to enumerate without any too elaborate comment — 
 
 Joyce, highly respected in the army, had been a common 
 tailor. He ultimately captured the King.^ 
 
 Colonel Pride was a drayman,* ultimately became a 
 brewer." 
 
 Venner, one of the most distinguished of the powerful 
 party after Charles's death, was a wine-cooper.* 
 
 Tuffnel, distinguished like Venner, was a carpenter.' 
 
 Okey had been a stoker in an Islington brewery,* and 
 later on was a chandler near Bishopsgate.® 
 
 Cromwell, as every one knows, was a brewer. 
 
 Colonel Jones, a serving man (brother-in-law to 
 Cromwell.)" 
 
 Dedne (admiral), a tradesman's assistant." 
 
 Colonel Goffe had been apprenticed to a drysalter." 
 
 1 When referring to this book in the list that follows, I shall simply 
 put the letter B and the number of the page. 
 
 * When referring to this book I shall put the letter W with the 
 number of the page. 
 
 9 B, p. 155. * B, p. 155 and W, p. 108. « W, p. 108. 
 
 « B, p. 155, and W, p. 158. »B, p. 155. 
 
 * B, p. 155, and W, p. 122. » W, p. 122. 
 " B, p. 156, and W, p. 125. " B, p. 156, and W, p. 121. 
 
 1^ B, p. 156, and W, p. 123. 
 
 184 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Major-General Whalley had been apprentice to a 
 woollen draper.' 
 
 Berkstead (a lieutenant of the Tower), had been a pedlar 
 or hawker of small wares,^ and, Winstanley declares, a 
 shopkeeper in the Strand.^ 
 
 Tichbourne or Tichburn (another lieutenant of the 
 Tower) had been a linen-draper of London.* 
 
 Colonel Harvey was a silk mercer.^ 
 
 Colonel Rowe was also a silk mercer.*^ 
 
 Colonel Wenn was also a silk mercer; ' Winstanley 
 declares he was a bankrupt one.* 
 
 Salway had been a grocer's assistant.® 
 
 Bond (of the Council) had been a draper." 
 
 Cawley or Crawley (also of the Council) had been a 
 brewer.^' 
 
 Berners, John (also of the Council), had been a 
 servant.*'' 
 
 Cornelius Holland (also of the Council) had been a 
 servant; '^ Winstanley says " a servant of Sir Henry 
 Vane's household." ** 
 
 Packe (held office of trust) was a woollen draper.** 
 
 Pury (held office of trust) was a weaver." 
 
 Pemble (held office of trust) was a tailor." 
 
 Barebone (member of and most active in Barebone's 
 Parliament) was a leather merchant in Fleet Street." 
 
 Colonel Berry was a woodmonger.*' 
 
 Colonel Cooper was a haberdasher.^" 
 
 Major Rolfe was a shoemaker.^* 
 
 1 B, p. 156, and W, p. io8. ^B, p. 156-157. 3w^p_,,^_ 
 
 * B, p. 156-157, and W, p. 129. * B, p. 157, and W, p. 129. 
 
 ^ B, p. 157, and W, p. 120. ' B, p. 157. 
 
 « W, p. 130. » B, p. 157. 
 
 i" B, p. 157. " B, p. 157, and W, p. 138. 
 
 I'^B, p. 157. "B, p. 1C7. 
 
 1* W, p. 124. " B, p. 158. 
 
 w B, p. 158. " B, p. 158. 
 
 i» B, p. 158. '» B, p. 158. 
 
 '"•B, p. 159. 21 B p_ ,5g 
 
 185 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Colonel Fox was a tinker.* 
 
 Colonel Hewson was a cobbler.* 
 
 Allen, Francis (became Treasurer of War), was a gold- 
 smith of Fleet Street.^ 
 
 Clement, Gregory (a member of the Bloody Parliament), 
 was a merchant.* 
 
 Andrews, Thomas, was a linen-draper in Cheap- 
 side.' 
 
 Scot, Thomas (a member of the Bloody Parliament), 
 was a brewer's clerk.* 
 
 Captain Peter Temple was a linen-draper.' 
 
 Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Axtell (Captain of the Guard 
 at the King's trial) was the keeper of a country " peddling 
 shop in Bedfordshire." ' 
 
 Colonel Thomas Harrison was the son of a butcher at 
 Newcastle.* 
 
 While among those who, though not so important as 
 the foregoing, nevertheless came to prominence on the 
 Puritan side in the Grand Rebellion, I might mention : 
 John Blakeston, a shopkeeper in Newcastle,*" Vincent 
 Potter, whose origin was so mean that it is unknown,** 
 Thomas Wait, who is in the same case,*^ and Thomas 
 Horton, also in the same case.*^ 
 
 There was, besides, another and perhaps even less 
 savoury element among the leaders of the Parliamentary 
 party. I refer to those who, like Essex and Williams, 
 opposed the King from some personal pique. It had often 
 been the King's duty, as well as StrafFord's and Laud's, 
 during the eleven years' personal government, to call not 
 only humble but also powerful men to order for aimes 
 against the people or the State. I have spoken exhaust- 
 ively enough of this element in Charles's opposition, in 
 
 ^B,p. 159. * B, p. 159, and W, p. 123. *W,p. 126. 
 
 * W, p. izg. 5 W, p. 131. 
 
 * W, p. 137. ' W, p. 141. 
 
 * W, p. 147. * W, p. 107. 
 low, p. 117. "W, p. 139. 
 " W, p. 142. 1* W, p. 131. 
 
 186 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 the preceding chapter. Still, there are one or two instances 
 of flagrant and base vindictiveness which are worthy of 
 particular mention here. Dr. Turner is a case in point. 
 He was prominent among the so-called patriots and was 
 reckoned with such men as St. John, Lord Saye and Sele, 
 Sir Arthur Haslerigg and Sir Dudley Diggis. And how 
 do you suppose that he came to join their ranks ? He had 
 been a place-hunting physician who for many years had 
 haunted Charles's court in the hopes of being patronised, 
 but whom the King had resolutely ignored owing to his 
 "deficient veracity! " Another name that occurs to me 
 is that of Humphrey Edwards, to whom the King had 
 denied preferment owing to Edwards's total unworthiness. 
 While the case of the disreputable alien, Dr. Daurislaus, 
 who ultimately drew up the charge against the King and 
 became ambassador to the Commonwealth in Holland, is 
 scandalous enough. He was a low Dutch schoolmaster 
 who, owing to some misdemeanour, had been forced to 
 flee his country. He took refuge in England and settled 
 down as a historical lecturer in Cambridge. The King 
 was forced to interfere with his work at the University and 
 wisely suspended him for a while; after which he was 
 "hardly restored to his place"; and from that time 
 forward, this criminal refugee who had no character and 
 no nationality, became one of the rats concerned in com- 
 passing Charles's doom. It is always with the utmost 
 satisfaction that I read and re-read the circumstances of 
 his murder at the hands of English Royalists in his native 
 country, after his appointment as English ainbassador by 
 the Commonwealth. 
 
 Thus, I think I have said enough to provide an adequate 
 picture of the type of mind and body which was opposed 
 to Charles in the last great struggle in which taste, tradition 
 and quality were confronted with the savage hordes of 
 vulgarity, trade and quantity in England — in the first place, 
 the overwhelming multitude from the shop, the furnace, 
 the office and the factory; secondly, the upstart and grasp- 
 ing landed gentry; thirdly, the men who in high places 
 
 187 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 and in low had found Charles's patriarchal government too 
 unfavourable to their criminal schemes. 
 
 Now, very early after the outbreak of the Grand Rebel- 
 lion, all these elements joined in one determined and, I 
 feel sure, partly unconscious, cry for Puritanism, Puritan- 
 ism, Puritanism! Every time the peacemakers arranged 
 negotiations for peace between the King and the so-called 
 popular party, the greatest of the latter's demands was 
 invariably that Puritanism should be established in 
 England; and Charles's reiterated and determined refusal 
 to accept this as a condition of peace was, as frequently, 
 the major cause of the fruitless conclusion of all the pour- 
 parlers. But, I also have not the slightest doubt that, 
 whereas the resolute cry for Puritanism, as the religion of 
 business, of commerce and of manufacture (as we under- 
 stand these things to-day), was very probably largely 
 unconscious, in so far as its metaphysical aspect was 
 concerned; it must certainly have been conscious in a large 
 number of the multitude, who were quite shrewd and 
 cunning enough to see how similar at least the morality of 
 the new creed was to that of the rising trade and commerce 
 associated in our minds with the economic school of 
 laissez-faire. 
 
 Certain it is, that as soon as the rebel party were able, 
 they began the work of imposing Puritanism by Act of 
 Parliament upon the nation, and in this work of depress- 
 ing, bleeding, besotting, uglifying, debilitating and dis- 
 heartening the Englishman, so as to render him a slave fit 
 for the office, the counter, the factory, the mine or the 
 stoke-hole, the religious and the more practical business 
 aims became so inextricably involved, that it is impossible 
 to tell how much was unconscious and how much was 
 conscious in this amazing act of religious creation of the 
 seventeenth century. 
 
 At all events, the fact remains, that whether the meta- 
 morphosis of the Englishman was effected consciously or 
 unconsciously under the cloak of religion, it was a feat that 
 was ultimately accomplished; and the meek herd which it 
 
 i88 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 reared for the capitalistic traders of the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries, make it impossible to regard Puri- 
 tanism as anything else than the great religious creation of 
 the western world to meet the requirements of business 
 profit and greed, under the rule of a " free," " democratic " 
 parliament. 
 
 Now let us see how the metamorphosis was contrived, 
 bearing in mind all the time that it was a matter of turning 
 a spirited, beauty-loving, life-loving and vigorous popula- 
 tion into a multitude which was just the reverse of all 
 these things. 
 
 The first thing that the Puritan party conscientiously 
 set about doing was to make the Englishman miserable. 
 This is always the most efficacious means of depressing 
 spirit, of destroying the awful contrast between character- 
 less labour and well-spent leisure, and of preventing a 
 drudge from feeling that life might be spent more healthily 
 and happily. 
 
 Already in 1 642 they were strong enough in Parliament 
 to interfere with popular sports and pastimes in England, 
 and the Sabbath, which, as Charles I had pointed out, 
 was the only day on which the labouring man could enjoy 
 himself, and preserve his spirit from desolation, was made 
 as gloomy and as wretched as possible. Not only was all 
 amusement forbidden, but the Church services ^themselves 
 were made so insufferably tedious and colourless, and 
 sermons were made to last such a preposterous length of 
 time, that Sunday became what it was required to be by 
 these employers of slaves — the most dreaded day in the 
 week. 
 
 A certain well-known German philosopher has said: 
 " It was a master stroke of English instinct to hallow and 
 begloom Sunday to such an extent that the Englishman 
 unconsciously hankers for his work and week-day again "; 
 for, if you are going to rear a nation of slaves, this is the 
 attitude you must force them to take towards the only 
 day of recreation they are allowed. In that way they 
 
 189 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 begin to regard their work, however appalling, with less 
 resentment and less loathing. 
 
 Puritan preachers vied with each other, as to who would 
 preach the longest sermons and say the longest prayers, 
 and if any of the less attentive among their congregations 
 should fall asleep during the former orations, which some- 
 times lasted over two hours, they were suspected of the 
 grossest impiety. 
 
 The Puritans who, fortunately for England, crossed the 
 Atlantic, were terrible in their Sabbath tyranny. Short 
 prayers and short sermons were considered irreligious in 
 New England, and it was not unusual for these to last one 
 hour and three hours respectively. A tithing-man bearing 
 a sort of whisk, would keep an eye on the congregations 
 during Sunday service, brusquely wake all those who fell 
 asleep, and allow no deserters. In winter the congregation 
 shivered in an icy-cold atmosphere; in summer they 
 stewed in glaring unshaded heat, " and they sat upon most 
 uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at all seasons." ^ 
 
 Indeed it was not unusual in winter for the communion 
 bread to freeze quite hard and to rattle " sadly in the 
 plates." ^ But not only was all activity restrained on the 
 Sabbath — the most natural and most ordinary acts of social 
 life were punished with the utmost severity. In New 
 London in 1670, a pair of lovers, John Lewis and Sarah 
 Chapman, were accused of sitting together on the Lord's 
 day under an apple-tree in Goodman Chapman's orchard ^ 
 and were brought to trial for this offence. In 1656 
 Captain Kemble was set for two hours in the public stocks 
 for his " lewd and unseemly behaviour " — that is to say, 
 for kissing his wife " publicquely" upon the threshold of 
 his house, after having been absent from her on a journey 
 for many years.* And an English sea-captain was soundly 
 whipped for kissing his wife in the street of a New England 
 town on Sunday. 
 
 1 The Sabbath in Puritan Neto England, by Alice Morse Earle, p. 8 1 . 
 « Ibid., p. 84. 
 
 * Alice Morse Earle, op. cit., p. 146. * Ibid., p. 247. 
 
 190 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 In Scotland, sis Buckle has shown, matters were just as 
 bad, and Sunday in North Britain in the seventeenth 
 century was made a perfect hell on earth/ " It was a sin 
 to go from one town to another on Sunday, however 
 pressing the business might be. It was a sin to visit your 
 friend on Sunday. It was likewise sinful either to have 
 your garden watered or your beard shaved." ^ 
 
 In England, as soon as these maniacs had the power, 
 they too, as I have shown, did everything they could to 
 make the Sabbath a day hated and feared by all. For, to 
 make depression perfect, it was not only needful to make 
 Sunday service compulsory and tedious, it was also 
 necessary to suppress everything in the nature of enlivening 
 or inspiriting pastimes, upon the only day when the poor 
 labouring classes could indulge in recreation. 
 
 In addition to the measures passed in 1642, an Act was 
 passed on April 6, 1644, "For the better observation of 
 the Lord's Day," in which we read — 
 
 " That no person or persons whatsoever shall, without 
 reasonable cause for the same, travel, carry burthens, or do 
 any worldly labours, or work whatsoever, upon that day, 
 or any part thereof; upon pain that every one travelling 
 contrary to the meaning of this Ordinance, shall forfeit, 
 for every offence, ten shillings of lawful money; and that 
 every person carrying any burthen, or doing any worldly 
 labour or work, contrary to the meaning hereof, shall 
 forfeit five shillings of like money for every such 
 offence." 
 
 And in the section dealing with pastimes and amuse- 
 ments, we read — 
 
 "And let it be further ordained, that no person or 
 persons shall hereafter upon the Lord's-day use, exercise, 
 keep, maintain, or be present, at any wrestlings, shooting, 
 bowling, ringing of bells for pleasure or pastime, masque, 
 Wake, otherwise called Fasts, Church-Ale, dancing, games, 
 sport or pastime whatsoever; upon pain, that every person 
 
 ^ See History of CiviBiation in England, Vol. Ill, pp. 203 et seq. 
 * Ibid., p. 260. 
 
 191 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 so offending, iieing above the age of fourteen years, shall 
 lose, and forfeit five shillings for every such offence.^ 
 
 " And because the prophanation of the Lord's Day hath 
 been heretofore greatly pccasioned by Maypoles (a hea- 
 thenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and 
 wickedness) the Lords and Commons do further order and 
 ordain, that all and singular maypoles, that are, or shall 
 be erected, shall be taken down and removed by the con- 
 stables, Brusholders, Tythjngmen, petty constables and 
 churchwardens of the parish." ^ 
 
 Even the great festival of Christmas was condemned by 
 these determined advocates of depression and low spirits, 
 and, under the Commonwealth, attempts were made to 
 suppress the celebration of this Church anniversary and to 
 regard even the mince-pie as idolatrous.^ " In place of the 
 merry chimes," says Mr. W, Andrews, " which formerly 
 welcomed Christrrias from every church steeple in the land, 
 the crier passed along the silent streets of the town ringing 
 his harsh-sounding bell, and proclaiming in a monotonous 
 voice, ' No Christmas ! no Christmas ! ' " * 
 
 In some parts of the country, such as Canterbury, for 
 instance, the people were so indignant that riots actually 
 took place; but what the armed resistance of a great king 
 had failed to do, could not very well be accomplished by 
 isolated and sporadic risings on the part of his subjects. 
 
 In Scotland, W. Andrews tells us, the attempts to sup- 
 
 ^ The fine for allowing children to commit any of these sins was 
 1 2 pence for every oiFence. 
 
 * A Collection of Acts and Ordinances of General Use, made in the 
 Parliament from 1640. Jo 1656, by Henry Scobell, fol. 68. "The 
 New Haven code of laws ordered that ' profanation of the Lord's 
 Day should be punished by fine, imprisonment or corporal punish- 
 ment ; and if proudly, and with a high hand against the authority of 
 God — with death." — Alice Morse Earle, op. cit., p. 248,. 
 
 ' See The En^ish Housewife in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuriesj 
 by Rose M. Bradley (191 2), p. 79. " The Puritans did their best to put 
 a stop to feasting and junketing. Christmas Day was not to be observed 
 and the mince-pie was looked upon by the fanatics as idolatrous." 
 
 * Bygone England, p. 240. 
 
 192 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 press Christmas were more successful. And, as a proof of 
 the inconsiderate brutality of these Puritanical fanatics, not 
 only did the members of Parliament sit to transact business 
 on Christmas Day, but, in order to show their utter con- 
 tempt of the occasion, " the Reformers enjoined that their 
 wives and servants were to spin in the open sight of the 
 peope upon Yule Day, and that the farm labourers were 
 to yoke their ploughs." ^ 
 
 And thus the power of the Puritans fell like a blight 
 upon the land, killing good-cheer, healthy spirits and sport. 
 Traill even goes so far as to say that " many sports which 
 as sports they did not condemn, have ceased to exist, 
 because the Puritans condemned their use on Sundays, the 
 only day on which working people could practise them 
 regularly." * 
 
 The pleasures and diversions of the stage constituted 
 another of the vestiges of Merrie England which was also 
 severely suppressed by these vulgar fanatics. On Octo- 
 ber 22, 1647, they passed an Act for suppressing stage- 
 plays and interludes, and in it we read that " all person and 
 persons so oiFending [acting in plays or interludes] to 
 commit to any common Gaol or Prison, there to remain 
 until the next general sessions of the Peace, holden within 
 the said City of London, or Liberties thereof, and places 
 aforesaid, or sufficient security entered for his or their 
 appearance at the said Sessions, there to be punished as 
 Rogues, according to Law." ^ 
 
 And according to another Act passed in 1647, " F°^ the 
 utter suppression of stage plays and Interludes," the 
 spectator was to be fined five shillings for being present at 
 a play, the money "to be levied by the Churchwardens of 
 the said Parish"; while the money received at the doors 
 of theatres was to be forfeited and given over once more 
 to the Churchwardens! 
 
 But they went further. On May 2, 1648, in an absurd 
 
 * Bygone England, pp. 238, 242-243. 
 
 2 Social England, Vol. IV, p. 167. 
 
 3 Scobell, op. cit., fol. 135. 
 193 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 and savage Act passed, " For punishing Blasphemies and 
 Heresies," they literally undertook to establish a credo by 
 inhuman threat and punishment. 
 
 After enumerating all the beliefs concerning the 
 Trinity, the Manhood of Christ, etc., this measure proceeds 
 as follows, " that all and such persons as shall maintain 
 and publish by preachingj teaching, printing or writing 
 that ' the Bodies of men shall not rise again after they are 
 dead,' or that ' there is no day of Judgment after death ' 
 [shall be] comhiitted to prison without Bail or Mainprise, 
 until the next Gaol delivery be holden for that place or 
 County, and the Witnesses likewise shall be bound over 
 by the said Justices unto the said Gaol delivery to give 
 in their evidence; and at the said Gaol delivery the party 
 shall be indicted for feloniously publishing and maintaining 
 such Errour, and in case the indictment be found and the 
 Party upon his Triall shall not abjure his said Errour and 
 defence and maintenance of the same, he shall suffer the 
 pains of death, as in case of Felony without benefit of 
 Clergy." ^ This was not merely a brutal enforcement of 
 superstition; it was a savage insistence upon dullness and 
 stupidity. 
 
 Similar punishment was threatened if any one should 
 " deny that St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, or any 
 other of the Canonical works of the Old or New Testament 
 is the Word of God "; and prison was also the penalty for 
 those who dared to say that "all men shall be saved," or 
 " that man is bound to believe no more than by his reason 
 he can comprehend," or " that the observation of the 
 Lord's Day as it is enjoyned by the Ordinances and Laws 
 of this Realm, is not according, or is contrary, to the word 
 ofGod."^" 
 
 Everything was done, too, to associate high spirit and 
 proud daring with sin and the devil. Cotton Mather, that 
 ranting, raving divine of Nonconformity, in a book 
 entitled Batteries upon the Kingdom of the Devil, asso- 
 ciated all vital and spirited things with Hell and Satan. 
 1 Scobell, op: cit., fol. 149. * I6iJ., fol. 149. 
 
 194 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 He was never tired of saying, "When Satan fills the 
 Hearts of Men he makes them rush upon such hardy 
 ventures as they must be utterly and for ever spoiled 
 with"; or, "The Devil will make sinners venturesome 
 when once he becomes a Commander of them "; * or " The 
 Devil is a proud spirit; it was his pride that was his fall 
 at first; and when he would give us a fall, he does first by 
 Pride give us a lift." * All excellent doctrines on which to 
 rear slaves and not men, and quite typical of the gospel 
 most Puritan divines were preaching at the time. 
 
 And here, perhaps, it might be as well to refer briefly 
 to the chapter and text of the seventeenth-century Non- 
 conformist's Scriptural warrant for his fiercely negative 
 attitude towards life. The fact that he defended himself 
 and his position by an appeal to the Scriptures is plain and 
 incontrovertible; but can it be said that Christianity is 
 wholly on the Puritan's side ? 
 
 To those whose bodies and general physical inferiority 
 lead them to question the beauty and value of life on this 
 earth; to those who are predestined by their physiques to 
 take up a hostile or doubtful attitude towards the joys and 
 the hardships of life — to such men, in fact, as I have 
 described on pages 177 to 1 80 of this chapter — there are 
 certainly several features about Christianity which will 
 seem to substantiate and justify their position, more 
 particularly if they rely entirely upon the Scriptures and 
 divorce themselves wholly from the traditions of the Holy 
 Catholic Church whose pagan elements tended rather to 
 mitigate the sternly negative creed of primitive Chris- 
 tianity than to accentuate it. 
 
 We know the famous equation : The World = The 
 Flesh = The Devil. Now, to all men who are physically 
 biassed in favour of such a chain of consequences, there is 
 much in the Scriptures which will appear to sanctify their 
 point of view. 
 
 In the first place, take the repeated references in the 
 Bible to the baseness of this world and of this life, and the 
 1 p. 16. 'p. 27. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 glory of the world and the life to come. There is a pecu- 
 liarly hostile spirit manifested against this earth and this 
 world in many a Bible passage, and in the First Epistle 
 of John we actually read the definite commalnd : " Love 
 not the world, neither the things that are in the world. 
 If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in 
 him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and 
 the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the 
 Father, but is of the world." ' 
 
 The body and the flesh, too, come in for a good deal 
 of hostile and even rancorous criticism, and for those who 
 were prepared to revile them to the honour of the Spirit, 
 there was ample support in the gospels and epistles of the 
 New Testament. 
 
 In Romans we read : " Flesh is death; Spirit is life and 
 peace. The body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is 
 life because of righteousness. If ye live after the flesh, ye 
 shall die : but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds 
 of the body, ye shall live." ^ And even those whose minds 
 were prepossessed in favour of carnal things are rebuked 
 and cautioned. " For to be carnally minded is death: 
 but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because 
 the carnal mind is enmity against God : for it is not subject 
 to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they 
 that are in the flesh cannot please God." ^ 
 
 Such sentiments not only seem to cast a, slur upon the 
 natural functions and joys of the body, they also actually 
 separate these functions and joys from all community with 
 God; so that the fundamental instincts of life seem to lie 
 under a ban, and to be covered with shame and disgrace. 
 Thus true life involves the paradox of hostility to life, and 
 St. Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians actually confirms 
 this supposed eternal hostility. He says, " For the flesh 
 lusteth against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh." * 
 
 He dares to go even further; he undertakes to enu- 
 merate the things with which he necessarily associates the 
 
 ^ I John ii. 15, 16. * Rom. viii. 6, 10, 13. 
 
 ' Rom. viii. &-8. * Gal. v. 17. 
 
 196 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 flesh. He says : " Now the works of the flesh are manifest, 
 which are these : Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, 
 lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emula- 
 tions, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, 
 drunkenness, revellings, and such like." ^ 
 
 There is no mention here of the healthy and restrained 
 joys and wonders of the flesh; no hint that only hogs must 
 regard the flesh in this way. Indeed, if you had but the 
 New Testament as your guide in matters of sexuality, you 
 might reasonably be excused if. you regarded all things 
 connected with the functions of procreation as the most 
 unpardonable sinfulness. St. Paul actually exhorted the 
 Corinthians to cleanse themselves from all filthiness of the 
 flesh;" in the first Epistle of Peter we are told of the " filth 
 of the flesh," ^ and we are also informed by St. Paul that 
 to become Christ's we must crucify " the flesh with the 
 affections and lusts." * 
 
 To deny, to revile, and to despise the body, would, 
 according to these texts, seem to be the only road to salva- 
 tion — a course utterly strange to him who is sufiiciently 
 master of his appetites to rejoice in his body and to 
 enjoy it, without making, as the saying is, " a beast of 
 himself." 
 
 " Walk in the Spirit," says St. Paul, " and ye shall not 
 fulfil the lusts of the flesh "^; "they which are the chil- 
 dren of the flesh, these are not the children of God," * 
 while St. John emphatically declares : " It is the spirit 
 that quickeneth : the flesh profiteth nothing." ' 
 
 But the very needs of the body and men's concern 
 about it, receive a severe blow even from the Founder of 
 Christianity Himself. Christ, in His famous Sermon on 
 the Mount, said: "Therefore I say unto you. Take no 
 thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall 
 drink : nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on." * 
 
 ^ Gal. V. 19-21. * 2 Cor. vii. i. 
 
 » I Pet. iii. 21. * Gal v. 24. 
 
 5 Gal. V. 16. ' Rom. ix. 8. 
 
 » John vi. 63. * Matt. vi. 25. 
 197 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Now it may be perfectly true that all this negativism 
 towards the world, the body and the flesh, does not actually 
 constitute the kernd of true Christianity, and it certainly 
 never constituted the basis of the doctrine of the Holy 
 Catholic Church; but, on the other hand, it must not be 
 forgotten that with this negativism to be found and quoted 
 as authority by men who were predisposed to question 
 the value, beauty and joy of life and the body, it was only 
 natural that the Puritajis should regard their standpoint 
 and their attitude as more than amply confirmed and 
 supported by the texts of holy Scripture. 
 
 I have attempted to describe the kind of men they 
 were,^ and, if my description be at all true to reality, just 
 ask yourself whether, in the few passages I have selected 
 from the Scriptures, these men were not able to find more 
 than the adequate foundation and justification which they 
 most needed for their campaign against beauty, the body 
 and its joys! Even if we admit that they exaggerated, 
 distorted — nay, burlesqued — 'the teachings of Christ and 
 His Apostles, we are still forced to acknowledge that at least 
 the elements of their extreme attitude were undoubtedly 
 to be sought, and found in Christianity itsdf. 
 
 And if to-day we find it an almost universal tendency 
 to exalt the soul at the expense of the body; if we find the 
 modern world getting into trouble and confusion over its 
 management of questions of sex, of healthy breeding, of 
 healthy living and healthy thinking; if we find nervousness, 
 insanity and general debility increasing so much that 
 movements such as that of the Eugenists seem to be neces- 
 sary and proper — it is impossible, and it would be unfair, 
 not to point to precisely that element in Christianity 
 which, though exaggerated beyond all reason by the 
 Puritans, yet plainly means hostility and doubt in regard 
 to the deeds, the joys, the beauties and the inestimable 
 virtues of the body. 
 
 For all healthy peoples, all permanent .peoples have 
 always held that nothing on earth can justify a botched 
 1 See pp. 177 to 180. 
 198 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 body, an ugly body, or foul breath. They have also 
 regarded all the lusts of the flesh as legitimate if not 
 sacred. But this exaltation of the soul, besides under- 
 mining our joy and faith in the body, introduces an in- 
 sidious plea for, and a dangerous sanctification of, botched- 
 ness. It says practically, since the body does not matter; 
 since to be separated from the body is to be freed from 
 sin,^ why trouble about this earthly shell, why fret con- 
 cerning this inheritance of hell .'' Is it botched .'' — then to 
 be sure it contains a fine soul ! Is it bungled and ugly ? — 
 then remember it encloses an immortal spirit ! Is it repul- 
 sive, is its breath foul.? — then think that this is but an 
 earthly ailing! ^ And so on! — ^AU excellent excuses and 
 pretexts for those whom the Old Testament ventured to 
 call the unclean; but dangerous and insidious doctrines for 
 a nation that would last and would be permanent and 
 glorious. 
 
 Now there can be no doubt that the Puritans fastened 
 on this particular aspect of Christianity with as much 
 obstinacy as enthusiasm. And everything which was 
 redolent of the world and the flesh — everything, in fact, 
 that was fundamental in life, was to them anathema. Con- 
 sistently with this attitude, therefore, they attacked beauty 
 and good healthy living, because both lured and led back 
 
 ^ Rom. vi. 7. 
 
 ^ As an instance of how universally this view is now accepted, at 
 least in England, see how the very mob, which contains some of the 
 healthiest elements of the nation, sings, enjoys and whole-heartedly 
 approves of such Puritanical sentiments as we find in the chorus of some 
 of the most popular music-hall songs of the last decade of the nineteenth 
 century. To refer to a single example let me quote the lines of the 
 popular music-hall chorus in the love-song. Sweet Marie — 
 
 " Come to me, sweet Marie, 
 Come to me, sweet Marie, 
 Not because your face is fair, love, to see. 
 But your soul so pure and sweet 
 Makes my happiness coniplete, 
 Makes me falter at your feet. 
 Sweet Marie." 
 
 1-99 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 to the world, the flesh and the devil, and both opened 
 the highway to the joys and the wonders of the body. 
 
 Not only was the beauty of the human body, however, 
 the butt of their bitter hostility — every kind of beauty 
 fell under the same ban. Wherever the Parliamentary 
 rebels could do so, they destroyed the art-treasures and 
 glories of English homes' and churches, and as early as 
 May 1644 an Act of Parliament was passed by these 
 vandals to destroy all beauty in churches and to remove 
 all organs. As M. B. Synge declares, " to the Puritan, 
 beauty was a curse." ^ 
 
 That vile pamphleteer and murderer of Laud, William 
 Prynne, spoke as follows concerning human beauty, and 
 in his words the whole of the poisonous creed which sets 
 bodily charm at naught and exalts that inward beauty of 
 the soul, which can justify even a foul and botched body, 
 comes vividly to light. 
 
 " Man's perfect Beautie . . . consists ... in the in- 
 ward Endowments, Ornaments, Trappings, Vertues, and 
 the Graces of the Minde and Soule, in which the Excel- 
 lency, Essence and Happinesse of men consist: This is 
 the only Comelinesse, and Beautie, which makes us 
 Amiable, Beautifull, and Resplendent in the sight of God, 
 of Men and Angels : this is the only culture, and Beauty 
 which the Lord respects." * 
 
 And again — 
 
 " A Studious, Curious, Inordinate, and eaeer Affection 
 of Beautie, . . . must needes be sinful! and Abominable : 
 yea farre worse than Drunkennesse, and excesse of Witie 
 . . . because it proceeds most commonly, from an Adul- 
 terous, unchast, and lustfuU Heart, or Meretricious, and 
 Whorish afFection." ' 
 
 One can but marvel at the unscrupulousness of these 
 monsters. But, agfain, let me recall how tragically all 
 this prepared the way for this age, for our age. 
 
 ^ J Short Hilton of Social Life in Enziand, p. 207. 
 ^ The UnloveRnesse of Lovelocks (1628), p. 51. 
 » Op. cit., pp. 55-56. 
 
 200 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 "Those who have continent and chaste affections," 
 Prynne continues, " as they deeme this corporall and out- 
 side Beautie a needlesse and superfluous thing: so they 
 are farre from seeking, or affecting it : that like that chast 
 and beautiful Pagan, they would rather obscure and 
 neglect, and quite deface their naturaU Beauties, by inflict- 
 ing wounds and scarres upon their faces, to make them 
 more deformed, for feare least others should be infatuated 
 and insnared with them." ^ 
 
 " Infatuated and snared " to what? To life, of course, 
 to flourishing, healthy life, which is always associated with 
 beauty; to the joy of life and in life, to a multiplication 
 of joyful life! 
 
 The relationship between beauty and the stimulation of 
 the sex-instinct was a thing not unknown to these filthy- 
 minded Puritans; hence their loathing of this "outside 
 Beauty," as Prynne chose to call it. 
 
 They also made more direct attacks upon the sex instinct 
 itself; for in their suppression of sports and of the May- 
 pole in particular, they were largely actuated by the feeling 
 that all jollification which brought young men and girls 
 together, must lead to the most horrible of all sins — the 
 stimulation and promotion of sexual interest. We have 
 only to recall the words of Charles I's " Declaration to his 
 Subjects concerning lawful Sports to he used on Sundays.''''^ 
 In it he said, " under the pretence of taking away abuses," 
 certain festivals had been forbidden. "We know what these 
 Puritans regarded as "abuses." Anythino; was an abuse 
 which, taking place round the Mavpole, led to young lusty 
 men and sun-warmed maidens falling into each other's 
 arms before they had passed before the parson and the 
 registrar. 
 
 But in order to make assurance doubly sure, they deter- 
 mined to put an end to all spontaneous love — or as they 
 in their bitterness said : fornication^ by Act of Parliament. 
 On May lo, i6(rp, any sexual intercourse outside marrias'e 
 was made punishable by three months' imprisonment for 
 * Op. cit., p. 57. * Quoted on p. 130. 
 
 201 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 both the man and the woman ! We can imagine what this 
 meant for the English man and maiden of those days! 
 Now, of course, after two centuries of Puritan tradition, 
 it is not hard to find men and women who are so depressed, 
 so deteriorated, spiritually and sexually, that they can be 
 content, nay, happy, as lifelong spinsters and bachelors. 
 Vitality is now at such a low ebb, that though we ^till talk 
 glibly of restraining our passions, and of controlling our 
 instincts — ^as if they were still something quite as difficult 
 to command as our alimentary appetite — there is not much 
 hardship involved to the average English maid or man in 
 holding a check upon his sex nowadays. He does it very 
 well; so well, indeed, that it is a mere euphemism to speak 
 of control. If a wet squib were able to speak, we should 
 all laugh if it boasted of exercising control when it would 
 not go off. 
 
 But in those days things were different, vitality was 
 greater, and this law was an absurdity. 
 
 If the Puritans had so reconstructed the whole of society 
 as to make early marriages possible for everybody, there 
 would have been no stupidity, no brutality, and not neces- 
 sarily any negativism in this law. But to allow the status 
 quo to persist, and then to pass this surface sanctimonious 
 legislation was a piece of sheer barbarism. 
 
 In many villages in France, as also in England, I have 
 myself observed how beneficently the stern morak of a 
 small and limited community solve this sex problem for 
 themselves. Prostitution is absolutely unknown in such 
 places, because non-promiscuous sexual intercourse be- 
 tween couples is tolerated, long before marriage is a 
 possible consideration. The public opinion of the com- 
 munity, however, is powerful enough to keep the man to 
 his bargain, and die few irresponsible men who always 
 must appear, are ostracised. It is not unusual, for 
 instance, in some parts of Picardy, for a bride-mother 
 to stand before Monsieur le Maire at her marriage cere- 
 mony, with her two children, four and two years old — 
 standing behind and witnessing the whole affair. This is 
 
 202 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 not immoral; it is eminently practical and proper, and 
 where this occurs the evils of prostitution are unknown.^ 
 
 But what are the pre-requisites to such a scheme of 
 sexual morality? The pre-requisites are two things that 
 the Puritan tradesman did his best to destroy: a small 
 village community where public opinion counts for some- 
 thing, and where, alone, public opinion can exercise disci- 
 pline; and a stable population, which is not constantly 
 tossed from one place to another, here to-day and a 
 hundred miles away to-morrow. In the large towns 
 created by the sort of industry and commerce which owe 
 their growth to Puritanism, such a code of sexual morality 
 is quite impossible. In such places public opinion is too 
 vast and too heterogeneous to be concentrated on one 
 particular point or quarter, and the population is too fluid 
 for ostracism to be any hardship. Prostitution, therefore, 
 is almost a foregone conclusion in such communities; 
 unless you can so depress the vigour and vitality of the 
 race as to exterminate the fundamental instinct of life. 
 But even in spite of coming within measurable distance 
 of this goal, the English race has already been deteriorated 
 without prostitution having necessarily been abolished. 
 
 The object of the Puritans was to attempt to depress 
 the fundamental instinct of life by atrophy. As I have 
 
 ^ Where this sort of thing goes on in England, as it does in Devon- 
 shire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and many other counties, there are always a host 
 of idiotic puritanical and, unfortunately, wealthy old spinsters who do 
 their utmost to interfere with it,; little -dreaming in their stupid and 
 unthinking brains that they are thus abetting. an{l promoting prostitu- 
 tion. I once heard a certain fat and fatuous old maid boast that she 
 had done her utmost in Devonshire to put a stop to what she called 
 this " horrible immorality "; and Mr. F. E. Green in his stimulating 
 book, Tie Tyranny of the Countrysitie, gives two examples of the same 
 foolishness which are worth quoting. " I know of one lady," he says, 
 " who has given orders to her steward that no girl who ' has got into 
 trouble ' shall be allowed, jcottage room on her estate. ... In quite 
 a different county a pathetic appeal was made to nle by a cowman who 
 had been given notice to quit because his eldest unmarried daughter, 
 aged nineteen, was enceinte. He had pleaded in vain to be allowed to 
 remain, as his wife was about to give birth to another child," pp. 3 1-32. 
 
 20-3 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 already shown, they have indeed partly succeeded; but 
 the condition of society to-day shows that their efforts 
 have only given rise to the most wretched of all com- 
 promises, in which we find Prostitution with all its horrors 
 and ill-health — ^for no form of prostitution can be worse 
 than that which occurs under Puritanical conditions-^ 
 abetting and promoting the general decline inv vitality 
 initiated by the Puritan's depressing and life-sapping 
 creed, their unhealthy industrial occupations, and the bad 
 city conditions to which the latter gave rise. 
 
 From the first, too, the wretched bawd was punished by 
 them with terrible severity. By the Act of May lo, 1650, 
 in which, as I have already shown, all sexual intercourse, 
 away from the marriage bed, was punished by three months 
 imprisonment, the bawd's penalty was fixed at being placed 
 in the pillory, being branded with a red-hot iron on the 
 forehead with the letter B, and being detained for three 
 years in a House of Correction or in prison. A second 
 conviction was punished by death.^ 
 
 Not satisfied with these measures, however, three 
 months later, on August 9, 1650, an Act was passed 
 whereby any one condoning " fornication," or even think- 
 ing it right and proper, was made liable to six months 
 imprisonment. Nor was this all; for in its savage ferocity 
 this same Act ordained that any one who, having once 
 been found guilty of this crime — of merely thinking that 
 fornication was right — ^was convicted a second time, should 
 be sentenced to banishment (which meant life-long 
 slavery), and, failing his appearance at the port of 
 embarkation — to death ! " 
 
 These legislative acts speak for themselves, and that is 
 why I have preferred to quote them, often in extenso, 
 rather than to enter into a more detailed history of the 
 Puritans themselves. Unscrupulously, resolutely, fiercely, 
 they set to work to damp, to eradicate, and, if possible, 
 to kill the spirit of Merrie England. It is as if a vivid 
 picture of the England of to-day had lain like a distant 
 * Scobell, op. cit., p. J2i. * liU., pp. 1 24-125. 
 
 204 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 mirage before their eyes, and they had sought by what 
 means, by what artifices, they couid help that mirage to 
 become a reality. They saw it in all its ugliness, all its 
 squalor, and ail its hopeless drudgery, and every one of 
 the manifestations of beauty, health and good taste about 
 them in their day, seemed only like so many obstacles 
 strewn in the path of its ultimate realisation. 
 
 So much, then, for their tamperings with the spirit and 
 the sexual instinct of the nation — and 1 have purposely 
 coupled these two things together, seeing that, as 1 have 
 already said, there is strong interaction between them; — 
 it now remains to discuss their tamperings with the body 
 of the nation. 
 
 If a body can be directly depressed by drugs, or by 
 poor diet, or by unhealthy living, there is no further need 
 for spiritual means for accomplishing this end. For, where 
 the bowel acts slowly, where digestion is retarded, and 
 where the nerves are jaded — the very river or stream of 
 the spirit is already poisoned at its source. 
 
 The story I am now going to tell is as strange as any 
 that has ever been told inside the pages of what purports 
 to be a serious work; but though apparently accident and 
 design will often be seen to unite with wonderful preci- 
 sion, in bringing about the desired unravelment, I submit 
 that there is no such thing as accident or chance in the 
 whole affair. 
 
 It was a question of altering the Englishman's body. 
 What mattered it then that some drugs fell into the 
 Puritans' hands, just as Manna had fallen on to the 
 shoulders of the Israelites in the' desert — ^fortuitously, 
 gratuitously, unsolicitedly, just as if the God of Puritans 
 had felt the urgent need of His people, and shed these 
 drugs upon them.? The fact that a thing falls into your 
 hands by chance, does not force you to swallow it. 
 Though innovations appear thick and fast about you, you 
 are not compelled to adopt them. Taste discriminates 
 and selects. If, therefore, certain new forms of diet 
 appeared just at that psychological moment when it was 
 
 205 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 to the taste of Puritans to adopt them, siirely the Puritans 
 are to blame, and not the chance appearance of the new 
 forms of dieit them'selves. And this becomes all the more 
 apparent when we remember that, as Buckle points out, 
 they were able on occasion to study- thp effects of diet upon 
 the so-called "low lusts of the flesh." ^ 
 
 But of this anon. 
 
 The first direct attack that the Puritans made upon the 
 dietetic habits of the Englishman, consisted in an attempt 
 at suppressing the consumption of the wholesome alcoholic 
 beverages. And we know what the Puritans meant when 
 they attacked "drink." They did not necessarily mean 
 " drunkenness " as we see it to-day, at our street corners 
 and in our slums — ^for that sort of drunkenness literally 
 did not exist in those days. They meant, once more, that 
 conviviality, that good cheer, and those high spirits, to 
 which a good, wholesome and well brewed fermented 
 liquor gives rise. In Cotton Mather's Batteries upon the 
 Kingdom of the Devil, and in William Prynne's Healthe 
 and Sicknesse, there are fulminations enough against the 
 drinking of alcoholic beverages; and' what was the reply 
 of the people of the day to these lucubrations ? As Prynne 
 himself points out,^ they replied that what the Pouritans 
 called " drunkenness," was " hospitality, good fellowships 
 courtesie, entertainment, joviality, mirth, generosity, 
 liberality, open-house keeping, etc." Of course, inasmuch 
 as some will always go too far — even if it be only in 
 playing an innocent game of bowls — cases of drunkenness 
 were not uncommon; but the after effects of such occa- 
 sional excesses in those days were not in the least harmful; 
 because what was absorbed was good, and — in so far as 
 the ale was concerned — actually excellent nourishment, 
 and an energy- and spiirit-giving drink. 
 
 And this brings me to the question of the national drink 
 
 ^ See p. 260, Vol. in, Tie History of Cwi/isatictf in England : "To 
 check the lusts of the flesh, they [the Puritans] furthermore took into 
 account the cookery, the choice of meats, and the number of dishes." 
 
 * Healthe and Sicknesse (edit. 1628), p. 5. 
 
 206 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 of England during the Middle Ages and up to the first 
 half of the seventeenth century : this, as in glorious 
 ancient Egypt, was simply barley-wine — or, in less high- 
 flown language, ale, brewed from fermented barley.^ 
 
 Athenaeus's account of the ale of the Egyptians is very 
 instructive for our purpose. He says it was very strong, 
 and had so exhilarating an effect upon those who drunk 
 it, that they danced and sang and committed all kinds of 
 exuberant extravagances. And in this judgment he is 
 confirmed by Aristotle.^ 
 
 Diodorus also affirms that the Egyptian ale was scarcely 
 inferior to the juice of the grape.^ And this drink, like 
 old English ale, was drunk by the peasants in all parts of 
 the country. 
 
 Now it is important to note that in all things relating 
 to Egypt, we are concerned always with the taste of a 
 people whose one passion was permanence. Indeed, so 
 highly did they reverence permanence in dynastic, as well 
 as vital matters, that Diodorus tells us, they despised 
 gymnasia and refused to use them, because they believed 
 that the kind of physical strength cultivated in such places, 
 was less permanent than that gained in the ordinary pur- 
 suits of a healthy life.* Such a people as this, apart from 
 the other proofs we have of their great wisdom and taste in 
 art and government, would never have selected for their 
 national drink a beverage which might have proved 
 deleterious or unwholesome in the long run to theii; race. 
 And the fact that the Egyptians existed for so many 
 thousands of years as a highly civilised, proud and art- 
 loving nation, is in itself the most convincing proof that 
 can be found of the beneficial value of their national 
 beverage. 
 
 And there is no reason to doubt Athenaeus's word con- 
 
 1 Diodorus, Book I, 34. Herodotus, Book II, 77. 
 
 * See The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, by Wilkinson, 
 Vol. I, p. 396. 
 
 * Book I, 34. 
 
 * Book I, 81. See also Herodotus, Book II, 91. 
 
 207 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 cerning the exhilarating effect of their ale upon them. 
 Whoever has taken a good draught of the nearest approach 
 our countryside now enjoys, to this old drink of ancient 
 Egypt and Merrie England, will not doubt for one instant 
 that it is absolutely true. Without a trace of the evil 
 effects which come of drinking modern bitter beer or stout, 
 this mild brown ale of the English agricultural village, 
 which, remember, is not to be compared in quality with 
 the liquor that the ancient Egyptian or the Englishman 
 of the sixteenth century was in the habit of drinking, is 
 still one of the most perfectly exhilarating and nourishing 
 drinks one can obtain. 
 
 But apart from the testimony of so great a people and 
 culture as those of Egypt, and apart from our own experi- 
 ence, we have the evidence of centuries of experience in 
 England, and the support of public and scientific opinion, 
 which are both in favour of the old ale that vanished when 
 the Puritans triumphed. 
 
 In the folk-lore, the legend, and the poetry of England, 
 the old ale of our forefathers — that which was brewed 
 from barley malt alone — has been too well praised, and 
 its sterling qualities too often enumerated, for me to 
 attempt to do it adequate justice in a mere portion of an 
 essay like the present. With its value as a body-building 
 and health-maintaining liquor, tested on the battlefields 
 of Great Britain and the Continent, and found in no way 
 lacking, the evidence of our fighting peasantry alone would 
 be sufficient to hallow it in our estimation as a national 
 institution, and I could not attempt to vie with men like 
 John Taylor of old, and John Bickerdayle of more recent 
 times, in demonstrating its merits beyond all shadow of 
 a doubt. 
 
 Nevertheless, to the reader who is not acquainted with 
 all the facts that have been collected and adduced in its 
 favour, perhaps a selection of these, briefly stated, will' not 
 prove unwelcome, and may even constitute an indispensable 
 part of my argument. 
 
 From the earliest times to about the middle of the 
 
 208 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 seventeenth century, then, the staple drink of these islands, 
 for the peasant as for the Sovereign, was the liquor pro- 
 duced by fermented barley mixed with pure water. The 
 most valuable and principal ingredient in this beverage 
 was the substance which chemists call maltose, or sugar of 
 malt. Now this maltose, besides being acknowledged as 
 the finest food for producing physical energy and heat, also 
 enjoys the privilege of being a promoter rather than a 
 retarder of the digestive process, as well as a potent and 
 invigorating appetiser.^ This is very important, because 
 more than half the trouble which is occasioned by the 
 Puritan substitutes for this drink, will, as I shall show, be 
 seen to concentrate around the question of retarding diges- 
 tion, and thereby lowering spirit and vitality.^ 
 
 The ale of our forefathers contained at least eight per 
 cent, of this maltose, and thus constituted a truly nourish- 
 ing beverage.^ Indeed there was an old proverb, current 
 among the people of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries in England which ran — 
 
 " Wine is but a single broth 
 
 But Ale is meat and drink and cloth." 
 
 This was the ale which the monk as well as the house- 
 wife had brewed for ages, which was drunk at Church- 
 Ales, Bride-Ales, Scot-Ales, Wakes, and Feasts of Dedica- 
 tion, and the proceeds on the sale of which had often 
 contributed to no small extent to the building of the 
 
 1 Foad and the Principles of Dietetics, by Robfert Hutchison, M.D., 
 
 p. 369- 
 
 * To the reader who would like to enter more deeply into the 
 medical aspect of the question, let me recommend, for a start, pp. 9 1 
 et seq. in Mr. Hackwood's book on the Innf, Ales and Drinking Customs of 
 Old England, and the whole of Chapter XV of Mr. Bickerdayle's book, 
 The Curiosities of Ale and Beer. 
 
 * Even of our modern beer, which is as different from the ale of 
 Merrie England as chalk is from cheese. Dr. Hutchison is still able to 
 say : " The large quantity of carbohydrate matter in malt liquors renders 
 them the most truly nourishing of alcoholic drinks " (op. cit., p. 370) ; 
 so we may judge of the superiority in this respect of the purer and 
 older brand. 
 
 P 209 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 neighbouring church or cathedral. As Bickerdayle says : 
 " These simple, hejirty festivals of old in which our ances- 
 tors so much delighted, served to light up the dull round 
 of the recurring seasons, and to mark with a red letter the 
 day in the calendar appropriate to their celebration. It 
 was these that gained for our country in mediaeval times 
 the name of ' Merrie England.' " ^ 
 
 If we remember the words of Athenaeus concerning the 
 exhilarating effects of this same malt-liquor upon the 
 ancient Egyptians, we can imagine the cheerfulness, merri- 
 ment and high spirits which must have characterised these 
 picturesque country festivals of old, and we begin to 
 understand how darkly, in later times, the cold and 
 resentful Puritans must have stood, some distance away, 
 watching the whole scene with bitter disapproval, and 
 longing for the day of their power to come, when 
 they would be able to crush out all this sinfulness for 
 ever. 
 
 This was the ale which was drunk in the morning at 
 breakfast, by peasant, lord and king. Even Queen Eliza- 
 beth's breakfast seems frequently to have consisted of litde 
 else but ale and bread,'' and the very children in the nursery 
 were not exempt from its use in a weakened form.' 
 According to Mr. Hackwood, Good Queen Bess enjoyed 
 a quart or this liquor at her early morning meal, and she 
 is said to have called it "an excellent wash "; * while it 
 
 ^ Tie Curiosities of Ale and Beer, p. 232. 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 275. 
 
 * See Traill's Social England, Vol. IV, p. 670 : " Water was scarcely 
 ever drunk, even by childrftn, who drank small beer from their earliest 
 years." See also John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education (edit. 
 1693), p. 16. After recommending good dry bread as a substantial 
 portion of a child's daily food, the old philosopher says : " If any one 
 think this too hard and sparing Diet for a Child, let them know, that a 
 Child will never starve, nor want nourishment, who besides Flesh once 
 a Day . . . may have good Bread and Beer as often as he has a Stomach." 
 And later on he says, speaking of the Child : " His Drink should be 
 only small Beer." 
 
 * /»«/, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England, p. 9 1 . 
 
 210 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 was a common thing for Tudor ladies to have a gallon of 
 ale for a nightcap as well.'' 
 
 Together with the excellent bread of the period, no 
 better meal could be imagined, and a continuous supply 
 of this staple national beverage was as important to 
 our ancestors as a continuous supply of water is to 
 us now. It is for this reason that the Statute Book of 
 olden times is full of references to this precious national 
 asset.^ 
 
 The value of this drink as a health-giver, to the poor 
 particularly — ^who, thanks to its qualities, were often able 
 to tide over a period of scant food without suffering any 
 evil effects — cannot be overrated. " There exist, sad to 
 relate," says Bickerdayle, "persons who, with the notion 
 of promoting temperance, would rob us of our beer. 
 Many of these individuals may act with good motives, but 
 they are weak, misguided bodies who, if they but devoted 
 their energies to promoting ale-drinking as opposed to 
 spirit [and bitter beer] drinking, would be doing useful 
 service to the State, for malt liquors are the true temper- 
 ance drinks of the working classes." ' 
 
 John Taylor, an old writer on ale, and an enthusiast 
 whom nothing could repress, was another who noticed the 
 inspiriting quality of the old English beverage. Writing 
 in the middle of the seventeenth century, he saw precisely 
 what the Puritans and Athenseus saw in old ale, but, far 
 from complaining, he gloried in it. He knew it would 
 " set a Bashfull Suitor a wooing," * and in a long poem of 
 over thirty verses he says — 
 
 1 Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old En^and, p. 9 1 . 
 
 * See Hackwood, op. cit., p. 81 : "It was incumbent upon the 
 brewers in old time to keep up an adequate supply of good ale, just as 
 we nowadays insist upon a proper supply of pure water ; the former, 
 however, was regarded more as a question of food supply, while the 
 latter is mainly a hygienic precaution. The brewers were not allowed 
 to cause any inconvenience by a sudden reduction of their output, on 
 the plea, perhaps, that the State-regulated prices were unremunerative 
 to them, or on any other excuse whatever." 
 
 * Op. cit., p. 14. * Drink and Welcome, p. 5. 
 
 211 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 " The Dick to his Dearling, full boldly does speak, 
 
 Though before (silly teilow) his courage did quaile. 
 He gives her the smouch, with iiis hand in his pouch, 
 li he meet by the way with a fot ot good Ale." '^ 
 
 Apart from its health-giving properties it was this 
 quality of a spirit-tonic that made the ale of ancient i^gypt 
 and of Merrie England such a formidable national posses- 
 sion. And if the English peasant in arms was so 
 proverbially feared by our continental neighbours under 
 the Plantagenets and the Lancasters, and even by his 
 fellow countrymen in times of peasant uprisings, it is 
 impossible to dissociate this fact completely from his daily 
 beverage and food, which, at one time, was the best that 
 art and experience could contrive for rearing stamina and 
 courage. 
 
 However, as this is not a book on dietetics, but simply 
 a critical examination of the principle of aristocracy, to 
 those readers who still doubt my word concerning this ale 
 of old England, I can but tender this advice : let them look 
 into the matter for themselves. It is sufficiently important 
 to repay investigation. And they will find that no praise, 
 however immoderate, that some have lavished upon it, is 
 too great, for the merits of our old English drink. 
 
 At all events, though, I must point out, that my case 
 neither stands nor falls with the claim that ale is the best 
 possible drink of all. It simply relies on the fact that the 
 substitutes which, owing to the Puritans, soon took the 
 place of ale, were not a hundredth part as good as ale, and 
 can, indeed, be shown to have been positively deleterious. 
 
 This point I should" like to emphasise. For it is so 
 easy to twist my argument into a panegyric on ale, when 
 it is really only an attempt at showing the unquestionable 
 superiority of our old national drink over all the substi- 
 tutes which the Puritans helped to introduce. 
 
 I think, mark you, that the case for ale, as being the 
 best possible drink, is an exceedingly good one; but, as I 
 say, it is not essential to my argument. 
 
 ^ Ale Ak-Vatedinto the Ak-Tttude (165 1), verse 23. 
 212 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 With their vehement cry against drink, then, with their 
 severe legislation against drunkenness, and particularly 
 with their suppression of those feasts and public celebra- 
 tions at which ale was drunk, the Puritans, as soon as they 
 had acquired sufficient power, waged a war to the death 
 against old English ale. 
 
 Too vulgar to see that you cannot have all the advan- 
 tages of ale without, here and there, feeling some of its 
 disadvantages; too stupid to see that the occasional drunk- 
 enness of the few was the inevitable reverse of a medal 
 which was, nevertheless, worth keeping — more particularly 
 as the evil effects of drunkenness in those days were 
 practically nil — they inveighed against drink per se, and 
 hated the spirit, the good cheer and the sexual stimulus 
 which it engendered. 
 
 On August 9, 1650, in an Act, part of which I have 
 already quoted, they made it a criminal offence even to 
 " condone drunkenness " or even to " think drunkenness 
 right and proper," and the punishment for these crimes of 
 " condoning " and " thinking " were, for the first offence, 
 six months' imprisonment, and for the second, banishment 
 (which meant life-long slavery). Should the criminal, 
 however, who had condoned drunkenness, or thought it 
 right and proper, fail to repair to the port of embarkation 
 in order to be shipped away as a slave, sold by his own 
 fellow countrymen, he was to be put to death.^ 
 
 The ferocious brutality of these Puritans was something 
 incredible; and if there was one thing on earth that could 
 possibly outreach or exceed it, it was, as in the case of the 
 Low Churchman and Puritan of to-day, their absolutely 
 unparalleled stupidity. 
 
 The greatest blow, however, which the Parliamentary 
 party levelled against the old national beverage of Eng- 
 land, was their tax on ale. To increase the price of the 
 staple drink of the lower classes, and thus to render its 
 consumption more difficult, was not only contrary to all 
 precedent — for, as we have seen, the monarchs of the past 
 ^ Scobell, op. cit., pp. 114-125. 
 213 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 had always taken the most scrupulous care to guarantee a 
 plentiful supply of it at the lowest possible rate to the 
 working classes — -but it was an indirect tax on labour itself, 
 an absolutely unheard-of meas\ire before that time, and a 
 tax whose incidence fell on the poorest people with a 
 thousand times more weight than upon the capitalists and 
 the landowners. 
 
 In addition to that it opened the flood-gates to all the 
 filthy substitutes for good old ale which, as chance would 
 have it, happened to be waiting on the threshold of 
 English social life for just such an opportunity as this. 
 
 And, seeing that, as I have already shown, trade super- 
 vision for the benefit of the consumer — the people — had 
 been overthrown with the monarchy of Charles I, adultera- 
 tion and the making of inferior beer soon arose to rob 
 the people still further of the benefits of their proper 
 standard beverage. 
 
 The greatest and most deleterious of the adulterants 
 immediately put into more general use was hops. For 
 years brewers had tried to palm ofF malt liquor adulterated 
 with hops as true ale, and as often as they had done so, 
 they had been severely punished by their rulers. For 
 there was not only a strong prejudice against hops, which 
 was entirely justified, but also a sound suspicion that hop- 
 ale was not ale. 
 
 As Hackwoad says : " Till the Revolutionary period 
 of the seventeenth century, Englishmen had been content 
 to drink malt liquor. It may be said that through the 
 centuries till then, ale had been the wine of the country, 
 the national beverage, all-suflicient for the taste and 
 temperament of the Englishman. On the outbreak of the 
 Civil War, in 1643, Parliament, with a view to increasing 
 the national revenue, imposed Excise duties on ale. . . . 
 The imposition of these duties, in that they eventually 
 tended to alter the drinking habits of the people, will be 
 found to be epoch-making and far-reaching in its effects."^ 
 
 It is not easy to say exactly when hops were first intro- 
 * Op. cit., p. 124. 
 214 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 duced into England; but public attention was certainly 
 called to them as early as the fifteenth century, for the 
 common people and their sovereigns disliked the weed 
 from the very beginning; while even as late as 1659, "^^ 
 gather from the evidence of an old play, that ale was still 
 generally made without hops, especially in the country 
 districts where the taste of the people was healthiest.^ 
 
 Bickerdayle tells us that in the first year of Richard Ill's 
 reign, a petition was presented to Lord Mayor Billesdon, 
 by the Brewers' Company, showing " that whereas by the 
 sotill and crafty means of foreyns dwelling without the 
 franchises ... a deceivable and unwholsome fete in 
 bringing of ale within the said citie nowe of late is f ounde 
 and practised, that is to say, in occupying and puttying of 
 hoppes and other things in the said ale of old type used 
 ... to the great deceite and hurt of the King's liege 
 people. . . . Pleas it therefore your saide good Lord- 
 shyppe to forbid the putting into ale of any hops, herbs, 
 or any other like thing, but onely licour,^ malte and 
 yeste."' 
 
 The petition was granted and a penalty of 165. Sd. was 
 laid on every barrel of ale so brewed contrary to the ancient 
 use. 
 
 Again, in the twelfth year of Henry VII's reign, John 
 Barowe, and twelve years later Robert Dodworth, were 
 prosecuted for using hops in the making of ale; while in 
 the tenth year of Henry VIII, William Shepherd, servant 
 to Philip Cooper, was similarly prosecuted. Henry VIII 
 disliked the hop exceedingly, *' and enjoined the Royal 
 brewer of Eltham that he put neither hops nor brimstone 
 into the ale";* while in 1542 Andrew Boorde, in his 
 Dyetary, wrote as follows : " Bere is made of malt, hoppes 
 and water; it is the naturall drynke for a Dutch-Man, and 
 nowe of late dayes it is moche used in England to the 
 detryment of many Englysshe people; specyally it kylleth 
 
 1 Bickerdayle, op. cit., pp. 72-73. 
 
 " Water. » Op. cit., p. 68. 
 
 * Op. cit., p. 71. 
 
 215 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 them which be troubled with the colyke, and stone, and 
 the strangulation." ^ 
 
 Thus both popular and learned prejudice seem to have 
 been vigorous and emphatic against the use of hops, and 
 the outcry was general. The English believed, says 
 Bickerdayle, " that they were like to be poisoned by the 
 new-fangled drink which was not in their eyes to be 
 compared to th^ sweet and thick, but honest and un- 
 sophisticated English ale." * 
 
 As a matter of fact the prejudice lasted until late in 
 the seventeenth century, and had it not been for the policy 
 of laissez-faire in matters of trade, which was inaugu- 
 rated by the Puritans, and which put an end to all state 
 protection of the consumer, and state supervision of trade, 
 there is every reason to suppose that it would have lasted 
 until this day. 
 
 In any case the liquor containing hops was not supposed 
 to be called ale at all, but beer, and it is against this so- 
 called "beer" that John Taylor, as late as the middle of 
 the seventeenth century, inveighs so bitterly in his long 
 poem on ale — 
 
 " To the Church and Religion it is a good friend. 
 Or else our Forefathers their wisdome did faile, 
 That at every mile, next to the Church stile, 
 Set a consecrate house to a Pot of good Ale. 
 
 " But now as they say. Beer beares it away ; 
 
 The more is the pity, if Right might prevaile : \ 
 For with this same Beer, came up Heresie here ; 
 The old Catholique Drink is a Pot of good Ale. 
 
 " This Beer's but an upstart from Dutchland here come, 
 Whose Credit with us sometimes is but small : 
 For in the records of the Empire of Rome, 
 
 The old Catholique Drink is a Pot of good Ale. 
 
 " And in very deed, the Hop's but a weed, 
 
 Brought o'er against Law, and here set to sale : 
 Would the Law were renew'd, and no more beer brew'd, 
 But all good men betake them to a Pot of good Ale." ' 
 
 ^ Chapter X, paragraph Beere. * Op. cit., p. 70. 
 
 ' J/f Ale-Fated Into the Ak-Titiide (1651), verses 26-29. 
 
 216 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 In the last pages of the book, John Taylor gives a 
 number of medical reasons, in keeping with the knowledge 
 of the time, why ale is superior to beer, and he very often 
 lights upon what I believe to be a great truth. For 
 instance, he says : " You shall never know or heare of a 
 usuall drinker of Ale to bee troubled with Hippocondra, 
 with HippocondryacaU obstructions or convulsions, nor 
 are they vexed (as others are) with severall paines of sundry 
 sorts of Gowts," ^ 
 
 While in his book Drinke and Welcome, he says — 
 when writing in the middle of the seventeenth century, 
 mark you! — " Beere is but an Upstart and a foreigner or 
 Alien. . . . Nor would it differ from Ale in anything, 
 but only that an aspiring Amaritudinous Hop comes 
 crawling lamely in and makes a Bitter difference between 
 them." * 
 
 As a matter of fact, it was a sound instinct that prompted 
 the people of England to be suspicious of the hop; for, 
 not only was the ale perfect without it, and simply adul- 
 terated by its addition, but also the properties of the 
 adulterant itself were very far from desirable. 
 
 Hops, however, possess two qualities which, consciously 
 or unconsciously, the Puritans must have thought very 
 precious. Besides being a means of altering, adulterating 
 and reducing the inspiriting ale of the past, hops constitute 
 a soporific and an anaphrodisiac. 
 
 All the pharmacopaeas mention it as an inducer of sleep, 
 and most of them speak of its anaphrodisiac powers. As 
 we read in the "National Standard Dispensatory : "Hops 
 may be used with benefit in the treatment of priapism and 
 seminal emissions."' Yes! priapism and seminal emis- 
 sions ! We know how the Puritans were disposed to such 
 things! How can the general use of hops in ale after 
 the triumph of the Puritans in the seventeenth century 
 any longer be regarded as an accident ! As I say, choice is 
 no accident. Hops fell into their hands like the Manna 
 
 1 Ale Ak-Vatedinto the Ale-Tttude, pp. 15-16. 
 * See p. II. * See p. 799. 
 
 217 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of the Israelites. Instead of rejecting them as previous 
 generations had done, they accepted thena. Such things 
 are not accidents. 
 
 Brunton, however, mentions one more property of hops, 
 which is important for my argument. He says: "Chief 
 among the soluble ingredients of hops is tannic acid." ^ 
 And we know that the effect of tannic acid is to retard 
 digestion — that is to say, to depress, to lower spirits, to 
 render lethargic, melancholy, humble and dull, in addition 
 to leading to all kinds of serious physical disorders. Even 
 if all the evil effects of hops were, however, very slight, 
 their use as an ingredient in the old ale of England would 
 still have to be deplored, seeing that this ale was in itself 
 so good and wholesome a beverage that it could only be 
 marred and not improved by the addition of any con- 
 stituents foreign to its original nature.* 
 
 But by far the most extraordinary coincidence of this 
 period of our history is that, precisely at the hour when 
 Puritans were inveighing against drink and the merriment 
 it engendered, at the very moment when by taxation, 
 hostile legislation, and their indifference to adulteration, 
 they were doing their utmost to abolish the good old ale 
 of England, and almost compelling the working classes to 
 cast about them to contrive other substitutes, two insidious 
 drugs were knocking at the door of social England for 
 admittance — two drugs which were of use to neither man 
 
 * Text-book of Pharmacology : Tkerapeutics and Materia Medica, 
 p. 1031. 
 
 * In recent years, of course, the evils of beer-adulteration have 
 attained such large proportions that it is now no longer a matter of 
 objecting merely to the introduction of hops, but to that of all sorts 
 of inexpensive and common substitutes, even more injurious than hops 
 themselves, among which quassia chips easily take the first rank. This 
 evil is, indeed, so far-reaching and serious that the very hop-growers 
 themselves have organised a movement to resist it, and at the time of 
 writing I have before me a number of leaflets and pamphlets, given me 
 by a prominent promoter of this movement, in which the deleterious 
 effects of the substitutes for that which in itself was originally nothing 
 but an adulterant, are analysed and exposed. 
 
 218 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 nor beast, and which, in my opinion, have largely con- 
 tributed to the physical impoverishment of the working 
 classes of England. I refer to tea and cofFee. 
 
 Sound scientific opinion is so unanimously agreed as 
 to the harmfulness of these two vegetable poisons, that it 
 might, perhaps, be sufficient for me simply to refer the 
 reader to Dr. Haig's Uric Acid, Dr. Tebb's Tea and the 
 Effects of Tea-drinking, Dr. Robert Hutchison's Food 
 and the Principles of Dietetics, Dr. T. Lauder Brunton's 
 Pharmacology, etc., where he would find more than I could 
 tell him concerning the deleterious influences of these 
 beverages. I will, however, enter briefly into the nature 
 of these alleged deleterious influences, in order that there 
 may be no doubt as to their general relation to the grand 
 movement that was on foot. 
 
 Tea and coff^ee reached this island at about the same 
 time, and began to claim the attention of ever wider and 
 wider circles from the middle of the seventeenth century 
 onward. Tea may have preceded cofi^ee by a few years; 
 but, at any rate, the difi^erence was slight, and previous 
 to 1630, neither of these beverages ^ was known to more 
 than a very select minority in England. 
 
 In any case it is certain that the first cofi^ee-house was 
 opened in London three years after the murder of 
 Charles I, and the others which speedily followed soon 
 proved themselves to be redoubtable rivals to the old ale- 
 vending tavern.^ 
 
 With nothing; to prevent the spread and gfcneral con- 
 sumption of these non-alcoholic drinks, and with every- 
 thing: to encourap-e their adoption by the poorest majority 
 in the land,^ it did not take long for them to become almost 
 
 J- Mr. W. Andrews, in Bygone England, fixes the date of the intro- 
 duction of coffee into England at the year 1641 (see p. 149). 
 
 * See Hackwood, op. cit., p. 358 : "A rival to the tavern, in 
 the shape of a public-house vending a non-alcoholic beverage, came 
 in appropriately enough when England was under Republican govern- 
 ment. As a pamphleteer of the Restoration put it : ' Coffee and 
 Commonwealth came in together.'" 
 
 3 It should be borne in mind that, at least so far as tea was 
 
 219 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the staple drinks of the people, and when to-day, in one 
 of the gilt and marble tea and cofFee emporiums of 
 London, we see two undersized, pale and unhealthy- 
 looking people of different sexes, simpering sickeningly 
 at each other over their pap and poison — their white, 
 adulterated bread, their boricised milk, and their tea — ^we 
 know to what period of our history we owe the establish- 
 ment in the land of the custom which makes it possible 
 for two such specimens of botched humanity to imagine 
 that they are partaking of food under such conditions. 
 
 Examine two such people more closely, however, and 
 you will find that they are the most typical products of 
 the diet that lies before them. Both suffer from indiges- 
 tion, the girl more particularly; both have no fire, no light 
 in their eyes; both are depressed, physically and spirit- 
 ually; each has the swollen knuckles of the rheumatic 
 invalid, neither of them has over much vitality, or sexual 
 vigour. They will probably sit side by side day after day 
 for years, sipping their poison and munching their pap, 
 and be able to wait continently for marriage without either 
 a pang or a pain. The girl laughs, and her long teeth, 
 denuded of their gums at the fangs, by the heat and the 
 tannin of her favourite drink, shine like the keys of an old 
 cottage piano. He returns the smile, and all along the 
 edge of his inflamed red gums you notice the filthy dis- 
 charge characteristic of pyorrhioea,^ which is a gouty malady 
 of the teeth. No wonder such charms can be resisted for 
 many a year! Puritanism can find nothing to criticise 
 here. There is little that lures to life, and to a multiplica- 
 tion of life, in such ghastly people. Even a maypole 
 would not make these people attractive. They are pecu- 
 
 concerned, it was impossible at first, owing to its prohibitive price 
 per lb., for the poorer classes to touch it ; and they had to confine 
 themselves to badly adulterated ale and to coffee. By the end of the 
 eighteenth century, however, tea itself was sufficiently accessible to 
 all ; for 23,717,882 lbs. were consumed in one year by a population 
 numbering 16,794,000 {i.e. I "41 lbs. per head). 
 ^ Pyorrhoea alveolaris. 
 
 220 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 liarly adapted to their drab, ugly city; to its harsh noises, 
 its bad air, and its nervous ceaseless bustle. 
 
 A pretty waitress trips up to them. She is anaemic, 
 but there is vitality in her. The sun of love has not yet 
 reached her, and like all beautiful things that need the 
 sun, she has grown pale from the lack of her natural 
 element. The panel doctor prescribes iron; she herself has 
 a shrewd notion that the doctor has misunderstood her 
 malady. But so much about her has been misunderstood 
 since she was a girl of thirteen, that she is beginning to 
 doubt everything and to follow the main stream listlessly, 
 patiently and with resignation. 
 
 The man belonging to the sickly couple looks up. He 
 and his companion have finished their white adulterated 
 bread and pressed tongue, and in his face one can see a 
 faint burlesque of the determined look which might have 
 fastened on the face of an old Roman bent on enjoying a 
 banquet to the full. Gravely and portentously he orders 
 two pieces of cake, and without a suggestion of surprise 
 or wonderment — ^for this damnable farce is as common- 
 place as the misty, murky atmosphere outside — the pretty 
 waitress intersects the tables to the counter in order to 
 carry out his order. 
 
 No matter whether it is tea or coffee they have had, 
 the effects are much the same. The principal ingredients 
 of both are the alkaloid caffeine, which is a whip to the 
 brain and to the nerves, and which might be regarded as 
 the most corroborative drug possible for the neurotic, 
 hypertrophied and hypersensitive soul of the average 
 modern townsman; and tannic acid, the tendency of which, 
 says Dr. Tebb, " is greatly to impair digestion " and to 
 give " rise to palpitation of the heart, headache, flatulence, 
 loss of appetite, constipation and other symptoms." * 
 
 An ordinary infusion of tea is said to contain about 
 three or four per cent, of caffeine, and ten to twelve per 
 cent, of tannin; and according to Dr. Hutchison an 
 
 ^ Op. dt., p. 10. 
 221 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 ordinary cup of coffee contains about as much of the two 
 drugs as an ordinary cup of tea.^ 
 
 Ihe retarding influence of tea and cofi^ee on peptic 
 digestion has been established by many scientists, among 
 whom Fraser, Roberts, Ogata and Shulz-Schulzenstein 
 may be mentioned. While Dr. Brunton, speaking of the 
 effects of tannic acid, says, " even from small doses, there 
 is a dryness of the fasces and lessened peristalsis." ^ 
 
 The importance of this effect of the tannin element in 
 tea and coffee cannot be exaggerated, when we remember 
 to what it leads in the matter of loss of spirit, fire, vigour, 
 eagerness and general tone. While, among the subsidiary 
 effects of caffeine, we should not forget its influence in 
 increasing rather than diminishing tissue waste,^ and its 
 action as a depressor and paralyser once its stimulus to 
 the nerves and brain have become exhausted." * 
 
 Among other authorities who have deprecated the use 
 of tea are Sir Andrew Clarkej who thought that it was " a 
 great and powerful disturber of the nervous system," and 
 Sir B. W. Richardson, whose opinion is that " the alkaloid 
 [theine] exercises a special influence on the nervous system, 
 which when carried to a considerable extent, is temporarily 
 at least, if not permanently, injurious." ° 
 
 Now when it is remembered that at the present moment 
 255,270,472 lbs. of tea are used per annum in the 
 United Kingdom, and that it has been calculated that the 
 poor in London spend at least one-eighth of their income 
 in buying this drug, it is difficult to realise the full import- 
 ance of the revolution in so far as it undoubtedly affected 
 this question of dietetics. 
 
 For again I should like to point out that even if it could 
 be proved that tea and coffee are not nearly so harmful as 
 I claim, the fact that with adulterated ale they ultimately 
 became the masses' substitutes for the old ale of England, 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 324. * Op. cit., p. 1032. 
 
 * Hutchison, op. cit., p. 333. 
 
 * Brunton, op. cit., p. 871 ; Dr. Tcbb, op. cit., p. 19. 
 
 * Dr. Tebb, op. cit., p. 19. 
 
 222 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 which was at once a tonic and a food, would alone be 
 sufficient to make us deplore their general adoption. For, 
 in addition to their other shortcomings, as Dr. Hutchison 
 points out, they are " in no sense foods." ^ 
 
 Nor can it be said that there were no cries of protest 
 raised against their establishment as the staple beverages 
 of the people. 
 
 From the seventeenth century down to our own time, 
 an unceasing murmur of disapproval can be discerned 
 beneath the general and indolent acquiescence of the 
 majority, and it cannot even be urged that this disapproval 
 has tended to diminish through the centuries. On the 
 contrary, if science in her infancy once tentatively ven- 
 tured to condemn the use of tea and coffee, she now does 
 so with all the unhesitating emphasis that her increased 
 knowledge allows. 
 
 One of the earliest objectors was Dr. Simon Pauli, who, 
 writing in 1665, felt it incumbent upon him to warn 
 Europeans against the abuse of tea. He declared that it 
 was " moderately heating, bitter, drying and astringent";'' 
 and the German physician Dr. Cohausen and the Dutch- 
 man Boerhave were of the same opinion, the latter 
 emphasising the evil effects of tea on the nerves. 
 
 In 1673 the people themselves presented a petition to 
 Parliament in which they prayed that tea and coffee might 
 be prohibited, as their use interfered with the consumption 
 of barley, malt and wheat, the native products of the 
 country. " The petitioners," says Hackwood, " boldly 
 asserted that the ' laborious people ' who constituted the 
 majority of the population, required to drink ' good strong 
 beer and ale,' which greatly refreshed their bodies after 
 
 '^ Op. cit., p. 334 (see also Dr. Tebb, op. clt., p. 19). "Poor 
 people meet the craving for natural food by taking large quantities of 
 tea. A strong craving for it is engendered which leads to the taking 
 of tea at almost every meal, greatly to the injury of health. Poor 
 women in the factory and cotton districts become actual sufferers from 
 this cause, they are rendered anxmic, nervous, hysterical and physically 
 feeble." 
 
 * Dr. Tebb, op. cit., p. iz. 
 
 223 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 their hard labours; and that the pot of ale or flagon of 
 strong beer with which they refreshed themselves every 
 morning and every evening, did them no great prejudice, 
 hindered not their work, nor took away their senses, and 
 while it cost them little money, it greatly promoted the 
 consumption of home-grown grain." 
 
 William Cobbett, too, whom I have so often quoted in 
 these pages, was very hostile to tea and coffee, and in 
 1829 in an address to young men wrote as follows : " Let 
 me beseech you to resolve to free yourselves from the 
 slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-ketde, if, 
 unhappily, you have been bred up in such slavery. 
 Experience has taught me that these slops are injurious to 
 health."^ And again : "You are weak; you have delicate 
 health; you are ' bilious ! ' Why, my good fellow, it is the 
 very slops that make you weak and bilious ! And, indeed, 
 the poverty, the real poverty, that they and their con- 
 comitants bring on you, greatly assists, in more ways than 
 one, in producing your delicate health." ^ 
 
 Dr. Simon Pauli was also strongly opposed to coffee, 
 for the strange reason that he firmly alleged that it pro- 
 duced sterility. Of course, as a drug which, like tea, 
 depressed the whole system, coffee must to some extent 
 impair sexual potency; it is, however, doubtful whether it 
 can, like hops, be regarded as a direct anaphrodisiac. At all 
 events, however. Dr. Pauli's view is curiously confirmed 
 by an extraordinary pamphlet which appeared in 1674. 
 For even if we suppose that this pamphlet was meant only 
 as a mere joke, surely the thought of connecting impaired 
 
 ^ Advice to Toung Men, Letter i, par. 31. 
 
 * Ibid., Letter i, par. 32. See also Rural Rides, Vol. I, p. 30, 
 where, speaking of certain perambulatory impostors, Cobbett says : 
 " They vend tea, drugs and religious tracts. The first to bring the 
 body into a debilitated state ; the second to finish the corporeal part 
 of the business ; and the third to prepare the spirit for its separation 
 from the clay ! Never was a system so well calculated as the present 
 to degrade, debase and enslave a people." See also Rural Rides, 
 Vol. II, p. 272 : " If I had a village at my command, not a tea-kettle 
 should sing in that village." 
 
 224 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 sexual potency with cofFee can be no accident, and popular 
 opinion and rumour based on popular experience, must 
 to some extent have supported it, otherwise this pamphlet 
 would have had very little point. It is called The 
 Women's Petition Against Coffee,^ and after much that 
 I could not think of quoting, we read — 
 
 "The dull Lubbers want a Spur now, rather than a 
 Bridle : being so far found doing any works of superero- 
 gation that we find them not capable of performing those 
 Devoirs which^ their Duty, and our Expectations Exact. 
 . . . The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after 
 a serious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the 
 Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more 
 than the Excessive use of that Newfangled,. Abominable, 
 Heathenish Liquor called CofFee, which rifling Nature of 
 her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Mois- 
 ture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our 
 more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as 
 Age, and as unfruitful as those Desaris whence that un- 
 happy Berry is said to be brought. . . .^ Wherefore the 
 Premises considered, and to the end that our just Rights 
 may be restored, and all the Ancient Priviledges of our 
 Sex preserved inviolable; That our Husbands may give 
 us some other Testimonies of their being Men, besides 
 their Beards and wearing of empty Pantaloons. . , . But 
 returning to the good old strengthening Liquors of our 
 Forefathers; that Nature's Exchequer may once again be 
 replenisht, and a Race of lusty Hero's begot, able by their 
 achievements, to equal the Glories of our Ancestors." ^ 
 
 1 By a Well-Wilier. " Representing to Publick Consideration the 
 Grand Inconvenience accruing to their sex from the Excessive Use of 
 that Drying, Enfeebling Liquor." 
 
 * Page 2 of Pamphlet. 
 
 ' Page 6 of Pamphlet. On page 5 of this pamphlet there is also 
 shown some hostility to the weed tobacco. I do not intend to burden 
 this essay any further by an examination of the effects of this drug ; 
 certain it is, however, that tobacco, by paralysing the motor nerves 
 of involuntary muscles and the secreting nerves of glands, does 
 act as a powerful anaphrodisiac. Now it is well knowtl that James I 
 Q 225 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Thus, at some length, I have stated the case for the 
 old ale of England and against the innovations tea and 
 coffee. And I have done this, not in the spirit of a diet- 
 reformer, but rather with the view of showing how 
 thoroughly and how perfectly both chance and design 
 combined in the seventeenth century to render the most 
 earnest religious desires and beliefs of the Puritanical 
 faction capable of realisation in England. 
 
 As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, all 
 deep religious movements have their hygiene and diet as 
 well as their morality, and in this respect the religion of 
 uncontrolled trade and commerce, which I suggest is 
 Puritanism, is no exception to the rule. The desired end 
 was achieved. The object of the Puritans was to convert 
 England from a garden into a slum, from a land of spirited, 
 healthy, vigorous, happy and beauty-loving agriculturists, 
 herdsmen and shepherds into a land of unhealthy towns- 
 men, hard manufacturers, docile and sickly factory hands 
 and mill hands, and a sweated proletariat, indifferent alike 
 to beauty as to all the other charms of full and flourishing 
 life. And everything conspired to produce this result: 
 the defeat of Charles I in the field of rebellion, the triumph 
 of the trade Puritanical party and the advocates of a 
 "Free" Parliament, the hostility of the Puritans to 
 beauty, sex, life, high spirits and cheerfulness, and finally, 
 the reforms they and their legislation brought about in 
 the food and drink of the people. 
 
 For, as I have already shown, they also considered the 
 question of solid food in its relation to the lusts of the 
 body, and sought to reduce these as far as possible by 
 dietetic means. Mrs. Cromwell, who was in a position 
 to set an example to all the housewives of England, was 
 a confirmed advocate of " pious plainness." " She ate," 
 says M. B. Synge,^ " marrow puddings for breakfast, and 
 
 and Charles I both hated tobacco smoke, and thoroughly disapproved 
 of the habit of pipe smoking. James I even wrote a book against it ; but 
 the Commonvirealth men were, on the other hand, much addicted to it. 
 ^ A Siert History of Social Life in England, p. zi8. 
 
 326 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 fed her husband on sausages of hog's liver. When she 
 suspected general discontent in her household she was 
 heard to remark: * The Kingdom of God is not meat 
 and drink, but righteousness and peace ' " — precisely the 
 root doctrine of her husband's party! 
 
 Another writer, speaking of Mrs. Cromwell's house- 
 hold, says : " The food is described as ordinary and vulgar, 
 and no such dainties as quelquechoses were suffered. 
 Scotch coUops of veal was an almost constant dish, varied 
 by a leg of mutton, a pig collared like brawn, or liver 
 puddings. Mrs. Cromwell's usual drink was Pumado, 
 which reads like a glorified edition of toast and water." ^ 
 
 Next to the physical and spiritual transformation of 
 the Englishman, however,, by far the worst results of the 
 Puritanical Revolution consisted in the spread of the spirit 
 of greed and gain in the nation, through the triumph of 
 trade, and all the consequent evils of the prevalence of 
 such a spirit — ^that is to say, (i) the increase of the shop- 
 keeper or the middle-man class, (2) the opportunity 
 and temptation to adulterate the vital nourishment of 
 the people,^ and (3) harshness towards the unprotected 
 proletariat. 
 
 Taking these consequences in the order in which I 
 have stated them, it must be obvious that any increase 
 in the shopkeeper or middle-man class must be bad for 
 three reasons : (a) owing to the undesirability of the type 
 of man who is content and happy to spend his life unpro- 
 ductively in buying at one price and selling at another; 
 (b) owing to the fact that the middle-man always separates 
 
 ^ T^ English Housewife in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, by 
 Rose M. Bradley, p. 150. 
 
 2 In order to avoid burdening this chapter unduly, I have deliberately 
 shunned any elaborate treatment of one of the most important items in 
 the general charge I bring against the Puritan innovations. But there 
 can be no doubt that an exceedingly good case could be brought against 
 them, on the subject of adulterations alone ; for their regime of laissez- 
 faire in trade morality certainly tolerated all kinds of abuses in food 
 adulteration which must also have had a seriously deleterious effect upon 
 the health and spirit df the people. 
 
 227 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the purchaser from the producer and thus prevents every- 
 thing in the shape of human intercourse, of healthy 
 criticism, of thanks, of gratitude or of an effort to please 
 between them; and (c) because the middle-man delays the 
 encounter between the product and the pvu-chaser, and 
 therefore, by introducing the quality of staleness, gives 
 rise not only to ill-health directly, but also indirectly, 
 through the temptation to use adulterants which prevent 
 or disguise staleness.^ And all these three reasons are 
 independent of the greatest reason of all, namely, that 
 shops and shopkeeping make huge, unwieldy town popula- 
 tions possible and even plausible, and thus lead to all 
 the miseries with which we cannot help associating a 
 monstrous "wen" like London. 
 
 In regard to reason (c), that which constitutes its most 
 regrettable feature is the permanent lack of freshness which 
 characterises everything that the town man eats or drinks. 
 Those who have picked fruit from the trees on which 
 they grow, those who know what it is to drink fresh milk, 
 eat fresh eggs and puU up fresh lettuces for their evening 
 meal, must realise what it means to lead a life in which 
 all one's food is soiled, bruised, finger-marked, dog-eared, 
 tarnished! through having passed through the hands of 
 so many middle-mbn or shopkeepers before it reaches one's 
 table. And yet how many millions of Englishmen lead 
 such lives, and without a murmur! 
 
 In regard to reason (b), William Cobbett has so many 
 interesting things to say that, at the risk of fatiguing the 
 reader, I feel I must quote him in full. 
 
 Writing on Sunday, October 22, 1826, Cobbett said: 
 " Does not every one see, in a minute, how this exchang- 
 ing of fairs and markets for shops creates idlers and 
 traffickers; creates those locusts called middle-men who 
 create nothing, who add to the value of nothing, who 
 
 *■ To refer again to ale, there seems to be no doubt that the whole 
 value of the hop, apart from its bitter flavour, consisted in the fact that 
 it preserved the malt liquor, thus proving a desirable ingredient to the 
 middle-man or shopkeeper. See Bickeriiayle, op. cit., p. 80. 
 
 228 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 improve nothing, but who live in idleness, and who live 
 well, too, out of the labour of the producer and the con- 
 sumer ? The fair and the market — those wise institutions 
 of our forefathers, and with regard to the management of 
 which they were so scrupulously careful — the fair and the 
 market bring the producer and the consumer in contact 
 with each other. Whatever is gained is, at any rate, gained 
 by one or the other of these. The fair and the market 
 bring them together, and enable them to act for their 
 mutual interest and convenience. The shop and the 
 trafficker keeps them apart ; the shop hides from both 
 producer and consumer the real state of matters. The 
 fair and the market lay everything open : going to either, 
 you see the state of things at once; and the transactions 
 are fair and just, not disfigured, too, by falsehood, and by 
 those attempts ut deception which disgrace traffickings in 
 general. 
 
 " Very wise, too, and very just, were the laws against 
 forestalling and regrating} They were laws to prevent 
 the producer and consumer from being cheated by the 
 trafficker. There are whole bodies of men, indeed a very 
 large part of the community, who live in idleness in this 
 country in consequence of the whole current of the laws 
 now running in favour of the trafficking monopoly. It 
 has been a great object with all wise governments, in all 
 ages, from the days of Moses to the present day, to confine 
 trafficking, mere trafficking, to as few hands as possible. 
 It seems to be the main objects of this government to give 
 all possible encouragement to traffickers of every descrip- 
 tion, and to make them swarm like the lice of Egypt. . . . 
 Till excises * and loan-mongering,^ these vermin were 
 never heard of in England. They seem to have been 
 
 ^ These laws were regarded, of course, as interferences with trade, 
 and were soon abolished after the introduction of the laissez-faire policy 
 of the Trade-puritanical party. 
 
 * The invention of the Puritans. 
 
 ' The invention of statesmen of the second half of the seventeenth 
 century under the government of the usurper William III. 
 
 229 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 hatched by that fraudulent system, as maggots are bred 
 by putrid meat, or as flounders come in the livers of rotten 
 sheep. The base vermin do not pretend to work : all they 
 talk about is dealing; and the government, in place of 
 making laws that would put them in the stocks, or cause 
 them to be whipped at the cart's tail, really seem anxious 
 to encourage them and to increase their numbers. . . ." ^ 
 
 But, alas! the fair and the market are as good as dead. 
 Like the agricultural life upon which they rested as popular 
 institutions, they were swept away by the triumph of 
 trade and industry, and no one so much as questioned 
 whether it were right or even desirable to abandon either. 
 
 The monstrous vdcers which are pompously and 
 euphemistically called the hearts of the Empire grew 
 swollen and inflamed to bursting-point under the new 
 system, backed as it was by religion and the sword; so 
 that even one hundred years ago one of the greatest and 
 deepest men Europe has ever produced did not consider 
 it an absurdity to say that the English were a nation of 
 shopkeepers. 
 
 And now, when we look back on this terrible trans- 
 formation; when we see the youth and flower of England's 
 proletariat and lower middle class marching daily to their 
 mill, to their factory, to their mine, to their sufi^ocating 
 stokeholds, to their stools in stuffy oflices, to their shops 
 where they stand like mere selling, virtueless intermediaries 
 between the producer and the buyer, or their horrible 
 benches in a telephone exchange; when we examine their 
 pale and , haggard faces, their listless eyes and their 
 emaciated bodies, not even pretending to offer any spirited 
 resistance to the ghastly dehumanising and devitalising 
 nature of their labours; when, moreover, we watch the 
 sweated pauper at his work, and inspect the environment 
 in which he lives — the filthy grey slum, its crowded 
 inmates, the bad air, tRe poor, adulterated and insufficient 
 food and the racking labour — ^we cannot help being 
 staggered by the amazing brutality of the whole scheme 
 1 Rural Rides (edit. J. M. Dent), Vol. 11, pp. 195-196. 
 230 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 of modern life, with loathsome, conscience-salving charity 
 as its leaven, and by the inhuman cruelty of those who 
 laid its most powerful and most solid foundation-stones. 
 
 Instinctively we cry with Cobbett, "My God! is there 
 no spirit left in England?"^ But when we remember 
 how the metamorphosis of the Englishman was accom- 
 plished, what need is there for such a question? We 
 know that there can be but very little spirit left in 
 England. 
 
 Are there, however, any grounds for accusing the tri- 
 umphant Puritan-parliamentary party of inhuman cruelty, 
 as I suggest above? Were they brutal? Were they 
 inhuman ? 
 
 The difficulty in replying to such questions is not so 
 much to collect evidence as to compress it, and to give 
 its essence. 
 
 That the Piuitan-parliamentary party were cruel and 
 inhuman no historian ever seems to doubt. But even 
 admitting that no deep religious transformation of a people 
 can ever be accomplished without a cruel disregard of the 
 type which it is proposed should be stamped but, and 
 that, therefore, the very first accusation I have brought 
 against the Puritan party in this essay — namely, that of 
 having deliberately imposed the religion, hygiene and diet 
 of commerce and trade upon their fellows in order to rear 
 the necessary slaves for uncontrolled capitalistic indus- 
 trialism — involved the accusation of cruelty, there is still 
 a vast mass of other and independent evidence of their 
 cruelty, as manifested in their activities as ordinary soldiers, 
 rulers, prison-warders, judges. 
 
 To take only two instances from the Grand Rebellion 
 — selected from the impartial and authoritative narrative 
 of Professor S. R. Gardiner — who but a company of 
 bloodthirsty and callous ruffians would in the fifth decade 
 of the seventeenth century have put a gentleman of the 
 stamp of Colonel Reade on the rack day after day, in 
 the hope of wringing from him the secret of his master 
 1 Rural Rides, Vol. II, p. 264. 
 231 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Charles I's Irish schemes ? ^ Who but a pack of cowardly 
 blackguards would have behaved as Captain Swanley and 
 his subordinates did in 1644 on the coast of Pembroke- 
 shire? After capturing a vessel laden with troops from 
 Ireland, these ferocious savages actually " tied the Irish- 
 men back to back and flung them into the sea to drown! " 
 And, as Gardiner observes : " Not a voice was raised in 
 Parliament or in the City in reprobation of this barbarous 
 cruelty." ^ 
 
 But perhaps the reader has read the trial of Strafford 
 and the trial of Laud; and here, apart from all other 
 evidence, has satisfied himself of the brutality of the 
 Puritan party. Indeed, history teems with incidents 
 which confirm my contention, and in concentrating upon 
 the great Commonwealth leader alone, Oliver Cromwell, 
 whose example must have exercised a powerful influence 
 over his contemporaries, ample proof of my charge will 
 be found. 
 
 Charles I, the most tasteful and, perhaps, the most 
 patriarchal monarch that England has ever seen, was lying 
 in London under sentence of death. Whatever CromweU 
 and his colleagues may have thought of him, at least the 
 signing of the unfortunate King's death warrant should 
 have been a solemn and awful affair. These men, it is 
 true, did not know the nature of the crime they were 
 committing, they did not in the least understand the great 
 character of their victim or the value of the things for 
 which he stood; but even if he had been the most dis- 
 reputable criminal, the signing of his death warrant was 
 certainly not a thing about which a joke could decently 
 have been made or enjoyed. And yet what was Cromwell's 
 behaviour at this solemn moment? 
 
 Like an idiotic school-boy he "ragged" and "rotted" 
 his colleagues, and, after having aflixed his damnable name 
 to the warrant for Charles's murder, turned to Henry 
 
 ^ History of the Great Civil War, Vol. I, pp. 1 12-1 13. 
 2 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 337. 
 
 232 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 Martin, who was sitting at his side, and with his pen 
 jokingly smeared Martin's face with ink! ^ 
 
 This is a small matter, you may think — so, perhaps, it 
 is; but it is significant enough for my purpose. It suffi- 
 ciently proves Cromwell to have been a man utterly devoid 
 either of good taste or good feeling. 
 
 But now let me turn to charges which you may possibly 
 consider more serious and more substantial. It is not 
 generally known that in the seventeenth century English- 
 men sold their own flesh and blood into the most cruel 
 form of slavery — ^that form which compels a man to be 
 transported to some distant land away from all his friends 
 and relatives, to toil in tropical heat under the lash of a 
 strange and frequently cruel taskmaster, and to die a 
 victim to an inhuman tradesman who can turn human 
 blood into gold. It is estimated that for some years after 
 the triumph of the Puritans thousands were thus deported 
 to Virginia and Maryland, and Cromwell was himself 
 chiefly responsible for the enslavement of the majority 
 of these thousands. In addition to the Scots taken on 
 the field of Dunbar, the Royalist prisoners of the battle 
 of Worcester and the leaders in the insurrection of Pep- 
 ruddock, Lingard tells us that Cromwell shipped thousands 
 of Irish boys, girls and women to New England, into 
 hopeless slavery, in his ferocious efl^orts to stamp out 
 Catholicism in Ireland.^ 
 
 AU the tortures endured by the victims of the Inquisi- 
 tion pale before the lives of excruciating physical and 
 mental suff'ering endured by these thousands of exiles, 
 driven in herds on shipboard by Cromwell and his assistant 
 butchers, and wrenched from all that they loved and cared 
 for, in order to languish in bondage abroad. 
 
 The horrors of the negro slave trade were ghastly 
 
 1 Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, by Dr. W. F. Hook, Vol. Xl, 
 p. 406. 
 
 * History of England, Vol. VIII, p. 357. For the measures takeji by 
 Cromwell to exterminate the Catholic population of Ireland, or to 
 expatriate it, see pp. 356—357 and note. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 enough. But what were they compared with the inhuman 
 and hideous brutality of this enslavement by one race of 
 its own kinsmen? 
 
 And you must not suppose that the negroes suffered 
 any more cruelly than did their white fellows in bondage. 
 Read E. J. McCormac's White Servitude in Maryland, 
 and see for yourself the brutalities of which these Puritans 
 in New England were capable. See especially the case of 
 William Drake/ "who in September 1674 suffered such 
 excruciating tortures as a white slave that, as one reads 
 the story, it is difficult to credit one's eyes or the veracity 
 of the historian. 
 
 He who is simple-minded, innocent and stupid enough 
 to imagine that these unfortunate Irish Catholics suffered 
 the lash only for their indolence or for their inattention 
 to their labours had better give up thinking about these 
 matters altogether, and devote himself heart and soul to 
 the task that modern Fate in the twentieth centviry has 
 allotted him. But to one like myself, who has lived with 
 Low Churchmen and Nonconformists, and who has had 
 glimpses into their savage hatreds and their brutal poten- 
 tialities, kept in check only by law and not by the humanity 
 or nobility of their natures, such a notion is quite absurd. 
 As one who has written so much about Nietzsche the 
 Ante-Christ, and who has been engaged for so long in 
 propagating his doctrines, I know what little chance of 
 quarter, of justice, or even of common or garden mercy, 
 I might expect if ever I got into their power, away from 
 the protection of the law. 
 
 Perhaps to some, though not to me, Cromwell's 
 massacres in Ireland will seem more terrible even than 
 his expatriations. The fact that, after taking Drogheda, 
 he gave up the inhabitants to a general slaughter, which 
 lasted for three days,^ may strike one or two readers as 
 
 ^ On page 64 of the book mentioned above. 
 
 * In the words of a subaltern in Cromwell's own forces, the atroci- 
 ties perpetrated at the massacre of Drogheda were terrible. Women 
 were ruthlessly murdered and their jewels torn from their necks and 
 
METAMORPHOSIS OF THE ENGLISHMAN 
 
 more horrible and unpardonable than the brutality of his 
 systematic enslavement of the Irish population. 
 
 As a matter of fact, whether this be so or not does not 
 signify. The important point, and the one which is the 
 real characteristic of all these atrocities, is the inhuman 
 disregard of the unprotected and the helpless once they 
 had come into the power of the conquerors. For this is 
 precisely the characteristic of the whole of the modern 
 scheme of life. 
 
 The revolting cruelties of our early factory and mining 
 life, the appalling brutality of our treatment of children 
 in industry, the callous barbarity of the apprentice traffic 
 (once so scandalous in England), the hideous ill-treatment 
 of the little chimney-sweeps, and the hard unconcern 
 with which even the modern world allows thousands 
 and thousands of the proletariat to be dehumanised and 
 sickened by besotting and hopeless labours — all these 
 things, with which no monarch, however benign, however 
 patriarchal, can now interfere, I regard as merely part and 
 parcel with the original brutality of the true ancestors of 
 the modern world, the Puritan and Free Parliamentary 
 party, whose power, whose principles and whose life- 
 despising morality have been paramount in England ever 
 since the last upholder of good taste and popular liberty 
 was overthrown and murdered by them in the fatal fifth 
 decade of the seventeenth century. 
 
 And when I look around me to-day, and perceive the 
 harsh, ugly, unhealthy, vulgar, nervous and spiritless life 
 of modern times; when I see the seething discontent in 
 all grades of society, and especially in the women of 
 north-western Europe, it seems to me by no means 
 extravagant or even fantastic to suppose that at this 
 present moment we are witnessing the final unfolding 
 of the bloom, the finest flower and the most perfect 
 product of that religion of gain and greed, of trade and 
 
 fingers, and little children were taken up by Cromwell's soldiers as 
 bucklers of defence " to keep themselves from being shot or brained." 
 See Ling^rd, op. cit., Vol. VIII, p. 635. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 so-called liberty, of uncontrolled capitalism and unscru- 
 pulous exploitation; of the contempt of beauty, health, 
 vigour, sexuality and high spirits, whereof the hygiene, 
 the diet, the moral principles and the whole outlook on 
 the worid are to be sought and found in the general 
 attitude of Prynne, Vane, Cromwell, Essex, Pym, Fairfax, 
 Harrison, Hewson, Waller and the rest of odd names and 
 natures which constituted seventeenth-century Puritanism. 
 
 236 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS UNDER THE 
 
 MODERN DEMOCRACY OF UNCONTROLLED TRADE AND 
 
 COMMERCE 
 
 " The chief propelling power of democracy in England was misery." 
 J. Holland Rose, The Rise of Democracy, p. 19. 
 
 I FEEL that it is now time to restate my thesis, and 
 that I shall be able to do so the more intelligibly for 
 having written all that has gone before. 
 
 In the first place, however, I should like to direct 
 attention to one or two popular points of view connected 
 with my subject which, plausible as they may seem, are 
 yet, in my opinion, based upon error. 
 
 With the test of success growing ever more and more 
 final (for, according to most people nowadays, it is suffi- 
 ciently crucial and decisive to be applied to anything and 
 everything), there is a growing tendency among thinkers 
 of the present day to repudiate any old institution whose 
 dignity has been debased or overthrown by the incom- 
 petence of those in whose charge it happened to be found 
 in the moment of its weakness. 
 
 As an example, take the institution of wealth and 
 property.- 
 
 There can be no doubt or question that wealth and 
 property can be, and often prove, sacred and divinely 
 beneficent powers. Once the lofty duties associated in- 
 evitably with wealth and property are fuUy comprehended 
 by their owner, nothing is more sublime than the dual 
 
 23^7 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 combination of a wise administrator and his possessions.^ 
 But there can also be no doubt or question that for many 
 hundreds of years, here in England, and particularly 
 latterly, the divine dignity of wealth, the holy duties of 
 property, have again and again been wantonly violated 
 and desecrated by generation after generation of pluto- 
 crats who have made no effort to rise to the fuU beauty 
 and majesty of the position which wealth and property 
 ought invariably to involve. Thus in many quarters the 
 good name of wealth has been besmirched and sullied 
 beyond recognition, and has imfortunately given the 
 envious many a vile pretext for wagging tiheir viperish 
 tongues. 
 
 That these things have happened nobody in his senses 
 would deny. The only doubt I entertain, however, is 
 whether most people put the proper construction upon the 
 fact. 
 
 Admitting that for many years now wealth and property 
 have been abused in Englandj save by a few select 
 individuals, who, nevertheless, have not been numerous 
 enough to give the direct lie to the others, how ought 
 this circumstance to be interpreted.? 
 
 Unfortunately, there is a tendency all too general and 
 quite as absurd as it is artificial to lay the whole blame 
 of this abuse not on the unworthy individuals themselves, 
 but, if you please, on the shovdders of the institution of 
 wealth and property as such, as who should say that the 
 plough must be wrong if the furrow be crooked. 
 
 The Socialists bring a strong case against the abuses' 
 of wealth; but I maintain that they bring no case what- 
 ever against wealth or property itself. And why they 
 should direct all their attacks against the institution of 
 power in property, when all the time this is obviously as 
 
 ^ The ancient Egyptians apparently held this view of wealth. An 
 Egyptian writer living 3,800 b.c. said : " If thou art rich after having 
 been needy, harden not thy heart because of thy elevation. Thou hast 
 become a steward of the good things belonging to the gods." Quoted 
 by Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 328. 
 
 238 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 innocent as it is sacred, despite its pollution by many of 
 its holders, is a question to whicK I have never yet heard 
 them give a satisfactory reply. 
 
 Charles I would have said, just as Cobbett said long 
 after him, " there is nothing wrong either in great wealth 
 or in extensive property,^ provided that it be wisely 
 administered." 
 
 That is the whole point. Human nature, in casting her 
 creatures, moulds many a one who is worthy of great 
 possessions, and also many a one who is as unfit to use 
 power in any form beneficently as a barbarous Fuegian. 
 And where wealth and property are uncontrolled, as they 
 always are in countries where laissez-faire, or something 
 approaching to it, is the economical doctrine, both are sure 
 to acquire a bad name through the villainy of the number 
 of those who are unfit to possess them. 
 
 To attack wealth and property in themselves — to attack 
 capitalism in fact — is, however, as shallow as it is specious. 
 For these things have existed since the world began, and 
 in their essence they are no more wrong than superior 
 beauty or superior vocal powers. That which has ceased 
 to exist, though, and whose collapse was the most fatal 
 blow ever levelled at wealth and property, is that direction, 
 guidance and control from above, which either a king of 
 taste, a party of tasteful aristocrats, or a conclave of sages 
 in taste, are able to provide, and which prevent the edge 
 of power from being pressed too heavily and unscru- 
 pulously by the tasteless and vulgar among the opulent 
 against the skins of their inferiors and subordinates. 
 
 The socialist attack upon wealth, then, is shallow and 
 superficial. But so, too, is the democrat's attack on aristo- 
 cracy, and for precisely the same reasons. 
 
 It is admitted that the aristocracies of Europe have 
 on the whole wantonly blemished the sacred principle of 
 aristocracy. It is also, however, a sign of the crassest and 
 most unprecedented stupidity to repudiate the principle 
 of aristocracy on that account; and it is more particularly 
 ' See Rural Rides (edit. Dent), Vol. II, p. 7, 
 
 ^39 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 stupid to do so in England where we have only to think 
 of such great men as Elizabeth's chief adviser Cecil, 
 Charles's chief adviser Strafford, and the noble Earl of 
 Shaftesbury of the nineteenth century — to mention only a 
 few — in order to have before our eyes the very acme and 
 quintessence of what the aristocrat should and can be. 
 
 And this brings nie to my thesis, which I shall now 
 restate before proceeding any further. 
 
 I take it that life, the process of living, is a matter of 
 constantly choosing and rejecting. All life could be 
 summed up in the two words select and reject. Healthy 
 and permanent life chooses correctly — that is to say, 
 selects the right, the healthy, the sound thing, whether it 
 be a doctrine or a form of diet. Unhealthy and transient 
 life chooses wrongly — that is to say, it selects the wrong, 
 the unhealthy, the unsound thing in doctrine as in diet. 
 
 Now, most of the animals that we find about us to-day, 
 creatures which are but the reduced and decimated repre- 
 sentatives of the vast fauna which once inhabited our 
 globe, have all survived as species only because they 
 descend in a direct line from an uninterrupted chain of 
 ancestors, all of whom chose the correct or proper thing 
 in habit as in diet. 
 
 And, if these species continue to exist, it will be simply 
 because, by means of their instincts (which are merely their 
 spontaneous faculties of selecting and rejecting inherited 
 from their discerning ancestors), they continue the process 
 of life which is to choose and to thrust aside in the proper 
 healthy and sound manner, just as their ancestors did. 
 
 As Bergson has shown so conclusively, however, Man, 
 in acquiring his power over an infinitely greater range of 
 adaptations than any animal has ever been able to achieve, 
 has depended very largely upon his intellect, upon his 
 rationalising faculty; and this has been developed at the 
 cost of his instincts which, I repeat, constituted the trans- 
 mitted bodily record of his ancestors' healthy selectings and 
 rejectings. 
 
 We must imagine Man, therefore, as a creature cut 
 
 240 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 adrift from a large mass of incorporated ancestral select- 
 ings and rejectings, which must have been right, healthy 
 and sound, and we must see him as dependent very largely 
 upon his own wisdom for guidance in that continued 
 process of selecting and rejecting of which his life was still 
 bound to consist, after he had lost the direction of his 
 primeval instincts. 
 
 Admitting all this as being quite obvious, what is the 
 conclusion to which we are ciriven ? As I pointed out in 
 the first chapter, we must conclude that this choosing and 
 rejecting in matters of doctrine and diet cannot be the 
 matter of a mere whim or mere passing caprice, neither 
 can it be a " matter of opinion "; it is a matter of life and 
 death. For the survival of man as man depends entirely 
 upon his life being carried on correctly. 
 
 The old and shallow English belief that every man has 
 a right to his own opinion, assumes that the individual con- 
 science, whether it be that of a crossing-sweeper or of a 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, is an adequate tribunal 
 before which any problem, however profound or intricate, 
 may be taken and solved. 
 
 But if life is a matter of choosing and selecting correctly, 
 there must be one opinion on these matters that is right, 
 and another that is wrong. Therefore to grant every one 
 the right to his opinion must in a lai-ge number of cases 
 involve not only anarchy but also a condonation of suicide; 
 for some men's opinions on vital questions, by being 
 erroneous, must lead to deaths — that is to say, to a cessa- 
 tion of man as man. It may, in addition, involve a con- 
 donation of murder; for those who hold and act upon 
 wrong opinions will not only cease to exist as men either 
 in their own or a subsequent generation; but they may 
 stand in the way of others' existing. 
 
 Very well, then. Taste, which is the power of discerning 
 right from wrong in matters of doctrine, diet, behaviour, 
 shape, forni, constitution, size, height, colour, sound and 
 general appearance, is the greatest power of life; it is a 
 power leading to permanence of life in those who possess 
 R 241 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 it and who can exercise it. The absence of taste, or bad 
 taste as it is sometimes called in these same matters, is a 
 defect involving death, it is a defect leading to sickness or 
 transiency in lire in those who suffer from it. 
 
 Thus, the only man who could logically demand the 
 right for the dictates of the absence of taste to be heard 
 and obeyed would be the confirmed pessimist. The tenets 
 of bad taste ought to be his guiding code of morals, because 
 they are the certain road to death. On the other hand, 
 the optimist who, on the stupid plea that every one has a 
 right to his own opinion, unconsciously voiced the views 
 of bad taste, would thereby defeat his own ends and prove 
 himself a shallow fool into the bargain. 
 
 Having arrived at this conclusion, which slams the door 
 in the face of anarchy (every one has a right to his own 
 taste), and in the face of democracy (the taste of the 
 majority is right), the question next arising is : Who is in 
 pjossession of the touchstone of permanent life and of 
 healthy life which I call taste.? Who can choose cor- 
 rectly.? Who is able to discriminate between the right 
 and the wrong thing in doctrine, diet, behaviour, shape, 
 form, constitution, size, height, colour, sound and 
 appearance ? 
 
 The complicated conditions arising out of a state of 
 civilisation render it all the more important to arrive at 
 some definite decision upon this point, seeing that there 
 are many hidden and secret paths, and many broad and 
 conspicuous highways too, in a state of civilisation, which, 
 though they do not appear to the ordinary mind, for the 
 first score of miles or so, to lead to Nemesis, do ultimately 
 lead to a death which is apparent to the presbyopic 
 sage. 
 
 The business of consciously choosing, therefore, has 
 grown to be one of the most profound and subtle concerns 
 of the activity of life; for, not every lethal draught is 
 labelled Poison, nor has every one of life's elixirs been 
 withdrawn from the ban put upon it by the man of no 
 taste. 
 
 242 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 We have seen how things fared when the staggering 
 insolence of the Puritan mind induced the most impossible 
 Nonconformist sect in England to assume the lead in 
 matters of choosing and discarding in this country. We 
 have seen how many things they rejected and despised, 
 that permanent and flourishing life demands and insists 
 upon having, and we have seen how many things they 
 selected and embraced which lead only to Nemesis and 
 destruction. 
 
 I have not suggested, and do not wish to suggest, that, 
 in thus choosing the wrong things, the Puritans con- 
 sciously aimed at compassing their own or their fellows' 
 degeneration and destruction. I submit only that while 
 they thought they were but gratifying their own legiti- 
 mate impulses and choosing the right things, they actually 
 chose the wrong; and it was because they lacked taste, or, 
 as the saying goes, because they had bad taste, that matters 
 turned out as they did. 
 
 To take only one fact out of hundreds : if it be true, 
 as medical men assure us it is, that, after three generations, 
 born and bred cockneys become sterile, and that it is " the 
 despised yokel who rejuvenates our cities, who recruits 
 our army and who mans our ships of war," ' then it is 
 obvious that the kind of mind that chose the conditions 
 in which the cockney is born and bred, or that laid the 
 foundations of their existence, was one which had no taste, 
 or had, as people say, bad taste. 
 
 It is often said when great changes or reforms come 
 over a nation, that " the blind force of some abstract and 
 inexorable economic law has made itself felt." This is 
 simply nineteenth-century superior bunkum. 
 
 The whole truth of the matter is that when great 
 changes or reforms have come over a nation, a certain 
 portion of that nation — often the more powerful portion — 
 has deliberately chosen and established those great changes 
 or reforms in the teeth of an opposition which would have 
 chosen otherwise. As I have shown in the case of the 
 
 1 F. E. Green, op. cit., p. IJ- 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Puritanical reforms, you may, if you like, retrospectively 
 superimpose a semblance of economic law on all that 
 occurred in the seventeenth century, and thus disport 
 yourself as a profound economist after the fact. But if, 
 like myself, you are tired of this most fastidious kind of 
 futility; you will see in the events of the first half of the 
 seventeenth century, nothing more than a conflict of two 
 tastes — one good, one bad, one vital, one deadly, one 
 beautiful, one ugly — and the ultimate overthrow of the 
 type which represented good taste. 
 
 For, there are millions of so-called economical laws, and 
 any single group of them would be able to prevail, pro- 
 vided precisely that party in the State prevailed which in 
 its taste happened to favour the direction or workings of 
 that particular group. 
 
 To return, then, to my leading question : Who is in 
 possession of this touchstone of what is favourable to per- 
 manent and healthy life, which I call taste.? Who is able 
 to choose correctly.'' Who can discriminate between the 
 right and the wrong thing in doctrine, diet, behaviour, 
 shape, form, constitution, size, height, colour, sound and 
 appearance ? 
 
 In answering this question I shall not reach up into the 
 skies or out into the air for any new-fangled principle that 
 has neither precedent nor warrant in fact. I shall rely 
 simply upon the collected experience history gives us, and 
 upon our knowledge of men aild things. 
 
 For this, in short, is what I claim : I claim that among 
 all the variations shown by all animals and all men, two 
 are perfectly distinct, recognisable and constant, and might 
 constitute the headings of a broad double classification of 
 the fauna and of the men on this globe for all time. I 
 claim that some animals and some men, thanks to a for- 
 tuitous and rare concatenation of happy circumstances, are 
 born the examples of flourishing life — life in its maximum 
 of beauty, health, vigour, will and sagacity within the 
 species; and that others are born the examples of mediocre 
 or impoverished life— life in its average or in its minimum 
 
 244 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 of beauty, health, vigour, will and sagacity within the 
 species. 
 
 This is a fact to be observed by all who live, breathe 
 and think among living things; it is a fact that requires 
 no demonstration because it is the experience of all. 
 
 -Maximums, like minimums, are for some reason rarer 
 occurrences than the mediocre or medium lives; but if we 
 think of life at its best we instinctively call to our minds 
 an individual who possessed or who possesses a maximum 
 of beauty, health, vigour, will and sagacity; and if we think 
 of it at its worst, we likewise remember or picture an 
 individual who possessed or who possesses a minimum of 
 beauty, health, vigour, will and sagacity. As examples 
 more or less perfect of the first class taken at random, let 
 me suggest the Frenchmen who were the second and third 
 Dukes of Guise, the Englishman Strafford, the Corsican 
 Napoleon, the Englishman Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 
 the German Goethe. As examples more or less perfect of 
 the second class, also taken at random, let me suggest the 
 Frenchman Calvin, the German Luther, the Englishman 
 Cromwell, and the ancient Greek Socrates. 
 
 Now, if we can speak of " flourishing life " at all, how 
 have we acquired our concept of such a phenomenon ? Life 
 is not a vast abstract and indefinite creature standing like 
 a wire-puller and a monitor in the background of a group 
 of living creatures. Only in poetical language do we speak 
 of Life as something distinct from and independent of vital 
 organisms. 
 
 We only know life, therefore, from the examples of 
 living creatures we have seen, or of which we have heard. 
 Life is a factor in the world process with which we are 
 acquainted only through the living. All our notions about 
 it are derived, not from our abstract poetical image of 
 Life, but from creatures that have actually existed. 
 
 If, then, we speak of "flourishing life," we mean So- 
 and-so who was an example of it — not a disembodied ideal 
 created in the fervid imagination of a dreamer. In fact. 
 So-and-so who was or is an example of flourishing life is 
 
 245 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the only canon and criterion we have of this kind of life; 
 we have absolutely no other canon or criterion. And the 
 same applies to the other kind, to impoverished and 
 mediocre life. 
 
 This being so, the voice of flourishing life is not a voice 
 descending from the clouds or any other part of the 
 heavens; it is a perfectly definite sound emitted by those 
 who are responsible for our being in possession of a 
 concept of flourishing life at all. Just as the voice of 
 mediocre, impoverished or degenerate life is a thoroughly 
 definite sound which we expect to hear rising respectively 
 from a crowd of ordinary people, from a party of decadents, 
 or from a lazaretto. 
 
 Seeing, however, that our quest is to discover the needs, 
 the desires, the likes and dislikes of flourishing life — 
 because as optimists we desire permanence — whither shall 
 we turn for an enumeration of these things .'' No scientific 
 investigator, however wise, or however profound, can 
 pretend to propound the taste of flourishing life by merely 
 taking thought; no assembly of ordinary or mediocre 
 people will ever be able to discover it by simply deliberat- 
 ing; because, as I have pointed out, it is not an abstract 
 thing which can be imagined or formulated by an effort 
 of the intellect — however great — it is a perfectly definite 
 thing like gold, which you either have, or have not. 
 
 The only source to which we can turn, then, for the 
 needs, the desires, the likes and dislikes of flourishing 
 life, is the example of flourishing life himself. What he 
 wa,ntSj flourishing life wants; what he selects, flourishing 
 life selects; what he reviles, flourishing life reviles. His 
 voice utters the taste of flourishing life; it is the canon and 
 criterion of all that leads to permanence and resistance in 
 life — it is Taste. 
 
 It may differ slightly in outward form in different times 
 and climes — nay, it must so differ; but that it will remain 
 constant if the same conditions persist is also obvious. 
 
 The taste of flourishing life, like our concept of it, is 
 something the possession of which implies the possession 
 
 246 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 of an example of flourishing life in our midst. It is only 
 thea that life speaks healthily on matters of doctrine, diet, 
 etc. And, as health in these matters means permanence 
 and power, one of the first preoccupations of all great 
 peoples should be to have, and to hearken unto, those who 
 are examples of this maximum of life, and to take care 
 that such are born. 
 
 For, as I have pointed out above, by far the greater 
 majority of mankind are either simply ordinary, in which 
 case their selectings and rejectings will be uncertain, mis- 
 taken, and often dangerously wrong; or they are decadent, 
 in which case their selectings and rejectings are sure to be 
 erroneous, and therefore prove deadly; or they are sick 
 and degenerate, in which case their selectings and reject- 
 ings are the recipe par excellence for death. 
 
 The true aristocracy, then, the only genuinely best men 
 on earth, are the examples of flourishing life whose likes 
 and dislikes — whose discernment, in fact, is our canon of 
 taste. The concern about living and lasting as a great 
 power, as a great people, or as a great culture, is not only 
 mextricably bound up with them, it is a futile, impossible, 
 impertinent and hopeless venture without them. 
 
 And the healthy peoples of the past knew at least this 
 fact. It was always their endeavour and their 'greatness 
 to make the voice of flourishing life as generally and as 
 universally accepted as possible. They were aware of the 
 rarity of examples of flourishing life, so deeply aware, 
 indeed, that all great religions may be regarded only as 
 sacerdotal attempts at perpetuating and preserving the 
 important utterances concerning taste of a few great men. 
 They knew that one man who was an example of flourish- 
 ing life, or many men who were examples of it, could not 
 convert a whole nation into similar men; but they realised 
 that he or they- could impose their taste, their canon upon 
 them, and thus make a people participators in their price- 
 less and inestimable privileges. 
 
 Such an imposition of taste is, then, the greatest act of 
 altruism that can be imagined; for it may save a whole 
 
 247 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 nation from destruction for thousands of years; and their 
 obedience is simply the soundest form of egoism possible; 
 for, without it they may perish. 
 
 This, then, is the principle of sound aristocracy. It is 
 the principle of life. Only he who is a pessimist can declare 
 that it is wrong. For there are no two opinions about it; 
 it is not a matter over which every upstart thinker can have 
 his standpoint. He who is an optimist and who denies it 
 is simply wrong. 
 
 But this principle of sound government is responsible 
 not only for the healthy life and welfare of a people, not 
 only for its survival and permanence, but also for its 
 Culture and its Art. Because Art and Culture without 
 direction from above, without a grand scheme of life pro- 
 viding the artist with the terms for his interpretation of 
 life — such art is mere make-believe, mere affected fooling. 
 For the architect, the sculptor, the painter, the poet, the 
 musician and the actor are essentially dependants — depen- 
 dants upon the superior man who is the artist-legislator. 
 They themselves do not represent the will behind a great 
 social organisation; they merely illustrate it and interpret 
 it. That is why their function becomes meaningless and 
 erratic, and their aims become anarchical, unless there be 
 that in their life and in their nation which gives their art 
 a meaning, a deep necessity and an inspiration. Hence 
 the muddle in Art to-day! Hence its anarchy and its 
 pointlessness ! The chief artist, the artist-legislator being 
 non-existent, his followers no longer have that momentum, 
 that direction and guidance which their function requires 
 for its healthy vitality. 
 
 Now, in the light of this basic principle of aristocracy, 
 what precisely does democracy mean ? 
 
 Most of us are familiar with the kind of argument 
 which is usually levelled against democracy. I am not con- 
 cerned, however, with the common and stereotyped attack 
 which can be made upon the democrafic position. "When 
 I read Sir Henry S. Maine's Popular Government and 
 Lecky's Democracy and Liberty — ^works I would earnestly 
 
 248 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 advise every one to study — I was amazed at the mass of 
 subordinate, and to my mind entirely subsidiary reasons 
 which the author of the latter work especially urges 
 against democracy, and I was also deeply impressed by 
 the sobriety of tone in which these reasons are marshalled 
 and discussed. This work having been accomplished so 
 well by others, however, I should only be performing a 
 piece of superfluous duplication were I to restate all the 
 cogent reasoning set forth by them.^ While, therefore, 
 I cannot help regarding Lecky's wonderful summing up of 
 the usual case against democracy as very helpful to my 
 position, and to the position of all those who, like myself, 
 stand for an aristocratic order of society, and while I cannot 
 help agreeing with much that Sir Henry Maine advances 
 on the same side; I yet feel that the strongest and most 
 formidaljle attack on the democratic position is left entirely 
 out of our reckoning if we do not understand and are not 
 told that democracy must mean death. 
 
 Although this conclusion arises quite naturally from the 
 reasoning of the preceding pages, let me briefly restate the 
 stages by which it is reached. 
 
 I have attempted to establish the following proposi- 
 tions — 
 
 (i) That life is a process of choosing and discarding in 
 matters of doctrine and diet, etc. 
 
 (2) That to choose rightly in these matters for humanity 
 means the permanence and the resistance of man as man, 
 of a power as a power, of beauty as beauty. 
 
 (3) That to choose wrongly, or to discard wrongly, 
 means the ultimate evanescence of man as man, or of a 
 race as a race, or of a people as a people. 
 
 (4) That flourishing life, with its needs, is not an 
 abstract entity which can be realised by meditation, or by 
 
 ^ The point that distinguishes the two volumes of Lecky's Dems- 
 cracy and liberty more, perhaps, than anything else, seems to me to be 
 the numerous adumbrations occurring throughout the work, of abuses 
 and acts of corruption in the domain of politics which have taken place 
 since the volumes were written in the years 1893-1895. 
 
 249 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 taking thought; but that it is something with which we 
 become acquainted only through those rare possessors of 
 it who are born from time to time amongst us, and who, 
 for the lack of a better name, we may call the "lucky 
 strokes of nature." 
 
 (5) That these possessors of flourishing life, or " lucky 
 strokes of nature," are the only individuals of the human 
 species who can exercise taste in discriminating between 
 right and wrong in matters of diet, doctrine, etc., because 
 flourishing life never becomes articulate about its likes and 
 dislikes, save through them. 
 
 (6) That although one of these "lucky strokes of 
 nature " cannot by an efi^ort of will make all men like unto 
 himself; he can, by imposing his taste upon his fellows, 
 help them to share, for their own good, in the inestimable 
 benefits of his judgment. 
 
 Now, what is the position of modern democracy ? What 
 indeed did the democrat claim even in the time of the 
 Puritan rebellion? 
 
 While admitting that life is a matter of selecting and 
 rejecting, the democrat has claimed all along, and in direct 
 contradiction of historical facts, that not a few, but all men 
 are endowed with the gift of selecting and rejecting 
 correctly in matters of diet, doctrine, etc. 
 
 Forgetting Nature's irregularity, her comparatively few 
 really lucky strokes, and her relatively infrequent absolute 
 failures; forgetting, too, the total inability of man to 
 become acquainted with the demands of flourishing life, 
 save through its examples themselves, he, the democrat, 
 literally overlooked, discarded, in fact, the question of 
 Taste. 
 
 With those examples of flourishing life which are bound 
 to occur, even in democratic days (though perhaps a little 
 less frequently at such than at other times), he therefore 
 proceeds to mass together all those examples of impover- 
 ished and mediocre vitality, who cannot open their mouths 
 without expressing the taste of impoverished and mediocre 
 life, and whose taste, accordingly, leads inevitably to im- 
 
 250 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 poverishment and mediocrity in life. The wrong thing is 
 chosen and discarded in doctrine; the wrong things are 
 selected and rejected in diet; however slow the process may 
 be, the cumulative result must in the end be disastrous; 
 and what happens ? What cannot help happening ? What 
 indeed has happened under our very eyes ? 
 
 Death begins to threaten all the power, all the health, 
 all the institutions and all the prestige which were once 
 built up by the tasteful founders of the nation. 
 
 Death begins to assail the nation's virtues, its character, 
 its beauty, its world-ambition, its resistance, its stability, 
 its courage and its very people. Death under the cover 
 of insidious and almost imperceptible decay begins like 
 a hidden vandal to undermine the great structure of a noble 
 nation, and to level everything of value, of grandeur and 
 of grace to the dust. 
 
 It cannot be helped! Nothing can stop it! It is a 
 perfectly natural process. No mortal creation, however 
 hardy, can bear for long the deadly course of selecting and 
 rejecting the wrong thing in diet, doctrine, etc. And yet 
 the very principle of democracy forces this lethal process 
 upon all nations who adopt it. 
 
 The greater and nobler the edifice, of course, the longer 
 it will take for the corrosive to destroy it. But, that its 
 doom is inevitable, no one who has given the matter 
 mature consideration can doubt for one moment. 
 
 Democracy forgets the vital element Taste. I say it 
 forgets it; but it never actually takes it into account at all. 
 It has no experience of the Taste which alone can dis- 
 criminate between the right and the wrong thing; how 
 could it make a place for it in the scheme of life? 
 
 Democracy, therefore, means death. It means inviting 
 Life's adversary to the Council-board. It means admitting 
 into the deliberations concerning life one, or rather many, 
 who can be right about life only by a fluke, only by the 
 merest accident, and who could no more be expected to 
 voice the likes and dislikes of healthy permanent life, than 
 a kangaroo could be expected to go foraging for pheasants. 
 
 251 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 And even if the whole of England rose up and with 
 one voice cried out, " You are holding up an impossible 
 scheme of things to replace that which, however bad, is at 
 least possible and practicable ! " 
 
 I should reply: "This may be a comment upon our 
 present hopeless condition; it may be a true description 
 of our degenerate state; it may possibly be a fact that the 
 only practicable political means left open to us are those 
 which lead inevitably to Nemesis; but that has nothing 
 whatever to do with my contention. The fact that you 
 no longer see any practicable method of, installing " the 
 lucky strokes of nature" in power does not in the least 
 prove that democracy is not death! Often in a chase the 
 last loophole left for a stag or a hare is the merciful 
 precipice which shatters it to death. Do not let us, 
 however, give our precipice euphemistic names which may 
 make our death less noble even if thereby it become less 
 painful. Do not let us call it the "liberty of man," 
 the "freedom of Parliament," the "apotheosis of man's 
 independence " ! 
 
 Look about you to-day! See the confusion and chaos 
 that reign over all questions of doctrine, diet, hygiene, 
 behaviovir, the relations of man to man, and above all of 
 sex to sex; and ask yourself whether everything does not 
 already bear the indelible stamp of having been left too 
 long without the discriminating guidance of taste. Where 
 traditional usages are breaking down, what is rising to 
 take their place.? Where old institutions are losing dieir 
 power, where are the substitutes offered by the present 
 age? 
 
 Whatever beauty we possess — ^the beauty of the warrior 
 — marine and territorial — and his accoutrements, the 
 beauty of royal ceremony and apparel, the beauty of 
 our homes, of our churches, of our art, of our great 
 inheritance, of our pride as a nation — derives all its power 
 and all its depth not from the present, but from the past. 
 The present is productive, it is even prolific, in innova- 
 tions, complications and duplications ; but it does not 
 
 252 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 prodxice beauty — ^we are grateful if it produces things 
 that are not positively ugly. 
 
 Thus, however weighty and forcible may be the argu- 
 ments which Mr. Lecky or Sir Henry S. Maine bring 
 against democracy, however imposing may be the mass 
 of detail with which the former has adorned his indict- 
 ment, the most powerful and most fundamental criticism 
 of democracy still remains out of all reckoning, if notice 
 is not taken of the profound truth that, since democracy 
 includes the voice — and a majority of the voices — of 
 mediocre or impoverished life, it is bound by slow or 
 rapid steps to lead to Nemesis and to death. 
 
 You cannot with impunity drown the voice of flourish- 
 ing life in your councils; you cannot go unpunished if 
 Taste be outshouted at your governing board; you cannot 
 hope to be permanent, or to attain to even relative per- 
 manence, in your power and prestige, if the very touch- 
 stone of that which is sound in choosing and discarding 
 be excluded from your deliberations, or as good as 
 excluded, by being hopelessly overwhelmed. 
 
 I have been at some pains in the preceding chapters 
 of this book to show how far astray mankind has wan- 
 dered in England, owing to the lack of the element Taste 
 in our midst. I have enumerated a few of the hundreds 
 of innovations and novelties that have been allowed to 
 establish themselves in our society without provoking 
 even a question, much less a protest, among the members 
 of the governing body. I have also shown that while in 
 Charles I we had at least some one who understood a 
 number of the essential elements of true rulership, and 
 primarily Taste, he was grossly and absurdly mistaken 
 by his contemporaries, and was brutally supplanted by 
 men who not only lacked the faintest notion of what true 
 rulership meant, but, as I have tried to show, are also 
 entirely responsible for our present muddle and madness 
 to-day. 
 
 And, after all that I have said, how foolish does the 
 popular belief appear which would have it that there is 
 
 ^53 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 an obscure and natural law prevailing in this universe 
 that nations should rise and fall, flourish and decline, 
 despite all the efforts on the part of man to hold them 
 upright. The very disparity between ^the duration of 
 Egypt and Greece as civilised powers, or between the 
 cultures of China and Europe, shows how eccentric this 
 law must be, if it be a fact at all. Without the inter- 
 fering action of a vis major, however, quite independent 
 of the inner vitality and power of the civilisation itself 
 and of its people, who can tell how long Egypt or China 
 or ancient Peru might have lasted as examples of per- 
 manence for the whole world to witness? ^ 
 
 And when I contemplate this wonderful and stupendous 
 Empire of Great Britain, and think of the noble blood 
 and effort that have been spent in building it; when I 
 realise its fabulous powers for good or evil, its almost 
 unprecedented influence for virtue and quality, iii the 
 world, its vastness and its amazing organisation, I shudder 
 to hear the modern cynic speak with calm resignation 
 about a certain law of nations, according to which all this 
 marvellous structure must vanish and be forgotten. I 
 hate to listen to the sad but certainly unagitated tones 
 with which the cultured Britisher sometimes acknowledges 
 the fact that his country is standing at the cross roads, 
 and that the heads of the foremost horses show a decided 
 twist in the direction of the highway to ruin. 
 
 Knowing of the existence of no such obscure law 
 relating to the rise and decline of nations— /or nations, 
 unlike individuals, can regenerate their strength and their 
 youth ^ — I know only one thing, and that is, as I have 
 said, that taste is a power of life, leading to permanence 
 
 -^ For an interesting discussion on the causes of national decline, and 
 for a learned refutation o^ the old " moral " reasons of former historians, 
 let me refer the reader to Gobineau's rinigaliU des Races Humaines, Otto 
 Sieck's Geschichte des Untergangs der Antiken Welt, and Reibmayr's Inzucht 
 und Vermischung. 
 
 * See Otto Sieck's argument ending : " Es ist also falsch, dass die 
 glelchen Gesetze filr Individuen und ganze Nationen gelten" op. cit., pp. 
 
 26l-z62> 
 
 25+ 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 in those who possess it, whereas the absence of taste Is 
 as certain to lead to death as any poison, slow or gradual, 
 that the ingenuity of man ever concocted. 
 
 I know, therefore, that if this vast creation, the British 
 Empire, be really in danger, if it be truly decadent and 
 degenerate, it is possible to rescue it; its salvation is a 
 conceivable thing; its preservation an act within our reach 
 and within our power. And he who does not feel that 
 there is something worth saving here, and something worth 
 fighting for — ^whether he be a Scotsman, Welshman, 
 Canadian, Australian or Irishman — is unworthy of being 
 placed in the presence of anything great or noble created 
 by the hands of man. I do not suggest, mark you, that 
 the patriot's notion of preserving the British Empire 
 should necessarily consist in becoming its wholehearted 
 a,dvocate alone. On the contrary, there a.re times when 
 one's greatest friend would deem it an act of friendship 
 to assail one. But all I wish to imply is that to any one 
 ■^be he British or Colonial — there must appear to be 
 something in this great realm that is worth perpetuating 
 and guarding from ruin. And no friendship, no patriot- 
 ism, could be more radical and fundamental than that 
 which recognised that Taste, alone, the guidance and 
 direction of flourishing life, alone, can be of service and 
 of value here; and that nothing which thwarts and delays 
 the prevalence of that one quality in our midst can be 
 looked upon with patience, not to speak of equanimity. 
 If England had never in her history produced men of 
 taste; if her national records contained no instances of 
 genuine ruler-spirits; if, as some would have us believe, 
 there Is something Inveterately perverse about the Anglo- 
 Saxon which renders all hope of his permanence as a 
 world-power merely a wild and feverish dream. It would 
 Indeed be a hopeless outlook, and we should have no 
 other alternative but to acquiesce with as good grace as 
 possible In a doom as Ignoble and inglorious as our past 
 has been great. But I have myself, in this small book, 
 been able to refer to a goodly number of such spirits; 
 
 ^S5 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 nay, in the very worst period of England's history I have 
 been able to point to a whole number of them, and it 
 would be simply a piece of gratuitous injustice to assume 
 that such spirits will not or cannot occur again, or that, 
 if England's powers are suffering from momentary ex- 
 haustion, that these cannot be revived and regenerated 
 by a proper and judicious selection and encouragement of 
 her best and noblest qualities. 
 
 The above, then, is my thesis. It now only remains 
 for me to attempt to outline the manner in which the 
 principles it involves can be made practicable. But though 
 this will constitute the burden of the ensuing chapters, I 
 shall straightway reply to certain obvious objections to 
 my standpoint which occur to my mind as I write, and 
 shall conclude this chapter with one or two considerations 
 relating especially to the decline of manners and morals 
 under the modern Democracy of Uncontrolled Trade and 
 Commerce — considerations which I think all the more 
 worth stating, seeing that they are of a kind not usually 
 recorded in attacks upon the democratic position, and are 
 not, therefore, to be found in the ordinary anti-democratic 
 book or pamphlet of the day. 
 
 Turning to the obvious objections first, let me reply 
 to the opponent who very naturally inquires where and 
 when do I find the historical warrant for my thesis. 
 
 I find it in great historical individuals, and in groups 
 of individuals, who may be said to be, and who were 
 undoubtedly, examples of flourishing life. 
 
 Read the canon of the Brahmans — the Book of Manu; 
 read the canon of the Jews — the Books of Moses; read 
 the canon of the Mahommedans^ — the Koran !^ In each 
 of these books, if you study them with care and under- 
 standing, you will see but the record of a few men's or 
 of one man's taste in diet, doctrine, behaviour, etc. And 
 
 '- It is interesting to note, in reference to the facts adduced in 
 Chap. V. of this book, that the Koran forbids the drinking of coffee to 
 the faithful. \ 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 whatever permanence or power you may ascribe to the 
 obedient followers of these books you will realise is due 
 ultimately only to the elaborate direction and guidance 
 of one man or of many men of taste, in the matter of 
 selecting and rejecting. 
 
 In the case of the Jews and of the Mahommedans, for 
 instance, we are concerned with two men, Moses and 
 Mahommed, who were undoubtedly maximums of flour- 
 ishing life; in the case of the Brahmans, we are concerned 
 with an aristocratic group or body of examples of flourish- 
 ing life, of whose traditional laws and customs the Book 
 of Manu is but a codification. 
 
 As further examples of groups, or bodies of examples, 
 of flourishing life whose rule made for the permanence, 
 power and prosperity of their peoples, I would also refer 
 to the semi-religious and semi-temporal aristocracies of 
 ancient Egypt, whose culture endured for so many 
 thousands of years, and of ancient Peru, whose culture, 
 founded and maintained by the Incas, is, with Egyptian 
 culture, one of the most amazing examples of aristocratic 
 wisdom, foresight, clemency, practicality and art that the 
 world has ever seen. 
 
 Neither will it be possible for you to divorce the cir- 
 cumstances of China's extraordinary permanence from the 
 fact that, in Confucius, his great predecessors and his 
 equally great followers, the Chinese people had men of 
 taste, as I understand them, who once and for all laid 
 down the basis of healthy and permanent life for the 
 whole nation. While even if you inquire into the un- 
 doubtedly healthy regimen of the devout Catholic, with 
 all his fast days and lenten abstinence (which were simply 
 a religious insistence on periodical intervals of vegetarian 
 or non-stimulating diet), and his festivals (which Ivere 
 likewise only the religious sanction granted for occasional 
 fits of dionysian indulgence), you will be surveying merely 
 the canonised taste of some of the greatest specimens of 
 flourishing life that arose during the Middle Ages.^ 
 *■ Among the rocks on which Catholicism foundered we cannot 
 
 2$f 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 That the nations of antiquity fell only after they had 
 ceased to hearken to the voice of flourishing life is a fact 
 which must have struck many a historian or reader of 
 history. We have only to think of the many exhortations, 
 open or covert, on the part of the Jewish prophets, such 
 as Jeremiah, for instance, or on the part of the Greek 
 reactionaries, such as Aristophanes and Thucydides, or 
 on the part of the Roman writers, such as Cicero * or 
 Livy,* in which the keynote, tacit or expressed, is always 
 fidelity to the nation's best traditions and to the customs 
 and virtues of its forefathers (based, of course, upon the 
 dictates of flourishing life), in order to realise how essential 
 and how vital these virtues and customs of forefathers 
 must have seemed. While in China the extreme reverence 
 paid to ancestors, alone, is merely a socio-religious custom 
 guarding against a too diangerous departure from the 
 tradition of flourishing life. 
 
 It is even perfectly safe to prophesy, in the case of a 
 race like the Chinese, that any material departure from 
 the customs of their ancestors (which rely upon the original, 
 pronouncements of flourishing life) instigated by bad 
 European taste is sure to lead to decadence and death; 
 and unless the Chinese have the wisdom to use the science 
 and cultiare of Europe merely as weapons with which to 
 fight the European, without letting either that science or 
 culture enter too deeply into their social and spiritual life, 
 they are almost sure to be landed upon the highway to 
 ruin. For if they really become democratic; if they not 
 
 include a lack of men of taste in its organisation, for from this lack 
 it did not suffer. The primary reason I should give for its failure is 
 the fact that its doctrine was paradoxical from the start, and contained 
 an inward conflict ; and, secondly, that it attempted the task of the 
 cosmopolitisation of the world without reckoning with the anarchical and 
 barbarian people of the north of Europe, who were still insufficiently 
 cultured to understand or appreciate any rule or order superior to that 
 which they themselves had evolved. 
 
 ^ We have only to recall Cicero's constant reiteration of the expres- 
 sion " mos majorum." 
 
 ^ See History, Book V, Chapters 51-54. 
 
 258 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 only pretend to play at Parliaments, but actually allow 
 free parliaments to become the summum bonum of their 
 existence, they will certainly land in disaster, owing to that 
 strong element of ordinary or impoverished life which 
 will enter into the administration of their public and 
 social affairs. 
 
 In the ruin and downfall of the Peruvian civilisation 
 built up by the Incas, it is true we have an instance of 
 another kind of disaster — a disaster which cannot well be 
 traced to any flaw in the inner harmony and wisdom of 
 the civilisation itself; but here I think we have a right 
 to speak of a vis major which cannot well be foreseen or 
 forestalled by any precept of taste. Flourishing life may 
 choose and discard the right thing in every particular, but 
 it cannot help the earthquake which within a measurable 
 space of time is preparing to swallow it and its order up; 
 neither can it be so omniscient as to foretell and forestall 
 an overwhelming invasion from a people that seems to 
 have risen out of an ocean which hitherto had appeared 
 to be endless. 
 
 Another opponent may ask, " Who instals these men 
 of taste in power? Who 'elects' them to their position 
 of trust and influence? " 
 
 Looking back upon history, I find that no such act of 
 installation or election ever actually takes place, save as 
 a surface movement. What really happens, what has 
 always happened — save in degenerate times — is that those 
 among humanity who were examples of flourishing life 
 have always asserted and established their superior claims 
 themselves. And in communities in which the proper 
 values prevail concerning greatness, nobility, taste, beauty, 
 power, sagacity and health, they find themselves as natur- 
 ally raised to power by their own efforts as a frog rises 
 to the water's surface by the movements of its agile 
 limbs. 
 
 True, it is difficult to point to a great religion or to 
 a great nation that has originated from the single-handed 
 efforts of one man; but what usually occurs is this, that 
 
 259 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 just as one fool makes many^ so does one maximum of 
 life prove a loadstone to all his equals and his approxima- 
 tions. Thus, while we find that a galaxy of men of power 
 seem quite spontaneously to have clustered round the 
 Founder of the Christian religion, we also see a group of 
 the most able warriors spring as if by magic round the 
 person of the great Napoleon. 
 
 It is this element in men of flourishing life which helps 
 them to assert and establish their claims — this element of 
 discrimination and attraction by which they choose and 
 draw to them men who are like themselves and who can 
 but strengthen their holy cause. 
 
 But for any such assertion and establishment of higher 
 claims to be possible, the pre-requisite is that the com- 
 munity in which the attempt is made should, in the first 
 place, be susceptible by education and general outlook to 
 the charm and beauty of the values of flourishing life. 
 
 In a community where the wrong, the decadent, the 
 degenerate and the impoverished values prevail concern- 
 ing the qualities greatness, beauty, bravery, nobility, 
 power, sagacity and' death, it is obvious that the claims 
 of superior life will not even be heard or understood, 
 much less, therefore, appreciated.^ 
 
 The very first step, therefore, to the assertion and 
 establishment of superior claims in oiir midst is that we 
 should be steeped in the values which make a recognition 
 of such superiority a possible achievement. It is for this 
 reason that all chance of a regeneration and a rejuvenation 
 of a decadent society is such a hopeless matter; because 
 although many may be born who could efi^ect the neces- 
 sary reforms, the fibre of the people is not precisely drawn 
 to that degree of tension which would cause it to respond 
 and vibrate in unison with its potential saviours. And 
 
 ^ As a matter of fact, in ^England and Western Europe of the 
 twentieth century, all values are not only such as to make the rearing 
 of great men improbable, but also of a nature which make the recog- 
 nition and utilisation of greatness well-nigh impossible, even when it 
 does appear. 
 
 260 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 a saviour, however willing, would be unable to effect 
 anything if the people among whom destiny placed him 
 were totally unable to respond to his personal appeal or 
 react to the stimulus of his body and his spirit. 
 
 All preparation for salvation, all first steps to reform, 
 in a decadent society should, therefore, consist in so 
 shaping the body of the people, and so tightening the 
 strings of their heart, that when the examples of flourish- 
 ing life come to draw their bow, as it were, across the 
 instrument by means of which, alone, they can assert their 
 superiority, this instrument may respond with warmth to 
 their touch, and not groan and screech discordantly until 
 they are disheartened. 
 
 This may sound poetical, fanciful and, maybe, grandilo- 
 quent language wherewith to express an essential principle 
 of practical politics. But let no one suppose that it is 
 any the less reliable for that reason. He who declared 
 that what we needed was a " transvaluation of values " 
 hit the nail on the head in this matter. For unless the 
 spirit of England be chastened and purified by a great 
 disaster or by a tremendous awakening brought on by a 
 vast trouble of some sort,^ nothing but a " transvaluation 
 of values," nothing, that is to say, but an attempt to 
 make those values prevail which will render the people 
 able and willing to recognise the claims of superior life, 
 can ever make the people disposed to allow saviours to 
 rise in their midst, or to appreciate them when they 
 attempt to rise. 
 
 And this is what so many people overlook when they 
 face the question of the revival of aristocracy. They 
 
 ^ It is curious to note that Bolingbroke held an almost similar view. 
 He does not speak of a " transvaluation of values " as an alternative to 
 a great disaster ; but he certainly recognises the value of a disciplinary 
 disaster or disciplinary stroke of fortune when a nation is decadent. He 
 says : " It seems to me, upon the whole matter, that to save or redeem 
 a nation under such circumstances from perdition, nothing less is neces- 
 sary than some great, some extraordinary conjuncture of ill-fortune, or 
 of good, which may purge, yet so as by fire." — The Idea of a Patriot King, 
 pp. 64-65. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 forget, in the first place, that examples of flourishing life 
 assert their own superior claims; but, secondly, that, in 
 order that this assertion may be effective, the proper spirit 
 and the proper outlook must reign in the world, so that 
 these superior claims may be met by some response. 
 
 Thus all those who to-day are anxious to revive an 
 aristocracy of taste and discrimination which alone would 
 be able to elevate us, and save Western civilisation from 
 ending its momentary downward course in the pit of ruin 
 and oblivion, will strive to find out first which are the 
 values favourable to the recognition of superior life when 
 it appears, and then, if they differ from existing values, 
 to transvalue the latter with all possible speed and 
 determination.^ 
 
 It may be objected by some that, while it is easy to 
 talk glibly of transvaluing values, the task is not so simple 
 as it may seem — nay, is it either practicable or possible? 
 Even when values have been transvalued, would it be 
 such a simple matter to impose them upon a whole 
 people ? 
 
 I would not contend for a moment that this task of 
 transvaluing values is simple, any more than is the task 
 of imposing them upon a whole people; but that the feat 
 is a practicable and perfectly possible one is proved not 
 ohly by ancient but also by quite recent practice. 
 
 To avoid dwelling once more on the stupendous trans- 
 valuation of values inaugurated by the Puritans, think 
 only of the amazing unanimity of opinion concerning 
 certain fundamental and essentially modern questions that 
 reigns to-day in England! Consider the almost universal 
 
 ^ At the present moment it cannot even be urged by the indolent 
 that this is an inquiry and a duty too fantastic to be undertaken. It 
 cannot even be said that it is a task too colossal to be faced by one 
 generation ; for, however inadequately the detail of the work may have 
 been accomplished, and however much there may remain of this detail 
 to be done, the modern world has in Nietzsche's stupendously courageous 
 inquiry into the broad question of sick and healthy values, an outline of 
 its task, and a signpost as to the direction that it should pursue, which 
 it can ignore only at its own hurt and peril. 
 
 262 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 acceptance of the subsidiary vaJues of modern uncontrolled 
 capitalistic commerce and industry, with their unabashed 
 and almost truculent worship of material wealth, speed, 
 so-called "Progress," mechanical contrivances of all 
 sorts, tasteless comfort, vulgar pleasures and shallow 
 versatile learning! Question the non-analytic masses — 
 whether of Belgrave Square, Shoreditch or Kensington 
 (they are all " masses " to-day) — and ponder over the 
 extraordinary agreement between them— sometimes, as we 
 have seen, contrary to their own best interests — ^with 
 regard to all questions of taste, of hope, of pleasure, of 
 leisure, of industry and the like; and ask yourself whether 
 something on a grand scale in the nature of a transvalua- 
 tion of values has not already occurred, even since the 
 time when men so different from each other as Byron 
 and Cobbett contemplated with the gravest alarm the 
 innovations that, in the early years of last century, 
 threatened completely to transform the face of England ! 
 
 So far from its being impracticable or impossible, there 
 is, as a matter of fact, nothing less difficult of accomplish- 
 ment in the whole sphere of government than precisely 
 this task of swaying, modifying and rendering uniform 
 the opinions of those who expect their cue, theif lead, 
 their example to come from their leaders, and who often 
 accept it cheerfully and unhesitatingly even when those 
 leaders are but half fitted — or worse still — for their 
 responsible position. 
 
 " But," continues my opponent, " if you admit this 
 factor of recognition on the part of the masses of the 
 people, you yield up your whole case to me; for that is 
 the democratic principle, that people should be fuled only 
 by their own consent." 
 
 I deny this imputation most emphatically, because I 
 see no relation whatsoever between what I have said and 
 the principle of democracy. 
 
 The assent which the people give to the claims of 
 superior life in my case has nothing whatever in common 
 with that rational exercise of judgment which a democratic 
 
 263 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 people are called upon to make in considering the pros 
 and cons of a certain measure, a certain policy, or a certain 
 doctrine. 
 
 The people who, as I say, respond to the claims of 
 superior life do not need to understand or to judge the 
 examples of flourishing life; nor could they do so if they 
 tried, for this would imply an equal modicum of under- 
 standing on the part of the masses to that possessed by 
 their superiors themselves, which it would be obviously 
 absurd to expect. The people, however, do not say " we 
 want these men because we understand them," but "we 
 want them because we feel they understand us." They 
 do not say "we want them because we iudge them 
 rightly," but " we want them because we feel they judge 
 us rightly." It is the attitude of the child to its mother. 
 The child can and does adore its mother without in the 
 least understanding the principles or virtues of true 
 motherhood. It assents to its mother as a mother, because 
 it sees that its mother understands its needs, its likes and 
 its dislikes, its foibles and its powers. 
 
 In the same way a people can assent to the rule or 
 leadership of certain individuals without in the least under- 
 standing the rationale of their deeds and policy, without 
 having attempted to enter into the pros and cons of their 
 principles and measures; and seeing that, according to my 
 hypothesis, the people would be unqualified to attempt 
 such acts of judgment, the fact that, like children, they 
 are simply able to feel and respond to those who under- 
 stand and judge them correctly saves them from all neces- 
 sity of appealing to that faculty of rationally weighing 
 pros and cons^ and of giving practised consideration to 
 deep principles and policies, which is indeed presupposed 
 by a democracy, and without the assumption of which 
 even the abstract idea of democracy would be absurd: 
 
 Thus while the people, in my case, respond as a child 
 does to its mother, because it feels itself understood, in 
 a democracy it asserts its will because it claims that it 
 understands — obviously a very different matter! In a 
 
 264 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 proper aristocracy the people assent to the nature of their 
 rulers without being called upon in the least to perform 
 any mental gymnastics which, however well educated they 
 may be, they are totally unfitted by tradition, upbringing 
 and bodily gifts to perform ; in a democracy they are 
 drawn into the confidence of the elected active adminis- 
 trators, they share their troubles, their anxieties and 
 responsibilities. They are actually invited to criticise, 
 modify, arrest and even initiate certain acts of policy. In 
 an absolute democracy they really govern. 
 
 Clearly, then, I yield no point to the democrats when 
 I agree that the first pre-requisite to a beneficent aris- 
 tocrat's rule is the sympathetic response of the people 
 whom he would guide and govern. The oldest principles 
 of Royalty and Aristocracy always regarded this tacit assent 
 of the masses as one of the proudest tributes to their 
 beauty and perfection; but this has absolutely nothing 
 to do with the idea of absolute or even representative 
 democracy.^ 
 
 The assent I speak of is the kind given by and expected 
 from the people of China. For many hundreds of years 
 now the Chinese have been expected to assent to their 
 ruler's rule ; , but this act of assent has never presupposed 
 any more considerable exercise of judgment than that 
 which can clearly be included in the act of realising that 
 you are being understood and cared for as your body and 
 your spirit require. 
 
 I trust that the difference is now obyious. The new 
 element introduced by the idea of democracy is this : the 
 
 ^ According to Traill, even the Earl of 5tra|Ford seems to have con- 
 sidered the assent of the people as an essential warrant of good rule. 
 Traill says : "Wentworth identified the happiness of the people with the 
 vindication and establishment of the power of the Crown." And, 
 speaking of his attitude to the assent of the people, Traill says : " It 
 seems to me that he prized this assent and reckoned on securing it ; 
 only he refused to admit that the assent of an elective assembly — or at 
 least of such an assembly as his own experience had familiarised him 
 with — was equally necessary or equally possible to be secured by the 
 governor." — Lord Strafford, p. 60. 
 
 265 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 people, instead of assenting to a manner of life, a scheme 
 of life, designed and maintained by their superiors, and 
 of which they only feel the working, are invited to con- 
 sider whether they approve of their leaders doing this or 
 that, whether they agree to their leaders engaging upon 
 this or that course, whether the solution their leaders have 
 given of a certain problem is the right one — all matters 
 of principle, ratiocination, deep learning, leisured medita- 
 tion and, above all, taste! They are conjured to think 
 about the profoundest questions, the weightiest of state 
 issues is not withdrawn from their deliberations, and their 
 veto is final. 
 
 I beg 'to press upon the reader's notice that there are 
 a host of stupid and utterly unwarrantable assumptions 
 in this position, with which I should scorn to have any 
 connection. When, therefore, I speak of the assent of 
 the governed, let my opponents not think for a moment 
 that I am either so confused or so utterly abandoned in 
 so far as sound doctrine is concerned as to mean any- 
 thing so ridiculous and so preposterously untenable as the 
 democratic idea of the people's part in politics. 
 
 "But," my adversary will cry, "if you acknowledge 
 that the assent of the people is necessary even to good 
 aristocratic rule, then you commit yourself to granting 
 the masses the right of rebellion when that rule is not 
 good! " 
 
 Certainly! I admit it! And, as I pointed out in the 
 first chapter of this book, in admitting the necessary cor- 
 relative of popular assent, which is popular dissent, or 
 rebellion, I agree not only with the deepest thinkers of 
 China, but also with the deepest thinkers of Europe.'"^ 
 
 Rebellion is the only means to which a subject people 
 can turn, in order to rid themselves of tasteless rulers, once 
 the caste to whose guidance they originally assented, has 
 from some cause or other, degenerated; there is no other 
 means. But the fact that before such rebellions have taken 
 place — as in the case of the French Revolution, for in- 
 ^ See p. 14, Chapter I. 
 266 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 stance — tasteless oppression has, as a rule, grown so 
 terrible as to be literally insufferable, shows with what 
 docility and patience a mass of men will wait with unflag- 
 ging hope for a salutary change, before they reluctantly 
 avail themselves of the extreme and violent measure, 
 naturally so loathsome to that portion of mankind which 
 only asks to be left in peace, security and contentment, 
 while it performs its daily round of duty, love and 
 recreation;^ 
 
 Let it be pointed out, en passant, however, that modern 
 democracy is robbed, hopelessly and irretrievably, of this 
 final and extreme cure of misrule. The hydra-headed 
 administration of a modern democratic state, however bad 
 and corrupt it may be, defies the salutary shears of any 
 rebellion. As in the case of the limited liability company, 
 of which it is the true parent and prototype, no one in a 
 democratic government is responsible when anything goes 
 wrong; and, unless the people choose to lop off their own 
 heads, it is impossible for them to make an expiatory offer- 
 ing for any of the crimes and errors of what is ostensibly 
 their own administration. 
 
 The cause of this appalling dilemma is to be traced, in 
 the first place, to the average Englishman's misunderstand- 
 ing of the essentials of real rulership. No child, however 
 priggish and precocious, would be so foolish as to regard 
 itself as wholly self-supporting and self-guiding, if, owing 
 to their misdeeds, it had to throw over its parents. It 
 might abandon its father and mother; but its one object 
 thenceforward would be either to attach itself to some 
 other adult who could beneficently undertake the respon- 
 
 ^ The Puritan Rebellion was an instance of another kind. Here 
 we had oppression — certainly ! but it was the sort of oppression that 
 good taste will always exercise over the absence of taste, that good 
 health will always exercise over the absence of health. And, in this 
 instance, as I have shown, it was not the people rebelling against their 
 rulers, but a vulgar, mercenary and influential portion of the rulers 
 rebelling against the more tasteful portion, and with cries of " Liberty " 
 and " A Free Parliament," luring, by subterfuge, many of the ignorant 
 masses over to their side. 
 
 267 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 sibility of ruling it, or readily to acquiesce in the claim of 
 any beneficent adult who came forward with the offer to 
 rule it. 
 
 On the same principle a popular rebellion in China, 
 previous to the importation of shallow English and 
 European doctrines, meant simply a change of rulers — not 
 a usurpation of the duties of ruling on the part of the 
 masses. 
 
 Englishmen and , Europeans generally, on the other 
 hand, seem completely to have misunderstood the true 
 nature of ruling; and as often as their rulers have failed 
 in their duties, they appear to have considered the occasion 
 a sufficient excuse for perpetrating that grossest of all 
 errors — ^the usurpation of the seat of rule by non-rulers. 
 
 A most puerile and, at the same time, senseless non 
 sequitur is involved in this error; for, although the demise 
 or suppression of a great ruler caste may be an extremely 
 staggering event, it nevertheless possesses none of those 
 magic or miraculous powers which can convert a man into 
 a creature which he is not, or which can endow with 
 superior qualities a whole body of mediocre and ordinary 
 men who, hitherto, have led mediocre and ordinary lives. 
 
 If all the engineers in Christendom were to become 
 defunct to-morrow, none but the veriest dolt of a layman 
 would believe that he thereby automatically became an 
 engineer; and yet the equivalent of this act of iinpudence 
 and stupidity is one which has been perpetrated again and 
 again in the field of practical politics. 
 
 The supreme difficulties of ruling, the terribly profound 
 problems it involves, the great native gifts it requires, and 
 the enornjous number of human sympathies it calls into 
 play, have only seldom been appreciated in Europe, and 
 that is why non-imaginative and non-meditative classes 
 cease to recognise their limitations, once their values 
 become such that they do not favour the rise of true rulers 
 in their midst. 
 
 Continuing to raise objections, my opponent may 
 exclaim : " If it is, as you say, that certain exceptional, 
 
 268 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 well-favoured individuals establish the taste for their 
 fellows for whole centuries, what need is there of the 
 further exercise of taste once this initial promulgation of 
 the law has been accomplished ? " 
 
 It is obvious that if we were in a world without seasons, 
 and in a universe in which change were not a constant 
 factor with which man is obliged to reckon, a single pro- 
 clamation of the law in matters of choosing and discarding 
 would certainly suffice for all eternity; hence the natural 
 but hopeless attempt on the part of the common people 
 of all countries in which change is very slow, to try at all 
 cost to preserve and maintain the status quo, once they 
 feel themselves in possession of valuable utterances con- 
 cerning taste; for they instinctively realise that these can 
 continue to apply only so long as the status quo persists. 
 As examples of such peoples, behold China and all 
 Mahommedan countries! 
 
 But we are in a world in which change has to be faced 
 as a condition of existence, and although some of the utter- 
 ances of taste will last as valuable truths until the crack 
 of doom, others will require modification, adaptation and 
 readjustment; while all innovations and novelties will exact 
 fresh efforts and judgments of taste, not included in the 
 original promulgation of the law. 
 
 In all great civilisations, then, into which change is 
 constantly entering in the form of a host of isolated and 
 often obscure innovations, a continued exercise of taste, 
 subsequent to the original promulgation of the law, is an 
 essential pre-requisite of healthy and permanent life; and 
 it was for this continued exercise of taste that the priests 
 of ancient Egypt provided when they selected, educated 
 and initiated those who were going to replace them in 
 office under the man-god the Pharaoh, and that the Chinese 
 provided when they selected, educated and initiated the 
 candidates for those walks of life which lead to the 
 mandarinate. 
 
 So much for the first crop of obvious objections, which 
 
 26^ 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 seemed quite naturally to spring from the clear statement 
 of my thesis; now it will be my endeavour to discuss .with 
 more detail the subject contained in the title to this 
 chapter. 
 
 To many readers, probably, there will seem little need 
 to enter into the details of the question. They may think, 
 and perhaps rightly too, that if my thesis be correct — then, 
 since we are now living under a Democra.cy of uncontrolled 
 Trade and Commerce, in which men of taste are far out- 
 numbered by men of no taste, the necessary consequence 
 must be a decline, not only in art arid culture, but also 
 in the manners and morals of the mass of the population. 
 This is perfectly true. If my thesis be correct, this must 
 inevitably be the consequence of our present state. Such 
 readers will point. to many signs of the times which show 
 conclusively not only that manners and morals are declin- 
 ing, but also that they continue to do so more and more 
 every year. 
 
 There is a laisser-aller in conversation, behaviour and 
 dress, the treatment of women by men and vice versa, the 
 performances at music-halls and musical comedies, which, 
 while suggesting an increase in licence, is still covert, 
 cowardly and brutal, and has nothing of the nature of a 
 healthy return to paganism in its constitution. News- 
 papers are becoming cruder without showing any more 
 mastery or art in regard to questions of sex. Side by side 
 with this, there is among the barbarian section of the nation 
 a tightening rather than a relaxing of the strings of 
 Puritanism, and the negative attitude towards life and 
 humanity is consequently increasing in such quarters. 
 
 With regard to manners, it must be obvious to all who 
 move and travel in big cities, that these are at their lowest 
 ebb. Motors hoot peremptorily at anybody and every- 
 body; their chauffeurs, forgetting that the highway belongs 
 first to the pedestrian and secondly to the vehicle, insist 
 upon your making way for them at all costs, charge at you 
 like at an enemy, sometimes compelling you to run at 
 the risk of considerable danger to your person. And the 
 
 270 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 meek way in which the pedestrian, as a rule, repeatedly 
 submits to this treatment is sufficiently revelatory. The 
 meaning of this blustering importance on the part of the 
 new-fangled vehicle, is that it is now the symbol either of 
 opulence, or at least of fair means; and that these are now 
 the highest values recognised either by the leaders or the 
 loafers of a big urban population. The driver of a car, 
 whether he be the owner or the paid servant, feels he is 
 intimately linked up with the most powerful force in the 
 nation — money; his impudence is the impudence of the 
 occupant of a place of power and possession, which does 
 not necessarily impart any culture or taste to him who 
 occupies it. 
 
 And who are these meek people who wait for whole 
 minutes by the road-side, who advance, retreat, venture a 
 few steps and recoil, plunge and stagger, to the hoot of 
 the new car.? They are ordinary pedestrians, who may 
 be jealous of wealth, who may covet it, who may even 
 despise it temporarily for the same reason as the fox called 
 the grapes green; but who, by every one of their move- 
 ments, acknowledge, nay, proclaim to the world that in 
 their heart of hearts they are convinced that mere material 
 wealth and the comfort it. brings are the highest things 
 on earth. Resent as they may the importunity of all the 
 affluence which they behold, they are still worshippers at 
 its shrine, and think that there is indeed some holy right, 
 some sacred privilege behind this blatant, ostentatious and 
 tyrannical " Clear-the-road ! " " Clear-the-road ! *' implied 
 hy the motor-hoot which they have neither the spirit nor 
 the necessary " outlook " to resist or scorn. Not one of 
 them knows the real sacredness of wealth, the real virtues 
 of opulence; not one of them has a notion of its true 
 dignity, its possible holy powers. They know only that 
 it brings comfort, motor-cars, theatres, week-ends away 
 from the smoky "wen," and fine, sleek clothes. Hence, 
 though they may envy those who possess it, they have no 
 notion of the contempt or even the anger which rises up 
 in the breast of the man of taste when he sees the powers 
 
 171 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of wealth thus reduced to a mere purchasing power over 
 amusementSj good dinners, comfortable surroundings and 
 speedy conveyance! 
 
 None but a spiritless and wholly subjected people, com- 
 pletely convinced of the superlative value of money as a 
 pvirchasing power of this nature, would ever have tolerated 
 the advent of the motor-car. With its cloud of- dust and 
 puff of scornful stinks as it turns its back on you, with its 
 insolent command of " Clear! " as it ploughs through the 
 human crowd in front of it, with its tasteless and incon- 
 siderate treatment of the rural village and its children ^ — 
 it is a fitting symbol of the arrogant contempt which mere 
 wealth may well feel for the mass of foolish and spiritless 
 sheep, which have allowed it, uncontrolled by . taste or 
 good feeling, to become paramount in their midst. 
 
 Some suth considerations will naturally occur to the 
 mind of the thoughtful reader, and he will feel that these 
 and many others that could be mentioned tend to confirm 
 my contention concerning the present decline of morals and 
 manners. He may also have heard of the overbearing 
 rudeness of the sporting "gentry," or of private parks 
 which, not so very long ago, were, by the courtesy of their 
 owners, kept open to the public, until the gross and in- 
 considerate behaviour of picnicking parties and touring 
 cyclists forced these generously disposed owners to close 
 their gates against all strangers. He may think of the 
 increasing disrespect with which young people treat their 
 elders, inside and outside the home. He may himself be 
 able to testify to the decline in the dignity and good tone 
 of Parliamentary debates. He may have observed a grow- 
 ing lack of reserve in dress and speech in all ranks of life. 
 He may be aware of a certain pronounced deterioration in 
 
 ^ A fact from Mr. F. E. Green's book sheds a curious light on this 
 aspect of the question. He speaks of a notice-board he saw by a 
 roadside hedge near Greywell, Hants, which proclaimed the following 
 message : " Please drive cautiously. Hound puppies are at walk in 
 Greywell village." As the author remarks : " Hound puppies, mark 
 you ; not village children ! "■^-The Tyranny of tht Countryside, p. 1 80. 
 
 27-2' 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 the kind of literature which now satisfies the needs even 
 of the so-called educated classes. 
 
 Above all, he may have noticed a decline in xhe beauty 
 both of his fellows and of their surroundings; for taste 
 enters into the smallest matters, and when the ordinary 
 mind rules, all kinds of ugly beliefs, things, structures and 
 pastimes are allowed to find a place in society which they 
 could not otherwise have found, while beautiful things 
 meet with no special favour ^ and are thought of no special 
 value, save when they become th^ hall-marks of opulence 
 and power, and thus minister to the general desire for 
 ostentatious display. This explains the love of beautiful 
 and expensive old furniture, plate and pictures, on the part 
 of those who are often the most vulgar people in a 
 democratic age. 
 
 These are some of the features of modern life which 
 almost every one can see for himself. But it is not of 
 these aspects of the decline in manners and morals that I 
 here intend to speak. I have referred to them briefly and 
 lightly because it struck me that if I omitted all mention 
 of them the reader might iniagine that 1 paid them no heed 
 at all. This is not the case. As a matter of fact I am fully 
 aware of the minor symptoms of the decline; but, in the 
 conclusion of this chapter, I wished more particularly to 
 refer to two or three broader and deeper factors in the 
 general scheme of modern vulgarity, which are perhaps not 
 So obvious, and not so generally discussed as are the 
 instances of the motor-hoot, etc., which I have just touched 
 upon. 
 
 Foremost among these broader and deeper factors are 
 the causes which, in my estimation, are leading to the 
 gradual passing of the gentleman. All the wot-ld over, 
 
 ^ In his Tieory of the State (Authorised Translation, Clarendon 
 Press), p. 48 J, Bluntschli says that in a democracy " there is more 
 difficulty than in other constitutions to induce the State to attend to 
 the loftier interests of art and science. A democratic nation must have 
 reached a very high stage of civilisation when it seeks to satisfy deeds 
 of which the ordinary intelligence cannot appreciate the value or the 
 importance to the national welfare." 
 T 273 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 where flourishing and powerful societies have been formed 
 and maintained, the notion of the gentleman has appeared 
 in some form or other as a national ideal. Nobody read- 
 ing Confucius, for instance, or the Li-Ki — which is the 
 Chinese Book of Ceremonies — can doubt for one instant 
 that the idea of the gentleman was and still is a very 
 definite thing in China; nor could such a reader doubt that 
 the Chinese gentleman, even of two thousand years ago, 
 would have been able perfectly to understand every move- 
 ment and every scruple of his fellow in rank in England 
 of the twentieth century. 
 
 There was also the gentleman of ancient Egypt, the 
 gentleman of Athens, and the gentleman of Rome. 
 
 All huge and powerful administrations have to rely very 
 largely upon the trust, which they can place in a number 
 of high responsible officials who, in moments of great 
 temptation or great trial, will stand honestly and bravely 
 at their posts. All stable family life, too, depend.s upon 
 the existence of a number of such men, who need not 
 necessarily be State servants, but who, engaged in other 
 walks of life, reveal a similar reliability. 
 
 The very existence of a large administration, or of a 
 large nation of citizens, is impossible without such men. 
 And all societies which have started out with the idea 
 of lasting, growing and standing upright, have always in- 
 stinctively developed the high ideal of the gentleman — 
 the man who can be trusted at all times and all places, the 
 man who is sincere,, the man who is staunch and constant 
 in matters of principle, the man who never sacrifices the 
 greater to the less, and the man who is sufficiently self- 
 reliant to be able to consider others. 
 
 It is obvious that the gentleman class, or the body of 
 men who possess the above qualities, falls naturally into 
 various orders; but by far the highest order, is that con- 
 sisting of those men who, without being necessarily 
 examples of flourishing life, are yet so square and strong 
 in body and soul, that their honour can be subjected to 
 the greatest strain without snapping. 
 
 274 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 Now it is upon such men alone, that a great nation 
 relies for the preservation and maintenance of its best tradi- 
 tions, for the filling of its most responsible civil offices, and 
 for the high duty of inspiring trust in the mind of the 
 public. 
 
 If England has shown any stability at all, it is owing 
 to the fact that as a nation she has reared crop after crop 
 of such men, and that these men have been sent to all 
 corners of the globe, from Barhein in the Persian Gulf, 
 to Kingston in the Island of Jamaica, to represent her and 
 to teach the gentleman's idea of decent living to the world. 
 
 Once this class begins to decline, England will be in 
 sore straits; for even examples of flourishing life, when 
 they appear, must find worthy and trusty servants to fill 
 high places, otherwise the best supreme administration 
 would be helpless. 
 
 But how do you suppose the virtues of the gentleman 
 are reared.'' For you are too wise to believe that copy- 
 book precepts can do any good, save as a mere confirmation 
 of a deep bodily impulse. You are surely too experienced 
 to suppose that the leopard can change his spots, or that a 
 negro can beget a white child.? Then how do you sup- 
 pose that a strong virtue — a virtue which, like a powerful 
 iron girder, nothing human can snap — ^is cultivated and 
 produced in a family, in a line of human beings, even in 
 an animal? 
 
 On this question Aristotle spoke words of the deepest 
 wisdom. He declared that all virtue was habit, habitua- 
 tion, custom. "The virtues," he saySj "we get by first 
 performing single acts ... by doing just actions, we 
 come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery, we 
 come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave 
 actions, brave." ^ 
 
 And then he proceeds : " And to the truth of this, testi- 
 mony is borne by what takes place in communities ; because 
 the law-givers make the individual members good men by 
 habituation, and this is the intention certainly of every law- 
 
 1 See Chapter I, Book II, Ethics (Chase's translation). 
 275 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 giver, and all who do it not fail of their intent; but herein 
 consists the difference between a good Constitution and 
 abad."^ 
 
 A gentleman in body and soul, then, is a creature whose 
 very tissues are habituated to act in an honourable way. 
 For many generations, then, his people must have acted 
 in an honourable way. In order that the first and strongest 
 impulse in his body may be an honourable impulse, such 
 impulses must constantly have been favoured at the cost 
 of other impulses by his ancestors, until the voice of the 
 others is weak and the roar of the honourable impulse 
 fills his being with a noise that drowns all other voices. 
 
 And this brijtigs me to the subject of conscience, on 
 which, at the risk of digressing, I must say a passing word. 
 What is conscience ? The Christian religion rightly says : 
 " It is the voice of God in one's body." But what does 
 this phrase mean precisely? Who knows what the voice 
 of God can be ? The voice of God, in the Christian sense, 
 is obviously the voice of the giver of Christian moral law. 
 To whom does the Christian think he owes his moral law ? 
 To God! Very well, then, his conscience must mean to 
 him the voice of God ! 
 
 But men who have left Christianity, who repudiate 
 Christ, the Holy Ghost and the Gospels, still possess a 
 conscience. Let them deny it as much as they like, we 
 all know they have a conscience. What, precisely, is that 
 conscience ? Let us put the question in a diff^erent form. 
 Who is the law-gii^er whose voice speaks in their breasts 
 when they do a deed which makes them hear a sort of 
 whispered protest in their hearts ? 
 
 Think a minute on the lines of Aristotle's concept of 
 virtue ! Your greatest law-giver, the creator of your con- 
 science, is obviously your line of ancestors. It is they who 
 have implanted those impulses in your body which they, 
 by their habits and customs, cultivated and produced. 
 Very well, then, say you do a deed which your' ancestors 
 did a thousand times before you, what happens ? A warm 
 "■ See Chapter I, Book II, £/Aics (Chase's translation). 
 
 2y6 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 murmur of approval fills your heart. All the tissues of 
 your body are familiar with the deed, they rejoice in the 
 chance you have given them of venting a power long stored 
 up by generations of practice. In other words, your 
 ancestors have said : " You are right; you did this deed as 
 we have done it; we approve." 
 
 Now reverse the process; do something that is in conflict 
 with your traditions; indulge in any habit of life out of 
 keeping with your best traditions ; be for a moment untrue 
 to your ancestors! What happens? Immediately the 
 voice of your progenitors says : " You are wrong, you did 
 this deed as we have never done it, or you did this deed 
 which we have never done; we disapprove! " 
 
 Thus the diversity of men's sensrtiveness where con- 
 science is concerned, is accounted for by the diversity of 
 their ancestry. Some men, for instance^ can indulge in 
 sexual perversity without being weighed down by moral 
 indignation, while others feel suicidal after the first act of 
 the kind. In the first case, sexual perversity may be 
 suspected in the ancestry, because obviously the voice of 
 ancestral protest is not strong; in the second case sexual 
 purity may be suspected in the ancestry, because the voice 
 of disapproval is obviously loud and severe. The same 
 holds good in regard to little acts of deception, little thefts, 
 little lies. In one case no moral indignation is produced 
 by these deeds, in another case severe and bitter moral 
 heart-burn is generated by any one of them. 
 
 Conscience, then, to the non-Christian, is simply the 
 voice of his ancestors in his breast; and he should remem- 
 ber that he has it in his power to weaken or strengthen 
 that voice for his offspring and for their offspring. For, 
 just as virtues may be reared, so, as Aristotle points out, 
 they may be destroyed at will. 
 
 With this side-light upon the meanina- of conscience, 
 we are now in a position to fiace the problem of the 
 gentleman from the inside. 
 
 I have said that his most typiczl virtues are : that he 
 can be trusted at all times and in all places, that he is 
 
 S77 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 sincere, that he is staunch and constant in matters of 
 principle, that he never sacrifices the greater to the less, 
 and that he is sufficiently self-reliant and strong to be able 
 to consider others.^ 
 
 Now what is the kind of ancestral and present environ- 
 ment that can rear such virtues and implant them with the 
 strength of iron girders in a character? It is obviously 
 an environment which is above all the petty deceits, all 
 the subterfuges, tricks, expedients and wiles, which are 
 inseparable from a sordid struggle for existence. 
 
 Behold the jungle ! 
 
 In the jungle the only animal that does not require to 
 tread softly, to avoid crackling leaves and creaking 
 branches, the only animal that can dispense with deceit 
 and with make-believe, and who can come and go as he 
 likes and trumpet forth the truth honestly to the world 
 without either compromise or caution, is that animal whose 
 power and strength are above the ordinary attacks of his 
 neighbours, and whose food springs from the soil about 
 him, without his having to lie in ambush for it to appear 
 and be waylaid. All other animals must practise deceit, 
 subterfuge, falsehood, ruse, craft and a great variety of 
 attitudes. All other animals must be histrlons of no mean 
 attainments; they must know how to crouch, how to crawl, 
 how to cringe, how to dissimulate, and how t,o pretend. 
 Nature condones all these accomplishments in those of her 
 creatxxres . which are caught in. the cruel wheel of the 
 
 ^ To those to whom the last point is not. obvious let me offer a little 
 explaiiation in this footnote, so that I may avoid breaking up the dis-r 
 cussion once more by subsidiary considerations. It must be clear to all 
 that a baby, an invalid, a blind man, or anybody who is weak with any 
 physical defect, must be selfish and cannot consider others. Weakness 
 must cry out: "All for myself i" otherwise it cannot exist. The 
 moment a baby or an invalid began to consider the feelings of those 
 around it more than its own it would endanger its own existence. 
 Strength, on the other hand, is able to consider others, because its own 
 existence is already secure. The professed unselfishness of weak people, 
 therefore, is mere cant, mere lip-service, beneath contempt. The only 
 valuable altruism in the world is a strong self-reliant man's consideration 
 for others. 
 
 278 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 struggle for existence. If she did not condone these 
 accomplishments, either they would never get a meal, or 
 they would always be providing meals with their own 
 bodies to those who were stronger than they. The 
 elephant alone can afford to be honest, is honest. The 
 elephant alone can practise sincerity, staunchness and 
 constancy to principle; he alone can let others live. 
 
 If all this can be applied to human society, there is a 
 grave moral to be drawn from the application. The trend 
 of human society, at least in modern Europe, is to draw 
 ever greater and greater numbers and kinds of people into 
 the vortex of the struggle for existence. And, under a 
 Democracy of uncontrolled Trade and Commerce, there 
 is a danger that all orders of society will ultimately be 
 drawn into the struggle. The class that once stood im- 
 mune from this struggle — the mammoth men, the men 
 of leisure and secure power — are gradually ceasing to be 
 the most revered and most admired members of the com- 
 munity; or, worse still, they are gradually ceasing to be 
 bred. With great wealth as the highest value, people are 
 ceasing to consider how it is acquired, and all are being 
 tempted to take up that occupation by means of which it 
 can be acquired with the greatest possible speed. Whether 
 all the traditionally leisured families were capable of all the 
 gentlemanly virtues or not, is not necessarily the point 
 at issue. But one thing, in any case, is quite certain, and 
 that is that among them, alone, were these virtues to be 
 sought if they were to be found at all. 
 
 For it is pure romanticism to suppose that you can have 
 the virtue "without the soil from which it springs. You 
 cannot have your cake and eat it. You may long in vain 
 for the virtues which belong to the animal that stands 
 aloof from the jungle struggle, if you actually participate 
 in that striiggle. And to suppose that mere precept and 
 education will cultivate these virtues in you, if you do not 
 possess, or have not practised them for generations, is to 
 suppose that the leopard can by a course of training change 
 his spots in a single generation. 
 
 279 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 To-day, as we know, even the traditionally leisured 
 class is being drawn, has been drawn, into the field of 
 struggle. The very soil which alone is favourable to the 
 growth of sincerity and staunchness and constancy to prin- 
 ciple, is therefore no longer being tilled or cultivated. The 
 influence of the principle of unrestricted competition (the 
 modern form of that helium omnium contra omnes which 
 Hobbes rightly regarded as the condition of chaos pre- 
 ceding order), has reduced everything, even the power of 
 being an influence for good or evil, to a struggle for exist- 
 ence, and as a result — ^unpleasant as the fact may seem — 
 we are now undoubtedly witnessing the passing of the 
 gentleman. 
 
 Everybody is now one or the other of those lower in- 
 mates of the jungle. Everybody now must at some time 
 or other in his life be a " histrion of no mean attainments " ; 
 everybody must be wily, crafty, full of resource in subter- 
 fuge, pretence, deceit and dissimulation.* Sincerity, 
 staunchness and constancy to a principle are dying out. It 
 grows every day more and more difficult to find a man 
 whom one can trust wholly and thoroughly. If things 
 get worse and the passing of the gentleman is complete, 
 we shall be able to trust no one. 
 
 ^e all know that this is so; we realise it every day of 
 
 ^ The notion that rigid honesty and uprightness are essential attributes 
 of the gentleman, seems to have been lost many years ago in England. 
 This is probably owing to the fact that by no means the best trading 
 and commercial conditions have prevailed fpr so long in this country. 
 For instance, it was possible for that- old gss Macaulay, writing in the 
 Edinburgh Review in Pecejnber 183 1, to say of Charles I : "It would be 
 absurd to deny that he was a scholar and a gentleman. . . . But he 
 was false, imperious, obstinate," etc. This unwarrantable association 
 by Macaulay of falsity with gentlemanliness never seems to have affected 
 that writer's reputation in the least, because it did not strike the educated 
 Englishman, even of that age, that the two were hopelessly incompatible. 
 Charles I was either a gentleman, or he was false — \e. could not be 
 both But in a country in which uncontrolled trade and commerce 
 prevail, the title " gentleman " evidently deteriorates just as surely as 
 the genuine article itself does ; hence, Macaulay, Puritan as he was, was 
 able to betray the Puritan's notion of a gentleman. 
 
 280 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 our lives. But what we do not realise keenly perhaps, 
 is that with the passing of the gentleman we must 
 renounce all hope of holding a great nation like England 
 upright. 
 
 I do not mean thi? as a bitter attack on tradesmen and 
 men of commerce; these men have their uses and their 
 ■ merits like all parts of a great organisation. All I wish 
 to emphasise is the fact that it would be just as ridiculous 
 to expect grapes to grow in Iceland as to expect the soil 
 created by trading and commercial conditions to rear the 
 virtues of the gentleman. And when trading and com- 
 mercial conditions will have become almost general, when 
 the world will have been turned into a huge office with a 
 factory adjoining, the very conditions upon which gentle- 
 manly virtues depend for their growth and their stability 
 will have long ceased to exist. 
 
 The man immersed in the struggle for life, and the man 
 who emerges from it successfully, are not therefore neces- 
 sarily despicable or the reverse. AH I maintain about them 
 is that they never can, and never ought to, be placed in 
 any high position where absolute sincerity and absolute 
 staunchness and constancy to principle are the only safe- 
 guards that a people can have against their betraying their 
 trust. They are not essentially wrong men, they are simply 
 wrong men for the places in question — the high offices 
 of a nation, the high positions of trust which all great 
 administrations have to fill, and all posts in which mag- 
 nanimity, sincerity and absolute rigidity of principle are 
 pre-requisites. 
 
 I have referred to the relatively insignificant amount of 
 peculation, corruption and malversation that was allowed 
 or even overlooked during the time that Charles I and 
 Strafford held the reins of government; but see what a 
 change came over England when the Puritans and trades- 
 men triumphed ! Even Needham, the Government his- 
 torian, admits that three-quarters of the adherents of the 
 Parliamentary party were worldlings, interested and not 
 disinterested partisans, and as Dr. Cunningham declares : 
 
 281 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 " The Long Parliament attained an unfortunate notoriety 
 for the worst forms of political corruption." ^ 
 
 The tragic feature connected with a democracy of 
 uncontrolled Trade and Commerce is that it creates 
 precisely the environment which is most poisonously 
 unfavourable to the healthy growth and multiplication of 
 the gentleman. 
 
 The next most important factor in the decline of morals 
 and manners is the deleterious influence which an almost 
 fuU share in the direction of foreign and even home affairs 
 of State has upon the masses in a democratic country. 
 
 Since the publication of Machiavelli's Prince, opinion 
 in Europe has been hopelessly divided upon one important 
 point in connection with politics. This point is the relation 
 of political to private morality. 
 
 Machiavelli says definitely that political and private 
 morality are different things. He tells the ruler outright 
 that " he need never hesitate to incur the reproach of those 
 vices, without which his authority can hardly be pre- 
 served," '' and that in certain circumstances a lie, an act of 
 cruelty, of fraud, of deliberate subterfuge, of breach of 
 faith, is often necessary and statesmanlike,* — nay, that it is 
 often the only powerful weapon a ruler is in a position to 
 wield, and that such an act cannot and must not be judged 
 from the standard of private morals. He says that for a 
 prince or a statesman to act in his political capacity always 
 according to the moral standard of his private life, would 
 often mean the absolute ruin and Nemesis of the State he 
 was ruling. He even goes so far as to say that though it 
 may be useful for the ruler to appear to be acting always 
 according to the moral precepts of private life, it would 
 frequently be to his injury actually to do so.* 
 
 ^ the Growth of Industry and Commerce, Vol. II, p. 182. 
 
 2 See The Prince (translated by Ninlan H. Thomson, M.A., 1 898), 
 
 pp. III-IIZ. 
 
 * Ibid., pp. Ill, 119, 126, 127, 138. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 128. " It is not essential, then, that a Prince should have 
 all the good qualities which I have enumerated above, but it is most 
 
 282 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 /^gainst this view we find a curious and motley throng, 
 and for it, three of the wisest men the world has ever 
 seen. 
 
 First amon^ the opponents of Machiavelli are the 
 Jesuits. This is strange, especially when one remembers 
 their doctrine of the end justifying the means. Then: 
 opposition to Machiavelli, however, is perhaps best under- 
 stood and esteemed at its proper worth when we realise 
 their position. The Jesuits, admirable and profound as 
 they are in their organisation, would have been the first 
 to see that the sanction of super-morality in the State would 
 be tantamount to endowing the secular body with powers 
 with which they would find it difficult if not impossible to 
 cope. In their struggle against all states on behalf of the 
 Church, with the view of subjecting the former to the 
 latter, it is comprehensible enough that they could ill abide 
 the independence which Machiavelli claimed and recom- 
 mended. We cannot, therefore, help but take their objec- 
 tions to the great Florentine secretary cum grano salts. 
 
 Again in the case of the Huguenots, fighting against 
 the Crown of France, we are justified in suspecting motives 
 which must have been far from purely moral. Their oppo- 
 sition to the Machiavellian doctrine was, to say the least, 
 an interested one. If Machiavelli lent strength to their 
 enemies, this was reason enough for condemning him. 
 
 Professor Villari mentions Giovanni Bodino, the author 
 of the work De Republica, and Tommaso CampaneUa, a 
 philosopher and Dominican Friar, as being also opposed 
 to Machiavelli in doctrine; but by far the most interesting 
 of the group of anti-Machiavellians are surely Frederick 
 the Great of Prussia and Metternich. 
 
 The former, who throughout his reign at least acted as 
 one of the most devoted followers of Machiavelli, actually 
 wrote a hook, Re futation du Prince de Machiavel,in which 
 
 essential that he should seem to have them ; I will venture even to 
 affirm that if he has and invariably practises them all, they are hurtful, 
 wrhereas the appearance of having them is useful." 
 
 283 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 he attacked the doctrines of The Prince one by one with 
 great vigour. How is this to be explained? As in the 
 case of Metternich, this opposition can be understood only 
 as an example all too common in countries like Germany 
 and England, of the manner in which practice and theory 
 often conflict in the life of one man. The clear logical 
 intellect of the Southerner is not often guilty of such 
 muddle-headedness; but the Northerner is frequently able 
 to express the most sincere hatred of a principle in the 
 abstract, though he pursues it with the utmost energy and 
 resolution in his everyday life. 
 
 Thus Frederick the Great, despite his sudden and un- 
 warrantable attack on Maria Theresa, his conquest of 
 Silesia, and his treaties of alliance so often broken without 
 qualm or scruple, is able to work himself up into a fit of 
 righteous indignation over the man who gives rulers the 
 formulae of these sometimes necessary state crimes.^ 
 
 Macaulay, being one of a similar northern stamp of 
 mind, and overlooking the innumerable occasions when 
 England has acted and triumphed entirely on Machiavel- 
 lian lines, also works himself into a passion over the 
 " immorality " of the Florentine; and with a sublime 
 Puritanical stupidity, condemns the doctrine of The 
 Prince with scorn. But what are we to expect from a 
 writer who is so confused in his thought as to be able to 
 say of one and the same man that he was a " gentleman " 
 but "false"! 
 
 And now, who are the pebple on the other side^— the 
 people who were lucid enough to realise that political 
 morality and private morality are two different things, and 
 
 ^ Frederick the Great's attitude in regard to Machiavelli's Prince 
 is also open to another interpretation. We may, for instance, agree 
 with Voltaire, who, in speaking of his great friend's book against 
 Machiavelli, said : " II a craM dans le pot pour en digmter les autres." 
 But, in any case, in order to mitigate the severity of the above censure, 
 it should be remembered that Frederick was only twenty-seven when he 
 wrote his Anti-Machlavel, and that so young a man is frequently guilty 
 of an idealism which, fortunately, is often wont to leave him with 
 maturity. 
 
 284 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 who were honest enough to face the fact without any 
 canting circumlocution ? 
 
 Among the earlier monarchs who are of this group 
 we may mention Charles V of Germany, Henry III and 
 Henry IV of France, and Queen Christina of Sweden. 
 But among the men who really count, among the spirits 
 who rise to the' pinnacles of human greatness, we find Lord 
 Bacon of Verulam, Richelieu and Napoleon, all of whom 
 believed and defended Machiavelli's doctrine. 
 
 This should be sufficient for us. To all who believe, 
 not in metaphysical discussion or the mere bandying of 
 words, but in men; it ought to be enough that Napoleon 
 and Richelieu held the view which Machiavelli upholds in 
 The Prince — the view that political deeds are not bound 
 by any morality which governs private conduct. But, in 
 truth, to all such people who are profound enough to 
 make men and not disquisitions the measure of their choice 
 in doctrine, Machiavelli's contention will seem the merest 
 platitude. For what, at bottom, does it really mean.? It 
 means simply, in reference to internal politics, that the 
 morals for the child cannot constrain or trammel the 
 parent; and in reference to external politics, that the morals 
 which rule the conduct of each individual member of the 
 h^rd to his neighbour, cannot constrain or trammel the 
 leader of the herd in his position of defender or assailant 
 facing a hostile or strange herd. 
 
 You will say, perhaps, that this is obvious? You will 
 point to a thousand instances in European and American 
 and Asiatic history, in which this principle is exemplified, 
 proved and justified. You will show how again and again, 
 if the statesmen of England, or Germany, or America, 
 had acted along the lines of merely private morality 
 (i. e. morality within the herd), they would have belittled, 
 impoverished and humiliated their country. Very true! 
 But you must remember that there are hundreds and 
 thousands of fools, including Macaulay, with motives far 
 purer than those of the old Jesuits or the old Huguenots, 
 and with minds a million times more confused than that 
 
 285 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of Frederick the Great, who declare that this is wrong and 
 that political and private morality may and can be recon- 
 ciled without danger. 
 
 Let them say? — Certainly! — I merely thought it would 
 be well to call attention to the fact that MachiaveUi's 
 doctrine -^ however obvious — has been attacked and 
 opposed, because certain points in the argument which 
 follows would be missed if this fact were not borne in 
 mind. 
 
 Taking it for granted, then, that political deeds and 
 promises and contracts cannot and must not be judged 
 from the; standpoint of private morality, what is the further 
 conclusion to which we are driven? 
 
 An orderly state is one in which the intra-herd morality 
 is strictly and peacefully observed by all citizens. Indeed 
 an ideal state would be one in which the intra-herd morality 
 had actually become instinctive in all those classes of 
 citizens who are the better and the happier for having rigid 
 and inexorable rules of conduct prescribed and laid down 
 for them. 
 
 The honest, hardworking citizen, then, must regard his 
 morality as the only morality. His private morality must, 
 in his opinion, be that which, dictated by God and His 
 angels, is right for all time. His simple faith in its effi- 
 cacy, his simple trust that the practice of it — however hard 
 on occasion and however unrewarded it may go for some 
 tin;^e— will ultiinately be repaid, must never be shaken, 
 lest the foundation of the nation's virtue be undermined. 
 
 Very well, then, a mind more subtle, a creature more 
 cultured, a product of civilisation standing more firndy, 
 more intellectually, more consciously on his legs than the 
 simple citizen, will be required for that practice of the two 
 moraKties — the private and the political — without either of 
 these suffering corruption from being placed side by side 
 with the other in the same mind. 
 
 Not only the exoteric aspect of morality, but also its 
 esoteric aspect, will have to be known to a man who, 
 without running any risk of impairing his private moral- 
 
 a86 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 ity, is called upon to practise the other for purposes of 
 State. 
 
 The " gentleman " I have just described above, whose 
 virtues of sincerity and steadfastness are as rigid in him as 
 iron girders, can afFord, for his country's good, to tinker 
 with strategy, ruse, craft, deception and dissimulation, out- 
 side the herd, without any fear of upsetting his private 
 morals. His effort in political morality is intellectual, 
 conscious; neither his heart nor his spirit is involved, save 
 in so far as his aim is a patriotic one.^ But even the gentle- 
 man can prove at times too simple in his private virtue 
 to be a match for foreign diplomatists, as history has 
 sometimes shown. 
 
 That margin, however, which is permissible to one who 
 stands firmly upon a solid bedrock of private morality, 
 would be a dangerous concession to make to the simple 
 citizen, whose constant struggle for existence forces him 
 often enough to trespass against his private morality at the 
 cost of his liberty if he be found out, and at the cost of his 
 sleep if he merely fear lest he be found out. 
 
 For the private citizen to realise that there are two 
 moralities, one which is intra-herd and the other which is 
 inter-herd, would very quickly put an end to all virtue 
 whatsoever; for his private morality, already in a weak 
 position, would then be utterly routed. It could not bear 
 the proximity of another morality at its side, which con- 
 tradicted many of its most treasured tenets; the one would 
 either corrupt the other completely or a wretched com- 
 promise would be contrived which was neither fish nor 
 fowl, neither virtue nor vice. 
 
 1 Captain F. Brinkley, in his History of Japan (Vol. II, p. 198), gives 
 an interesting instance in support of this contention, in which he 
 shows how the Japanese "gentleman" was capable of practising the 
 two moralities and keeping them separate. " It may be broadly stated," 
 he says, " that moral principles received no respect whatever from framers 
 of political plots or planners of ruses de guerre. Yet the Taiko, who 
 stands conspicuous among Japan's great leaders for improbity in the 
 choice of means to a public or military end, desired to commit suicide 
 rather than survive the ignpminy of failure to fulfil a pledge." 
 
 287 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 For the private citizen to practise two moralities, how- 
 ever, would be even more fatal. For not only is his private 
 virtue insufficiently rooted in him, owing to the struggle 
 for existence; but he is also quite unable to act either 
 intellectually or consciously enough, in the realm of 
 m9rality, to preserve his private morality quite unimpaired 
 during the experiment. 
 
 But this practice of two moralities is essentially the task 
 which a democratic state imposes upon its simple citizens. 
 And for this reason alone, from the standpoint of intra- 
 herd morality, democracy must be regarded as profoundly, 
 insidiously, dangerously immoral. However slight may be 
 the share which the people of a democracy are called upon 
 to take in the administration of, say, foreign affairs; how- 
 ever much the secret diplomacy may be conducted by the 
 elected officials themselves; ultimately, if not immediately, 
 the morality of the inter-herd attitude must become 
 apparent to the multitude; their will must be exercised one 
 way or the other as a sanction or a veto upon the negotia- 
 tions; and it is then that the poison will enter their 
 unresisting and feeble spirits. 
 
 The fact that democracy means the imposition of the 
 practice of two moralities, often so incompatible, as that 
 of politics and of private life upon the multitude, is one 
 of the most immoral aspects of the democratic state; and 
 when this state in addition is one of uncontrolled commerce 
 and industry, in which unrestricted competition (Hobbes's 
 bellum omnium contra omnes) is the prevailing rule, then 
 the situation becomes absolutely hopeless. For unre- 
 stricted competition already intfdduees elements of inter- 
 herd morality into the herd, and whatever participation in 
 political morality the multitude may enjoy besides simply 
 increases the forces of dissolution which are already reduc- 
 ing and destroying the fibre of intra-herd morality on which 
 the prosperity of all great nations must repose. 
 
 The replies to this are obvious, and the ardent democrat 
 may advance two, either of which I shall show to be 
 equally deplorable. 
 
 288 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 Democrat A. denies that Democracy is immoral, because 
 he believes that it is possible for the multitude to govern 
 their State strictly along the lines of private morality, 
 without any danger accruing to the nation. He likes 
 England's strength and would love to preserve it; but 
 forgetting that he cannot have it both ways, imagines 
 that this great nation, constructed upon the most skilful 
 practice of inter-herd morality, can be run by the morality 
 which rules in his own back parlour. 
 
 This man is obviously beneath notice. He does not 
 understand history or politics; not to speak of the very 
 springs of his own actions. Let him ask himself how many 
 states would ever have lasted more than three generations 
 if their inter-herd negotiations had been governed by intra- 
 herd principles. Let him ask himself why the Jesuits, 
 profound as they were, detested and loathed Machiavelli. 
 Does he suppose the Jesuits would have troubled them- 
 selves about the doctrines of this Florentine secretary if 
 they had not perceived that in these doctrines there lay 
 an inexhaustible fund of strength which might be drawn 
 upon by any secular power with which they might some 
 day find themselves in conflict.'' 
 
 Let such a man dwell for a moment upon the sentiment 
 of the proverb, "Blood is thicker than water"; and then 
 let him ask himself honestly whether those same scruples 
 which animate him when he feels himself one of a body of 
 men, all from the same home, can hold any sway over him 
 when he is forced to face strangers and foreigners, and to 
 safeguard the interest and the security of that same home 
 against them. 
 
 But Democrat A.'s contention will find many to support 
 it, and any weakness or humility that may enter into 
 our negotiations with foreign powers will be due to the 
 preponderance of men like Democrat A. in the nation 
 and in the government. In fact signs are not wanting 
 which show conclusively that Democrat A.'s view is 
 growing extremely common in England; and the more the 
 franchise is extended, the commoner it will become. For 
 u 289 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 it is only natural that the more stubborn and the more 
 moral among the simple citizens should refuse to believe 
 that their right to vote must involve, immediately or 
 ultimately, the practice of a kind of morality, the tenets of 
 which they would loathe from the bottom of their hearts. 
 
 Democrat B. declares, with a lump in his throat and 
 a tear in his mild cerulean eye, that all the individuals 
 constituting mankind form a brotherhood, and that if it 
 is impossible to be strong and overwhelming as a nation 
 without differentiating between intra-herd and inter-herd 
 morality, then the sooner inter-herd morality is swept away 
 the better, and this is precisely what democracy, with its 
 inclusion of the voice of the multitude, aims at doing. 
 
 Democrat B. is more logical than Democrat A. He 
 sees that inter-herd negotiations, to be strongs cannot 
 be governed by the same morality as intra-herd negotia- 
 tions; but, like the honest, simple citizen that he is, he 
 feels himself unable to abandon the morality of private life 
 and prefers to see the power, the will to power, the pre- 
 servation of power in his nation go to the deuce, rather 
 than that he should be called upon to have a share in that 
 inter-herd morality which he scarcely understands jand 
 emphatically detests. 
 
 This is an attitude which is also becoming more and 
 more general, and all those who share Democrat B.'s 
 outlook are likely in the future to be very hostile towards 
 any high-handed or powerful act of inter-herd morality 
 which the government in power may find it necessary to 
 perform. In a nation that wishes to remain great and 
 mighty, democrats of the stamp of B. are likely to prove 
 a very dangerous weakening influence, because the only 
 way of propitiating them involves the relinquishing of all 
 that inter-herd licence in morality which is frequently the 
 only weapon with which a state can hold its own. 
 
 Behind Democrats A. and B. there is a vast crowd of 
 the ignorant, of the licentious, of the lax and of the dis- 
 solute, who can see in the principles of inter-herd morality 
 simply a sanction for their own anti-social designs against 
 
 290 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 their neighbours within the herd; and to these the invita- 
 tion received from a democratic government to confound 
 political with private morality, can have only the most 
 utterly dissipating and demoralising effects. 
 
 Thus we find modern democracy confronted with the 
 following dilemma: either inter-herd morality must be 
 sacrificed, in which case the nation's relation to other 
 powers is bound to be weakened; or inter-herd morality 
 is to be preserved, in which case the multitude who are 
 invited to share in the government are bound to taste 
 the forbidden fruit of a morality strange to intra-herd 
 principles, and to lose their rigidity and their virtue in 
 consequence/ 
 
 The escape from this dilemma is, as a rule, as we see 
 to-day, merely an utterly despicable compromise which 
 only adds one more factor to the many already at work 
 corroding the foundations of the Empire. 
 
 The last important phase, in the decline of morals and 
 manners in a Democracy of uncontrolled Trade and Com- 
 merce — or at least the last to which I shall refer for my 
 particular case^ — is the demoralising influence which is 
 exercised by the materialistic principle of numbers, by the 
 
 1 For some interesting examples taken both from French and English 
 history of the difficulties involved in the conduct of foreign affairs under 
 a democracy, see Chapter XV in J. Holland Rose's valuable little book, 
 The Rise of Democracy. The chapter concludes with these words : " If 
 the United Kingdom is to recover its rightfiil influence in the world, 
 it will not be merely by vast armaments, but by the use of different 
 methods in foreign affairs from those which must necessarily prevail 
 in our domestic concerns. An electorate which is largely inexperienced 
 may, possibly for several decades, enthrone the principle of flux in our 
 home politics, but that same electorate will assuredly learn by bitter 
 experience that unless our foreign policy is firm and continuous, we 
 shall remain without an ally, and, be condemned possibly to an unequal 
 struggle even for the maintenance of our present possessions." 
 
 ^ I should like to remind the reader that I take it for granted that 
 he is familiar with the usual arguments brought against democracy 
 in the works of men like Lecky and Sir Henry Maine, and even in 
 the works of democrats like Mill and Bentham, with most of which 
 usual arguments I heartily concur. 
 
 291 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 conscious power of being able to override and refute any 
 principle,, truth or judgment, however profound and how- 
 ever sacred, by the mere accumulation of voices against it. 
 
 At the basis of all democracies is the scheme of life 
 which makes a majority omnipotent. And with a majority, 
 the greatest wisdom, the profoundest insight and the most 
 far-sighted judgment simply fight in vain. 
 
 There can be no definite right or wrong, no absolute^ 
 standard of good or evil, and no sacredness in superior 
 wisdom, superior ins%ht, superior foresight, or superior 
 judgment, in a land where a mere majority can make all 
 these things utterly null and void; and in such a land the 
 intrinsic value of a principle, of a precept, or of a proposi^ 
 tiqn, will be certain to be eclipsed by the extrinsic value 
 which the favour of a mere majority can put upon its 
 opposite, its contradiction or its refutation. 
 
 But, apart from the fatal effects of this fact alone, what 
 are likely to be the consequences to the majority them- 
 selves of the exercise of this shallow and senseless' power ? 
 It is obvious that a certain contempt of sound judgment, 
 as such, and of taste and penetration, as such, wiU be bound 
 to grow in such communities. For can these qualities do 
 anything against numbers.' In a country in which the 
 constitution provides the means for outvoting a god, what 
 can be thought of that wisdom^ judgment and discrimina- 
 tion which in some human beings can attain almost the 
 divine ? 
 
 There are causes enough, in all conscience, which are 
 at work to-day, compassing the doom of the working-^ 
 man's intelligence, but this principle of the omnipotence 
 of majorities is surely the most potent of all. The best of 
 the ancients would have lau,ghed at the, materialistic notion 
 that the mere body-weight behind a measure or a policy, 
 or a judgment, was sufficient to sanctify— nay, justify 
 that measure, policy or judgment. But to-day, with abso- 
 lute gravity and earnestness, with imperturbable calm and 
 
 ^ To the thoughtful optimist fiour-tshmg life is the test of the 
 absolute in all doctrine. 
 
 29a 
 
DECLINE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 
 
 conviction, we leave our nlot^l judgments, our intellfectual 
 discoveries and conclusions, our hard-thought-out plans 
 and policies to take care of themselves, and all we do is 
 to weigh bodies. The scales descend on the left, the 
 bodies shouting "nay" have it — and the wisdom even 
 of a Solomon is cast carelessly on the dust-heap. A god 
 himself could not contend with any hope of success with 
 this essentially materialistic method of differentiating right 
 from wrong in doctrine and policy by the measure of the 
 butcher's scales; but think of the besotting effect of the 
 method upon those whose bodies only are weighed and 
 whose judgment is ignored, whose capacity for judgment 
 is ignored! Think of the bottomless stupidity of their 
 laughter when their mere "arm-in-arm-together" opposi- 
 tion can outweigh the utterance of a piractised, tried, 
 discriminating and tasteful thinker! What respect can 
 they have for God or man, for wisdom or meditation, for 
 beauty or real power, when this weighing of meat, this 
 literal reckoning of carcasses, of bones, flesh and blood, 
 becomes the sole criterion, the one and only test of superior 
 divination, selection and rejection! 
 
 And the demoralising influence of this immoral creed 
 of majorities, is the one which is most powerful to-day, 
 not only in governments but wherever you turn and find 
 men opposed to one another; so much so, indeed, that the 
 masses are losing all the instinct, which they once pos- 
 sessed, of distinguishing intuitively between that which is 
 superior and that which is inferior to them, save in mere 
 numbers; so much so, that the masses are rapidly being 
 turned into merely movable herds of cattle, a sufficient 
 number of which it is necessary to drive bleating into 
 one's pen, before one can dare to utter any truth, any 
 warning or any prophecy, however deep, however sound 
 and however urgent; so much so, that our only hope, our 
 only trust can be that the masses themselves will one day 
 halt, and, sick of being herded into the scales or into the 
 pens of party and propaganda, and tired of bleating to 
 order, will cry aloud for that saviour, that leader of men, 
 
 293 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 that powerful ruler-spirit and creator of national order, 
 who, though caring nothing for their bleating, will yet 
 understand their needs better than they can possibly under- 
 stand them themselves, and treat them as something a 
 little higher, a little nobler and a little more precious than 
 mere meat for the scales.^ 
 
 ^ As Bluntschli says, in the Theory of the State (authorised translation^ 
 Clarendon Press), p. 1 94 : " The real interests of the proletariat proper 
 demand Patrons rather than representatives, which it cannot find in its 
 own ranks. The higher the position and influence of the ' patron ' the 
 more effective would be the defence of the rights of the proletariat." 
 
 294 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 " That kingdom where Sudras [common, low people] are very numer- 
 ous, which is infested by atheists and destitute of twice-born inhabitants 
 [aristocrats] soon entirely perishes." — Laws ofManu, VIII, 22. 
 
 In the statement of my thesis I defined the aristocrat 
 broadly as the example of flourishing life among men. 
 Let me now be quite plain as to what I mean by flourish- 
 ing life. I have said that it was that manifestation of 
 human nature possessing a maximum of beauty, health, 
 vigour, will and spirit. Of course, I meant, within a 
 particular race; for that is an essential condition of such 
 powers constituting the best in a given community. 
 
 What, thenj does flourishing life mean within a par- 
 ticular race ? It means that example of life in which the 
 race's view of beauty, health, vigour, will and spirit appear 
 in a maximum degree of development. It means that 
 example of life on which the whole of a particular race can 
 look with the approbation of proud spectators saying : 
 " This is our highest achievement in instinct, virtue, 
 beauty and will ! " 
 
 And with this I come to the kernel of the question; 
 for the aristocrat is an achievement. He is not the mere 
 foam on the surface of a society; he is a society's top- 
 wave. 
 
 But an achievement implies design, endeavour, the 
 patient exercise and garnering of virtuous, volitional, and 
 bodily accomplishments. An achievement involves effort. 
 This, however, is precisely what constitutes the aristocrat. 
 He is the outcome of effort. He is the product of long, 
 untiring endeavour. As a being in possession of highly 
 
 295 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 developed instincts and virtues, he is essentially a work of 
 human art, and as such he naturally prizes himself, and is 
 naturally prized by others. 
 
 Let me, however, define my terms. What are instinct, 
 virtue, beauty and will.^ These are words used and mis- 
 used with a looseness which can lend only to the worst 
 confusion. They, nevertheless, stand for very definite 
 ideas, and to every strong race, or even people, they are, 
 and always have been, very definite ideas. 
 
 Instinct in man is the knowledge of certain things, or 
 the inclination of ability to practise certain more or less 
 complex actions, prior to experience. It is either racial 
 experience, racial memory, or it is an inevitable tendency 
 arising out of a certain correlation of bodily parts; and, 
 after experience has been acquired, while it is being 
 acquired, instinct remains a predisposition, a bias, in favour 
 of a certain mode of action, a certain course of conduct. 
 
 An instinct may remain dormant, it may not find a 
 favourable environment for its expression; but it cannot 
 be created by environment; it cannot be generated by 
 something outside man; because it is essentially something 
 in him, something embedded in the very heart of his 
 ganglia and muscles, and something, therefore, as unaltel-- 
 able as a leopard's spots. 
 
 As Theognis of Megara said : " To beget and rear a 
 man is easier than to implant a good soul in his body. No 
 one has yet known how to do this; no one has yet been 
 able to change an imbecile into a sage, or a bad man into 
 a good one." ^ 
 
 No historian has told us, no historian knows, the very 
 beginning of races. The most that historians know is 
 that a certain number of races are to hand, or were to hand 
 at a certain date, and that some have flourished, some 
 have never risen above a certain low level, some have 
 survived in more or less modified forms to this day, and 
 some have become totally extinct. 
 
 ^ Fragments, 429-43 1 . The words " bad " and " good " here mean 
 nothing more than " plebeian " and " noble " respectively. 
 
 296 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 The inception of a particular race with definite instincts 
 is a thing which is mysteriously buried in the darkness of 
 prehistoric antiquity. All we know is, that whereas some 
 of the races of this world step into history fully equipped 
 with the instincts calculated to make them attain to a state 
 of high civilisation — others in circumstances equally 
 favourable, but without these instincts, enjoy a much less 
 dignified and much less noble fate, and femnin for ever 
 in barbarity, or at least at a very low level of culture. 
 
 With Gobineau, therefore, we are forced to conclude 
 that there is inequality between the races of man, and that 
 barbarity, far from being a primitive state, or an infantile 
 state of historical humanity in general, is rather the in- 
 evitable and permanent state of certain races with instincts 
 incompatible with any other condition, while civilisation 
 is the inevitable and certain creation of races with other 
 instincts.-^ To take an instance : it is not ofily extremely 
 doubtful, but well-nigh thoroughly improbable, that the 
 Fuegians of whom Darwin speaks,'^ would ever have 
 created the civilisation of the Incas, even if they had lived 
 in their circumstances; while it is also thoroughly im- 
 probable that the, ancient Peruvians would have developed 
 the low and degraded social organisations of the Fuegians^ 
 even if they had been in circumstances ten times as 
 unfavourable as they. 
 
 Darwin says, glibly: "The perfect equality among the 
 individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long 
 time retard their civilisation." ^ Gobineau would reply : 
 " Their civilisation is as it is, and will remain as it is, as 
 the result of conditions which sink much more deeply into 
 thein lives, than that which appeared to Darwin to be a 
 mere convention of their social life. The equality that 
 Darwin read as the obstacle to their advancement, was but 
 the surface manifestation of an obstacle far greater and 
 far more formidable, which resided in the very hearts 
 of their bodies." 
 
 ^ See Chapter V, of Vol. T, Essai sur I'lnigaliti des Races Humaines. 
 * Journal of Researches, Chapter X. ' Op. cit., p. 228. 
 
 297 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 This is not the occasion to examine all Gobineau's 
 support of his claim concerning the inequality of human 
 races; suffice it to say that he utterly, and in my opinion, 
 successfully, routs those who would sentimentally contend 
 that all mankind is equal, and that the difference between 
 the negro and the Caucasian is simply the difference 
 between youth and maturity. 
 
 Civilisajjjon, then, outside a cidtured nation, must always 
 mean a transfusion of blood ? 
 
 Gobineau does not hesitate to draw this inevitable con- 
 clusion from his arguments.^ He says, practically, you 
 cannot turn the Fuegian into a man capable of a high state 
 of civilisation, save by destroying his innate instincts by 
 cross-breeding him with a superior race. 
 
 The interesting converse of this contention, however, 
 is, that you cannot re-convert a civilised man into a brute, 
 save by cross-breeding him with an inferior race; and it 
 is this contention of Gobineau's which makes his work so 
 intensely valuable to the historian as well as to the 
 sociologist whose gaze is directed towards the future of 
 his nation. 
 
 For it is this contention which all races of antiquity 
 unconsciously grasped and acted upon. And it was only 
 when the jealous idea of race came to be undermined by 
 democratic influences such as wealth, or the idea of the 
 equality of mankind^ that the highly civilised peoples of 
 antiquity declined. 
 
 ^ Op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 6z : "En adoptant comme justes les conclu- 
 sions qui pr^cJdent, deux affirmations deviennent de plus en plus 
 6videntes : c'est, d'abord, que la plupart des races humaines sont inaptes 
 i se civiliser' jamais, i moins qu'elles ne se m^langent ; c'est en suite, 
 que non seulement ces races ne possMent pas le ressort intdrieur declari 
 n^cessaire pour les pousser en avant sur l'6chelle du perfectionnement, 
 mais encore que tout agent ext6rieur est impuissant a ficonder leur 
 st6riliti organique, bien que cet agent puisse fitre d'ailleurs tr& 
 6nergique." See also Reibmayr, Inzucht und VermUchung, p. 7 1 : " Just 
 as inbreeding serves the purpose of creating the ganglia of civilisation, 
 so cross-breeding serves the purpose of spreading and handing on the 
 same." 
 
 298 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 As Reibmayr has so ably shown,^ it was in islands 
 (Crete), peninsulas (Greece, Italy), or in naturally enclosed 
 lands (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru), where inbreeding and 
 the consequent preservation of a particular type, were best 
 ensured, that cultvire attained to its highest degree of 
 beauty and permanence, and it was only when these 
 civilisations began to lose their isolation and independence, 
 that degeneration set in with that most potent destroyer 
 of instinct, indiscriminate cross-breeding. 
 
 Indeed, Reibmayr goes so far as to declare that all 
 culture depends for its production upon the close inbreed- 
 ing of a particular leading stock, and that without such 
 close inbreeding within a superior class or group, man 
 would never have been able to raise himself out of his 
 original condition of barbarism." Like Bluntschli, Nie- 
 tzsche and many others, Reibmayr maintains, simply what 
 history proves, that every elevation of the type man, every 
 culture and civilisation, has always been the work of a 
 small leading caste of inbred aristocrats at the head of 
 a community; "but," he says, "it is more difficult for 
 an exogamic than for an endogamic people to rear a lead- 
 ing caste possessed of pronounced characters, and that is 
 why such peoples are never able to play a prominent part 
 in the history of human civilisation, so long as they remain 
 faithfiil to the custom of exogamy. In the struggle for 
 supremacy they almost invariably have to give way to 
 those communities who are strictly endogamic, and with 
 whom the rearing of a leading caste is a perfectly natural 
 phenomenon." ' 
 
 In every race that has achieved anything in this world, 
 there has always been a feeling, conscious or unconscious, 
 among its leaders, that they and their followers were the 
 chosen people and that they must wrap themselves 
 jealously in the mantle of their own natures and eschew 
 the foreigner, lest they lose their most precious possession. 
 This marvellous insight on the part of the people of 
 
 ''■ Die Enttoicklungigeschichte des Takntes und Genies, Vol. I, p. 9. 
 * Ibid., p. 6. ' Inzttcht und Vermischung, p. 73. 
 
 299 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 antiquity, seems almost incredible in its wisdom — more 
 particularly now that we are able to look upon it, and 
 whole-heartedly to uphold it, with the knowledge of the 
 fact that science entirely confirms the prejudice of these 
 ancient peoples. Yet it is impossible to think of a great 
 nation that did hot share this belief in ancient times. 
 
 Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians despised the 
 foreigner; ^ he also says : " The Egyptians are averse to 
 adopt Greek customs, or, in a word, those of any other 
 nation. This feeling is almost universal among thefti." " 
 Elsewhere he writes : " The Egyptiahs call by the name 
 of b&,rbarians all such as speak a language different from 
 their own." ^ While in Genesis we find the following 
 confirmation of this view : " Ahd he [Joseph] washed his 
 face, and went out, and refraihed himself, and said. Set 
 on bread. And they set on for him by hitti^elf, and fen* 
 them by themselves, and for the Egyptians, which did eat 
 with him, by themselves : because the Egyptians might 
 not eat bread with the Hebrews; for that is an aboniindlion 
 unto the Egyptians." * 
 
 Like the Jews, who probably derived the idea frbtti 
 them, the Egyptians believed they wete " a chosen 
 people"; they were the only men whom the gods really 
 cherished. They alone, in fact, were men (romet); ail 
 other peoples were Asiatics, Ni^gfers or Lybians, but not 
 men.' Strangers were forbidden to enter the couhtfy, and 
 for the exigencies of trade, certain defifiite places v^ere 
 allotted. The Greeks, for instance, who traded with the 
 Egyptians, were confined to the town of Naucratis." A 
 stdne pillar, hailing from the tiitte of Userteseen III (circa 
 1630 B.C.) has befen fbuhd, bearing a wrilteii ■vi^aniing to 
 all strangers, not to cross the frontiers of Egypt, and we 
 are told by Herodotus that the Ionian ahd Carian troops 
 of ^sammatichus (circa 664 B.C.) Wei-e the f!fst foteigners 
 
 1 Book II> 41 and 79. * liiJ., 91, 
 
 ' Hid., 158. * Gen. xliii. 32. 
 
 * Reibmiyr, Inzucht u)id V-ehmMtiitg, p. 160. 
 
 * Wilkinson, Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 328. 
 
 300 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 to be allowed to settle in the country, and even these 
 were given a special place a little helow Bubastis, called 
 the carnp.^ In short, as Wilkinson tells us, the Egyptians 
 treated foreigners " with distrust and cojn tempt," ^ and, 
 like the Chinese, tolerated rather than liked their appear- 
 ance even on the frontier. 
 
 And the Jews, in the same way, despised the alien, and 
 were forbidden to intermarry with him. We read in 
 Deuteronomy : " When the Lord thy God shall deliver 
 them [the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the 
 Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and Jebusites] be- 
 fore thee; thpu shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; 
 thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy 
 unto them. Neither shalt thou make marriages with 
 them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor 
 his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son." ^ 
 
 And why.-" 
 
 "For they will turn away thy son from following me 
 [that is, destroy his particular kind of social instinct — 
 the Jewish kind] that they may serve other gods : so will 
 the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy 
 thee suddenly." * 
 
 Here is the essence of ancient wisdom with regard to 
 the preservation of a valuable type, by means of inbreed- 
 ing. And why did the type wish to preserve itself.? 
 Because of its pride in itself. Because of its consciousness 
 of its peculiar virtues. 
 
 The chapter continues : " For thou art an holy people 
 unto the Lord God : the Lord thy God hath chosen thee 
 to be a special people unto himself, above all the people 
 that are upon the face of the earth. The Lord did not 
 set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were 
 
 1 Book II, 154. This statement is not so wrong as it seems, for 
 there are reasons for believing that the Jews were allowed to settle in 
 Egypt only when a kindred race (the Hyksos) was putting sovereigns 
 on the throne. 
 
 « Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 35. 
 
 * Deut. vii. 2-3. See also Joshua xxiii. 12-13 ; i Kings xi. 2. 
 
 * Deut. vii. 4. 
 
 301 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest 
 of all people : But because the Lord God loved you, and 
 because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto 
 your fathers," etc.-^ 
 
 Now hear how the prophet Ezra bewails the terrible fact 
 that this pride of his race has fallen, and that his co- 
 religionists have condescended to mix with the foreigner! 
 
 " Now when these things were done, the princes came 
 to me, saying, The people of Israel, and the priests, and 
 the Levites, have not separated themselves from the people 
 of the lands, doing according to their abominations, even 
 of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebu- 
 sites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians and 
 the Amorites. For they have taken of their daughters for 
 themselves, and for their sons : so that the holy seed have 
 mingled themselves with the people of those lands : yea, 
 the hand of the princes and rulers hath been chief in this 
 trespass. And when I heard this thing, I rent my garment 
 and my mantle, and plucked ofF the hair of my head and 
 of my beard, and sat down astonied." ^ 
 
 To this extent were the best of the Jews unconsciously 
 certain of the fact that races are a matter of instinct, and 
 that races are destroyed by the extinction of those par- 
 ticular instincts constituting their identity through indis- 
 criminate cross-breeding. 
 
 The Greeks, too, in their healthiest period, were just 
 as hostile to the foreigner, and to the base-born man, as 
 the proudest of the Egyptians or Jews. 
 
 " Both metropolitans and colonists," says Grote, 
 " styled themselves Hellenes, and were recognised as such 
 by each other : all glorying in the name as the prominent 
 symbol of fraternity — all describing non-Hellenic men 
 or cities by a word which involves associations of repug- 
 nance. Our term barbarian, borrowed from this latter 
 word, does not express the same idea : for the Greeks 
 spoke thus indiscriminately of the extra-Hellenic world 
 
 1 Deut. vii. 6-8. 
 
 ' Ezra ix. i, z, 3, etc. See also Neh. xiii. 23-31, 
 362 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 with all its inhabitants, whatever might be their degree of 
 civilisation. The rulers and people of Egyptian Thebes 
 with their ancient and gigantic monuments, the wealthy 
 Tyrians and Carthaginians, the phil-HeUene Arganthonius 
 of Tartessus, and the well-disciplined patricians of Rome 
 (to the indignation of old Cato) were all comprised in it. 
 At first it seemed to have expressed more of repugnance 
 than of contempt, and repugnance especially towards the 
 sound of a foreign language." ^ 
 
 As Grote shows, in this passage, the matter of the degree 
 of civilisation attained by a foreign people, was not con- 
 sidered by the Greek of antiquity. But neither was it 
 considered by the Jews; for the Jews could scarcely have 
 regarded themselves as more highly civilised than the 
 Egyptians. This is sufficient to show us that this race- 
 feeling was not asserted only in relation to the member 
 of an inferior or savage nation; it was the attitude of a 
 proud people, conscious of their physical and spiritual 
 possessions, towards all the rest of the world. And it is 
 this fact which makes it so astounding. Nothing but 
 the sound, though unconscious, " hitting of the nail on the 
 head," by the men of taste among the Egyptians, the 
 Jews and the Greeks, would ever have led a whole race 
 thus "blindly," so to speak, to conduct themselves as if 
 they knew all that the science of historians and anthro- 
 pologists now lays down as the rationale of all this race 
 prejudice and race-exclusiveness. 
 
 It is impossible to explain this healthy profundity on 
 the part of these people of antiquity, save by some such 
 hypothesis as the one I have suggested in my thesis. For 
 only the voice of healthy, flourishing life could, without 
 conscious science or experiment, have lighted intuitively 
 upon just precisely that measure of preservation for a 
 race, which is involved in this prejudice against the 
 foreigner. 
 
 All the disabilities imposed upon the metics in Athens; 
 all the contempt shown to freedmen and slaves, are only 
 ^ History tf Greece, Vol. II, p. 162. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 other expressions of the same feeling. For the ever- 
 preaent danger to such societies as those of Athens and 
 Rome, must have been the vast number of aliens from 
 all climes and races who gradually found a footing as 
 something more than despised slaves in the heart of titese 
 communities. 
 
 Theognis, the poet of Megara, had witnessed changes 
 enough in his native city in the sixth century b.c. to 
 cause him the gravest a,larm. He saw what no other man 
 perhaps the^, saw, that the gradual encroachment of the 
 metic and the plebeian upon the higher classes through the 
 steady rise in the dignity of mere wealth, was the greatest 
 danger threatening his people. And the phenomena which 
 were later to make their appear3Jice in Athens^ were 
 watched by him with the most serious qualms in his own 
 city. 
 
 Addressing his friend Cyrnus, he sa,ys : " We, Cyrnus, 
 go in search of rams, asses and horses of a good breed so 
 that they may give us progeny like unto themselves. But 
 the man of good birth [UteraUy ' the good man '] does 
 not decline the daughter of a churl or ruffian [literally ' a 
 bad man'], provided she brings him wealth. Neither is 
 there any woman who would not consent to become the 
 wife of a churl or ruffian if he be rich, or who would not 
 prefer the wealthy before the honest man. Riches are all 
 that people consider, the man of birth finds a wife in the 
 house of the churl, the churl in the house of the man of 
 birth. Wealth mixes races. Do not therefore be aston- 
 ished, Polypaedes, that our fellow-citizens' blood is de- 
 generate, seeing that the bad and the good are mixing." ^ 
 
 The point that is important here, is not only the evidence 
 that this passage provides of Theognis's knowledge of 
 the levelling or mixing influences that the power of wealth 
 exercises over a community consisting of different races; 
 but that he deplored it because he was aware of the dis- 
 integrating effects of cross-breeding upon the instincts of 
 a particular type. 
 
 1 Fraffnents, 183-192., 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 Elsewhere he says: "Never is a slave's head erect; 
 but always bowed, and the neck bent. For neither from 
 the bramble spring roses or hyacinths, nor ever from a 
 bond-woman a noble child." ^ 
 
 Indeed, so conscious was he of the importance of purity 
 of stock that he was suspicious even of the exile — even, 
 that is to say, of the man who, though born and bred a 
 Greek, had spent some time away from his native soil. 
 Addressing his friend Cyrnus once more, he says : " Do 
 not ever embrace the exile in the hope of gaining any- 
 thing! When he returns home he is no longer the same 
 man." ^ 
 
 Reibmayr would have it that it is a natural instinct in 
 a race not to mix its blood with that of any other.^ But 
 if this theory is true I have some difficulty in understand- 
 ing why the lawgivers of all races seem to have been so 
 particular about forbidding mesalliances with the foreigner 
 to all their fellow-countrymen. No other instinct requires 
 thus to be ratified by law. An explanation which seems 
 to me much more likely is that, in accordance with my 
 thesis, only those supremely happy or lucky strokes of 
 nature within a certain race, with their taste perfectly 
 attuned to every matter of selection and rejection, intui- 
 tively selected the right attitude here, and sought to 
 impress it upon the rest of their race. For any law on 
 the matter would surely be superfluous if there actually 
 did exist an instinct in man which made all but the women 
 of his own race creatures both loathsome and repulsive 
 to him. 
 
 In any case, no law seems to have been more easily 
 broken or ignored, more particularly in cities like Athens 
 and Rome, where the constant presence and contact of 
 metics and slaves of foreign origin offered all sorts of 
 opportunities to the Hellenes and the Romans to step 
 
 ^ Fragments, 535-538. ^ /&V., 429-431. 
 
 ' Inxucht und VermUchung. Chapter : " Ursachen der Inzucht beim 
 Menschen." 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 aside from the proud path of an exclusive and self-con- 
 scious race. 
 
 We know how wealthy many of the metics were in 
 Athens, and we also know how some of their number, 
 as well as numerous freedmen, were ultimately included 
 in the franchise by Cleisthenes in the fifth century B.C. 
 After this first step in the direction of absolute democracy 
 pressed upon the community by the steady rise in the 
 dignity of mere wealth, how could the old race feeling 
 any longer assert itself? It was still strong, of course; 
 but it had been assailed in a manner which rendered it 
 almost impossible for it ever to recover its former vigovir. 
 The words of Theognis about Megara in the sixth century 
 now applied to Athens in the fifth : " Our fellow-citizens' 
 blood is degenerate, seeing that the bad and the good are 
 mixing." 
 
 In the fourth century we find Aristotle saying with 
 perfect gravity, " Slaves have sometimes the bodies of 
 freemen, sometimes the souls " ^ — the feeling of aversion 
 is vanishing — and about the year 325 B.C. the proud sense 
 of race was so near extinction that Alexander was able 
 seriously to contemplate, and to establish the precedent 
 of, a fusion of Greeks and Asiatics. At Sura, the King 
 himself married Statira, the daughter of Darius; his bosom 
 friend Hephaestion took her sister, and a large number of 
 Macedonian officers wedded the daughters of Persian 
 noblemen. Of the rank and file of the Macedonians, 
 10,000 are said to have followed the example of their 
 leader and his officers and taken Asiatic wives, and all 
 those who did so were munificently rewarded by Alexander. 
 
 Long before this happened, however, Greece had fallen 
 into a state of steady decline, and the art, alone, of the 
 Hellenistic period shows clearly enough how the sympa- 
 thies of the ancient Hellenes, how their sense of the 
 beautiful in man and their range of subjects fit for art 
 had long since begun to include the " barbarian " and his 
 attributes. 
 
 ^ Politics, Chapter V, 1,254*. 
 306 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 The same observations apply to the Romans. To the 
 early patricians, the plebeians — a class which included 
 foreign settlers and manumitted slaves of plebeian 
 residents — ^were not merely a despised class, they were 
 regarded as profane men. To admit them to any share 
 of privilege was tantamount to flinging scorn at the ances- 
 tral gods. Roman jurisprudence proscribed the marriage 
 of a citizen with a metic or foreigner, and, in the days 
 of freedom and virtue, a senator would have thought it 
 beneath him to match his daughter even with a king. 
 As late as the last half-century B.C. Mark Antony's fame 
 was sullied by his union with an Egyptian wife — despite 
 the fact that she was the descendant of a long line of 
 kings; while in a.d. 79 it was popular opinion and censure 
 that compelled the Emperor Titus to part with his great 
 love, the Jewess Berenice. 
 
 Not quite three centuries later — to show how long this 
 feeling survived, at least in certain exalted quarters — 
 Constantine is found cautioning his son against mingling 
 his blood with that of the princes of the north,, " of the 
 nations without faith or fame," who were ambitious of 
 forming matrimonial alliances with the descendants of the 
 Caesars. " The aged monarch," says Gibbon, " in his 
 instructions to his son, reveals the secret maxims of policy 
 and pride, and suggests the most decent reasons for refus- 
 ing these insolent and unreasonable demands. Every 
 animal, says the discreet Emperor, is prompted by nature 
 to seek a mate among the animals of his own species; and 
 the human species is divided into various tribes by the 
 distinction of language, religion and manners. A just 
 regard to the purity 0/ descent preserves the harmony of 
 public and private life; but the mixture of foreign blood 
 is the fruitful source of disorder and discord." ^ 
 
 But by the time that Constantine ascended the throne 
 the Romans had long ceased to be Romans — ^just as the 
 Greeks had long ceased to be Hellenes in the Hellenistic 
 
 1 Decline and Fall (Methuen, 1898), Vol. VI, Chapter 53, p. 86. 
 [The italics are mine. — A. M. L.] 
 
 307 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 age. Their blood had been mingled with that of the 
 foreigner for so many generations that, as Gobineau very 
 rightly points out, it is absurd to speak of the " decline 
 and fail " either of the Athenians or the Romans; because 
 the men of the decline were no longer either Athenians 
 or Romans. They were a hotch-potch of humanity, pos- 
 sessing only an infinitesimally small remnant of the blood, 
 and therefore of the instincts, of the original founders of 
 the two great cities. Those who know the history of 
 Athens, if only from the time of Cleisthenes, wiU not 
 question this view. While in so far as Rome is con- 
 cerned, the two excellent chapters on " The Extirpation 
 of the Best " and on " Slaves and Clients," in Otto Sieck's 
 History of the Downfall of the Ancient World,^ are 
 evidence enough in support of Gobineau's standpoint* 
 
 Sieck says : " If we assumed that, in the year 400 B.C., 
 fovir-fifths of the free population in the states of the 
 classical world consisted of the descendants of manumitted 
 slaves, far from overstating the actual facts, we should be 
 making a verjj moderate computation." ^ 
 
 Now, says Gobineau, if this be so, it is no longer with 
 the original Greeks or Romans that we have to deal when 
 we concern o"urselves with the decline of these two nations, 
 but with a people who would have been utterly and hope- 
 lessly incapable of maintaining, much less df founding, 
 such states as Athens and Rome. We have to deal wira 
 a pot-pourri of lethargic Asiatic, African, Jewish and other 
 alien instincts, whicli did not, and could not, have any 
 influence in the original construction of these national 
 organisms, or they would never have come into being as 
 the powerful and highly civilised creations which we know 
 them to have been.^ 
 
 ^ Geschkhte des Untergangs der Jntiken fVelt (i8q5)» Chapters III and 
 IV., Vol. I. 
 
 * Op. cit., pp. 297-298. See also his remarks upon the degenerate 
 sort of Eastern slave who had the greatest chance of obtaining freedom 
 in the Roman world. 
 
 * Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 24 : " En montrant comment I'essence d'une 
 
 308 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 I have gone — all too briefly, I fear — into these ques- 
 tions in order to show two things: (i) The store which, 
 in their profound wisdom, the great cultured nations of 
 antiquity unconsciously set by instinct, and (2) how the 
 gradual break-up of old civilisations seems always to have 
 been strangely synchronous with laxity in matters of race 
 pride and of prejudice towards the foreigner. I cannot 
 attempt to go into the details of the second contention 
 nearly as adequately and fully as such men as Gobineau, 
 Reibmayr and Otto Sieck have done; but, basing my con- 
 tention wholly upon their conclusions, I believe it to be 
 well founded. 
 
 Let me now try to show what part instinct plays in 
 the life of a nation, in order that we may esteem at its 
 proper worth the depth of insight and intuitive good taste 
 which has always led all great nations, or their leaders, to 
 regard the foreigner and his blood with suspicion. 
 
 I have said that during the lifetime of men — while, 
 that is to say, they are acquiring experience — instinct may 
 be defined as a predisposition, a bias in favour of a certain 
 mode of action, a certain course of conduct. 
 
 I will now go further — and in doing so proceed to 
 make myself clear concerning the question of will— by 
 adding to this definition of instinct the following clause : 
 that instinct, as a hereditary bias to act, to select or to 
 reject in a particular way, constitutes the peculiar will of 
 a people. To their particular instincts and -will, whether 
 slowly and arduously acquired or implanted in them from 
 their very birth as a race, they will owe their foundation 
 as a great nation; to their instincts and will they owe 
 
 nation s'alt^re gradnellement, je diplace la responsabilite de la decad- 
 ence ; je la rends, en quelque sorte, moins hotiteuse ; car elle ne p&e 
 plus sur le fils, mais sur les neveux, puis sur les cousins, puis sur des 
 allies de moins en moins proches ; et lorsque je fait toucher au doigt 
 que les grands peuples, au moment de leur morts, n'ont qu'une bien 
 faible, bien imponderable partie du sang des fondateurs dont ils ont 
 hdrit^, j'ai suffisament expliqu^ comment il se peut faire que les civilisa- 
 tions finissent, puisqu'elles ne restent pas dans les la^jnes mains." 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 their triumphs, their glories, the fruits of their culture, 
 the possession of virtues whereof they may be justly 
 proud, and whatever beauty they may have achieved in 
 their own bodies or in their material creations. 
 
 It was this half-realised, half-conscious thought that 
 made the nations of antiquity, or at least their leaders, 
 so jealously proud of the attributes of their blood. It 
 constituted their wUl. Other blood might be as highly 
 ennobled, as highly cultivated as theirs; other instincts 
 might prove as triumphant and as eminently admirable 
 as theirs; but inasmuch as they were different, inasmuch 
 as they led to a different will, a different course of deter- 
 mined conduct in other nations, these nations must be 
 eschewed as breeding mates, lest a conflict of wills, a 
 neutralisation of wills, a mutual destruction of instinct 
 which is the basis of all will, should lead to the decline 
 of will, to the disintegration of will — that is, to instinctive 
 weakness and the parulysis of all endeavour, all purposeful, 
 resolute and unswerving action in the spirit of the original 
 founder, in the spirit of the great national ancestors. 
 
 Thus even the blood of a king was scorned by the early 
 Roman patrician seeking a mate for his daughter; not 
 because a kingly man was scorned, but because a king 
 must of necessity have been a foreigner, a member — 
 however great — of a strange people, and therefore a 
 creature whose instincts, whose will would probably be 
 in conflict with the instincts and will of the Roman. 
 Thus, too, Mark Antony is scorned, not because he chose 
 a low-born lady — Cleopatra was the daughter of a long 
 line of kings — ^but because Cleopatra was Egyptian, and 
 must be possessed of instincts and a will strange and 
 possibly poisonous to the instincts and will of the Roman. 
 The same remarks apply to the Jewish prejudice towards 
 the Egyptian, and to the Greek prejudice towards the 
 Persian, It manifested itself by an inability to sink race- 
 pride and race-prejudice beneath a rational recognition of 
 superior, or at least equal, claims to culture and refinement 
 in another nation. 
 
 310 
 
TME ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 At the riisk, now, of breaking into the general argument, 
 I must attempt to show the relation of instincts to will, 
 and thus clear up the matter of volition, at least from the 
 aristocratic standpoint. 
 
 To be quite plain, let us suppose with Reibmayr that 
 all men's instincts may be classified imder the three heads : 
 (A) The self-preservative, (B) the reproductive and (C) 
 the social.^ However much these may be subdivided, 
 however differently they may be coloured, however dis- 
 proportionately their respective strengths may be com- 
 bined in the same individual, the peculiar adjustment 
 of ^A) (B) (C) will always constitute the character of that 
 individual. 
 
 (A) may be paramount and all-powerful, and (B) and 
 (C) may be subservient; (B) may be all-powerful, and 
 (A) and (C) may be subservient; or (C) may be all- 
 powerful, and (A) and (B) may be subservient. But 
 whatever the ultimate adjustment of the three instincts 
 and their subdivisions (the virtues) may turn out to be 
 in the individual, that adjustment will constitute the 
 characteristic keynote of his character and his direction. 
 Whichever instinct obtains the mastery over the others, 
 that instinct will thereafter determine the actions of the 
 whole man, and constitute his will. 
 
 A man may be born with all his three instincts almost 
 equally powerful. Life soon gives him opportunities 
 enough of realising their conflicting claims in his breast; 
 and unless one of his instincts, by constant struggles 
 with the other two, attains to mastery, his conduct will 
 always occasion him the most appalling and staggering 
 difficulties. 
 
 Let us take a hypothetical case : H W is a 
 
 man of thirty with a great life-work before him in the 
 legislature, and the abilities to meet the demands which 
 this life-work will make upon his talents and his energy. 
 
 ^ Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talents uni Genies (Munich, 1908), 
 Vol. I, p. 242. Der Erhaltungstrieb, der Geschechtstrieb und der Sozia/e 
 oder GeselRgskeitstrieb. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 He is not securely established in life yet, and his position 
 is still precarious. He meets a woman who charms him 
 so completely that the question of marriage confronts him 
 for the first time in his life with all the terrible force and 
 persuasiveness of a passionate desire. 
 
 What is the conflict here ? His self-preservative instinct 
 (A) is hostile to an immediate match, because marriage 
 always means a great material sacrifice, and, as his position 
 is still uncertain, it can ill-endure any great strain of this 
 nature upon it. His social instinct (C) is hostile to an 
 immediate match, because his life-work requires all the 
 concentrated attention he can give it, and marriage is 
 likely to divert this attention from its principal object. 
 His reproductive instinct (B) is eloquent, urgent, press- 
 ing and importunate, and is prepared to put up a good 
 fight. 
 
 It is a clear issue, and, all these instincts being equal, 
 the odds are two to one against his marrying the girl. 
 
 But if for many generations the reproductive or sexual 
 instinct has been indulged in his family, it will probably 
 be very powerful, and, like Mark Antony, he may 
 abandon everything for the woman — that is to say, his 
 •will will reside in the guiding force of his paramount 
 reproductive instinct. If his self-preservative instincts 
 have for many generations been indulged by his family, 
 it will likewise probably be very powerful, and^ like Cecil 
 Rhodes, or any other great magnate of mere self-aggran- 
 disement, he will be capable of acting indifferently to 
 women's charms, and will cast the girl aside. His iiOill 
 will reside in the guiding force of his paramount self- 
 preservative instinct. If, finally, his social instincts hav6 
 for many generations been indulged by his family, it will 
 probably be very powerful, and, like Alexander, Caesar, 
 Charles I and Napoleon (who were never influenced by 
 women), he will be able to divorce himself absolutely 
 from the power of sex, if he should think it necessary, 
 and will only take the woman when he sees that his union 
 with her will serve a purpose very often (though not 
 
 312 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 always necessarily) independent of the mere desire of 
 gratifying his sexual instinct. 
 
 I have given this example not so much to prove as to 
 illustrate broadly the relationship of instinct to will. But 
 it wiU easily be seen that illustrations could be multiplied 
 ad libitum.'- 
 
 You have only to think of the subdivisions of the 
 three instincts, and of the numerous virtues to which they 
 can give force and resolution, in order to realise that the 
 will of a man may reside in a whole string of virtues or 
 vices which are either desirable or undesirable, and that 
 the various adjustments of these virtues, backed by the 
 strength of their generating instincts, constitute the varie- 
 ties of races and of individuals. 
 
 We would define will, then, as the guiding force gener- 
 ated by one or two of the instincts. Strong will is, there- 
 fore, always the sign of a strong leading instinct, bidding 
 the individual pursue such and such a direction or purpose 
 and no other; and weak will is the absence of a strong 
 leading instinct, and the consequent ignorance of any 
 direction or purpose whatsoever. 
 
 Now, how do the voluntarist's and determinist's posi- 
 tions stand in the light of this view of will? 
 
 The whole discussion about free will and determinism 
 could only have arisen in a weak and sickly age; for, as 
 a matter of fact, they both stand for precisely the same 
 thing, and, as ideas, arise from a similar state of decadence 
 and disease. 
 
 To the strong there is no such thing as free will; for 
 free will implies an alternative, and the strong man has 
 no alternative. His ruling instinct leaves him no alter- 
 native, allows him no hesitation or vacillation. Strength 
 
 ^ It should always be borne in mind, however, that the very conflict 
 between the three fundamental instincts in man is very often the 
 primary cause of there being strength in him at all ; for it is after a 
 struggle between them that the conquering one, through the exceptional 
 effort it has made, establishes its permanent supremacy by having far 
 outreached the others in power. 
 
 3^3 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of will is the absence of free will. If to the weak man 
 strong will appears to have an alternative, it is a total 
 misapprehension on his part. 
 
 To the strong there iis also no such thing as deter- 
 minism as the determinists understand it. Environment 
 and circumambient conditions determine nothing in the 
 man of strong will. To him the only thing that counts, 
 the only thing he hears is his inner voice, the voice of 
 his ruling instinct. The most environment can do is to 
 provide this ruling instinct with an anvil on which to 
 beat out its owner's destiny, and beneath the racket and 
 din of its titanic action all the voices of stimtdi from 
 outside, all the determining suggestions and hints from 
 environment, sink into an insignificant and inaudible 
 whisper, not even heard, much less heeded, therefore, by 
 the strong man. That is why the passion of a strong 
 man may be permanent, that is why the actions of a 
 strong man may be consistent; because they depend upon 
 an inner constitution of things which cannot change, and 
 not upon environment which can and does change. If 
 the strong man is acquainted with determinism at all, it 
 is a determinism from within, a voice from his own breast; 
 but this is not the determinism of the determinists.^ 
 
 Who, then, has free will — or appears to have it.' 
 Obviously the man who, to himself, even more than to 
 others, seems to have an alternative. His inner voice, 
 the voice of his ruling instinct, even if he have one, is 
 so weak, so small in volume, so low in tone that all the 
 
 ''■ Hence the strong man is not, as a rule, susceptible to sudden 
 conversions, sudden changes of opinion, or of his scheme of life. And 
 that is why he is often called wicked by the weak man. For the weaker 
 man knows from experience that he, personally, has been altered or 
 modified by advice, by good counsel, by a word or a text, and he' thinks 
 that if the strong man were not "Wicked" or "perverse," he also could 
 be altered in this way. The strong man, on the other hand, never 
 calls the weak man " wicked," because, knowing perfectly well that his 
 own deeds are inevitable, he imagines that the weak man's deeds are 
 also inevitable. Consequently he scofis at, laughs at, or pities the weak 
 man, but does not condemn him from any moral standpoint. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 voices from his surroundings dare to measure themselves 
 against it. His mind's ear, far from being deafened by 
 the sound of his own inner voice, is able to listen with 
 respectful and interested attention to the stimuli from 
 outside; it is able to draw comparisons between the volume 
 of sound within and without, and to itself it seems able 
 even to elect to follow the more persuasive and more 
 alluring sound. From this apparent ability which the 
 weak man has of electing one voice or the other — the one 
 in his heart or the one outside — he gets to believe that 
 he has free will; but as his inner voice is generally far 
 weaker than that coming to him from his environment, 
 the determinists are perfectly right in telling him that he 
 has not decided the course of his action. That is why the 
 passion of a weak man, if he appear to have any, is never 
 permanent, that is why the actions of a weak man are 
 never consistent; because they depend upon environ- 
 mental stimuli which change, and not upon an inner 
 constitution of things which does not change. 
 
 Determinism from without, then, is characteristic of 
 the weak man's action. But because he is not abashed 
 at the voice from outside daring to measure itself 
 against his inner voice, he imagines he exercises what 
 he calls free will — the solace and the illusion of the 
 degenerate ! 
 
 Thus the doctrine of free will and that of determinism 
 are essentially the same, and the controversy about them 
 could only have arisen, and could only have been fought 
 with vehemence and misunderstanding, in a thoroughly 
 weak age. 
 
 Having explained precisely what I mean by the two 
 terms instinct and will, it now remains for me to make 
 myself equally clear concerning the terms virtue and 
 beauty. 
 
 A virtue is essentially an ofF-shoot, a minor manifesta- 
 tion of one of the dominating instincts. Being essentially 
 a wilful adaptation of the instincts to the conditions and 
 needs of a given environment, it is capable of being 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 modified, of being trained, of being acquired, schooled, 
 perfected, deteriorated and provoked. 
 
 For instance, a man is born with a good eye — a, power- 
 ful, observant, keen and altogether excellent eye. If he 
 be born in a warrior nation of primitive people, prompted 
 by his self-preservative and social instinct, his eye is almost 
 certain to make him develop all the virtues ^of a good 
 marksman — the certainty of aim, patience in watching for 
 a quarry, self-control over muscles and emotions, and self- 
 reliance and courage vis a vis the foe or the beast of prey. 
 Prompted by his reproductive instinct, he will develop 
 the virtues of the fastidious and exacting connoisseur in 
 selecting his mate among women. He will notice things 
 other men fail to notice. He will admire grace of limb 
 and body, and desire and take grace of limb and body. 
 
 If he be born in a peaceful, highly cultivated nation 
 like the early Egyptians, prompted by his self-preserva- 
 tive and social instinct, his eye is almost certain to make 
 him develop all the virtues of the good artistic craftsman 
 — ^the certainty of expression and of judgment of form 
 of the good painter, decorator or sculptor; the patient 
 industry of the expressor who has his hardest critic con- 
 stantly by him in his own orgah of sight, the self-control 
 over muscles and emotions characteristic of him who sets 
 himself a definite task and desires to accomplish it single- 
 handed, and the self-reliance of one who can trust his own 
 ability. 
 
 Thus a virtue, though it can be strengthened heredit- 
 arily through generations of men who steadily practise it, 
 is much more a personal acquisition than an instinct; it is 
 often a thing that a man watches grow and become perfect 
 in himself during his own lifetime, and as such is a far 
 more conscious possession than the instinct. A man can 
 be extremely proud of virtues which he knows he has 
 strengthened or even acquired during his own lifetime, 
 without ever feeling the slightest pride concerning their 
 root, the strong instinct which has forced these virtues to 
 the fore, or forced him to bring them to perfection. 
 
 316 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 It is for his virtues' sake that man has always dreamt 
 of immortality and longed for it, not for his instincts' 
 sake. These virtues, these possessions, which he is 
 conscious of havin'g tempered and perfected under train- 
 ing and under self-training, guided by a strong desire he 
 does not understand, make him feel very naturally proud, 
 and reluctant to part with them or to lose them. It is 
 so much wilful endeavour, wilful self-control, hard toil 
 gone to waste, apparently irrevocably lost! Thus the 
 virtuous man always proudly repudiates the concept of 
 irrevocable, irretrievable annihilation, and, if he is positive 
 to this world and loves it, he hopes and longs for an eternal 
 recurrence, as the Egyptians did; and if he is negative to 
 this world and despises it, he longs for a Beyond away 
 from this world and utterly different from it. 
 
 What, then, in the light of these observations, is 
 beauty.^ Beauty is essentially that regularity, symmetry 
 and grace of feature and figure which is gradually acquired 
 by a stock pursuing for generations a regular, symmetrical 
 existence, under the guidance of the particular values of 
 their race. As these particular values give rise to par- 
 ticular virtues, so the faces and bodies of a people come 
 to be stamped with the character associated with the virtues 
 most general among them. And a certain association, 
 often unconscious, of the two — ^virtue and physiognomy 
 — always grows up within the race, so that the most 
 beautiful person is always he who, in his face and figure, 
 stands for the highest product of the virtues most prized 
 by the community. In a vigorous, healthy race the idea 
 of ugliness is always clearly associated with a degenerate 
 face or figure, or with the face and figure of the foreigner 
 and stranger. The foreigner or stranger, though beautiful 
 perhaps to his own people, stands for a regularity, an 
 order of virtues and their basic instincts which is unknown, 
 strange or unfamiliar — therefore he is ugly. The moment 
 a race begins to think another race beautiful, its faith in 
 its own instincts and virtues and the type they produce 
 is beginning to decline. 
 
 317 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 We are now in a better position for appreciating the 
 profound wisdom of the ancient prejudice and the pre- 
 judice of all stronger races against race-mixture. 
 
 For what does mixture do ? It can do but one thing : 
 it breaks the will. 
 
 Every race has its own special adjustment and de- 
 velopment of the instincts, its own notion of virtue, 
 its own standard of will-power and its own concept of 
 beauty. 
 
 What happens, then, when two races mix? 
 
 Obviously, two voices instead of one now speak in each 
 man's breast. When confronted by two alternatives, 
 instead of being able to point to " this " or " that " with- 
 out hesitation, each man now vacillates, temporises, doubts, 
 stammers, ponders, and is overcome by a paroxysm of per- 
 plexity.^ When coming upon two directions, instead of 
 stepping deliberately and composedly into one of them, 
 each man now stumbles, falters, wonders, staggers, and 
 often falls. 
 
 As a matter of fact the promptings of two totally 
 different and often hostile sets of ancestors are now heard 
 in his conscience.^ He becomes unreliable, unsteady, 
 uncertain. Not only can he not be trusted to choose the 
 correct course of conduct for his neighbour's or employer's 
 interests, he can scarcely be trusted to choose the correct 
 course of conduct for himself. As Reibmayr says : " The 
 root of a national character resides in the mass of the 
 people, and in the individual peculiarities fixed and become 
 hereditary in it through generations. That is why inbred 
 people have character, and why half-castes or hybrids are 
 notoriously characterless." ^ 
 
 ^ The old Egyptian word for indecision actually took this condition 
 into account, and implied that these wisest of people knew perfectly 
 well what was wrong with the man who hesitates. Their term for 
 what we understand by doubt and lack of decision was " hit-snaou," 
 which means " that which has two hearts." See Letourne»u, I'Evolutim 
 de I'Education, p. 308. 
 
 * See pp. ijS-z-jj of Chapter VI in this book. 
 
 * Inzucht und Vtrmischung, p. 37. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 The unreliability of the half-caste is well known both 
 in India and America, and the proclivity these people often 
 show to practise the lowest and most spiritless forms of 
 crime is evidence of their lack of will and character. Manu 
 condemned inter-class mesalliances because they " caused 
 a mixture of the castes among men, thence follows sin, 
 which cuts up even the roots and causes the destruction of 
 everything. . . . But that kingdom in which such bas- 
 tards, sullying the purity of the castes, are born, perishes 
 quickly, together with its inhabitants." ^ 
 
 It is now — that is to say, at times of promiscuous cross- 
 breeding — that the voice from outside begins to be heeded; 
 it is now that external stimuli can decide an issue; it is 
 now that environment has, as it were, a chance of deter^ 
 mining a course of conduct. Nothing is certain, nothing 
 stands on solid ground — the very breeze about him makes 
 a man twist and turn like a weathercock. It is for this 
 reason that the ancient customs and institutions of a people 
 begin to totter and to crumble away after a general mixture 
 of blood. It is for this reason that the social life degener- 
 ates and breaks up. Hence the profound wisdom of Con- 
 stantine's observation that " the mixture of foreign blood 
 is the fruitful source of disorder and discord." ^ 
 
 All the virtues strung like beads upon these fundamental 
 instincts of one race in a man's body are at variance with 
 those belonging to the other race. Chaos is necessarily the 
 result, and a state of absolute weakness supervenes. The 
 instincts of the man are confused and his will is, therefore, 
 broken; his modicum of bodily strength, though it is the 
 same as it was before, or only slightly increased, has now 
 twenty instead of ten virtues amongst which to divide 
 itself up, and consequently the vigour of his virtues, their 
 power, declines. He is perhaps more versatile, more 
 catholic, more ready to lend an ear to every sound; but he 
 is no longer what he was, he can no longer do what he did, 
 he has become weak, faithless and infirm of purpose. Like 
 
 ^ Laa/s of Manu, Chapter VIII, 353, and Chapter IX, 61. 
 * See p. 307 of this chapter. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the Lombards whom Gibbon mentions/ he may be terri- 
 fied by the sight of his ancestors, he may look with awe 
 upon their feats and their features; but he is incapable of 
 doing as they did, or of looking as they looked. Often he 
 is incapable even of carrying on the work they bequeathed 
 to him. 
 
 In his face you notice strange features, unlike those of 
 either of his ancestral races; he is, racially speaking, 
 "ugly," and is very often so from every othpr point of 
 view. 
 
 Multiply the mixtures, and all the evils enumerated 
 above become a thousand times more acute, until all 
 character vanishes, all will disintegrates, and all virtue 
 disappears. 
 
 It is for this reason that, in democratic times — in times, 
 that is to say, when much is said about the equality of all 
 men, and the "brotherhood of the human species," and 
 when much is done, too, which is in keeping with these 
 doctrines, when everybody marries, and can marry any- 
 body, and there is no distinction among peoples or classes, 
 it is for this reason, I say, that in such times, the will of 
 communities gradually declines,^ the character of com- 
 munities slowly goes to pieces,^ and ugliness in face and 
 
 1 The Decline and Fall, Vol. V, Chapter 45, p. zj. 
 
 * See Gobineau> op. cit., p. 89: " Plus une race se mainfient pure, 
 moins sa base sociale est attaqu6e, parceque la logique de la race demenre 
 la mSme." 
 
 * The chief characteristic of weakness, which is to be wholly at the 
 mercy of external determinants, also shows itself in the form of an 
 increase of vanity and a decrease of pride in democratic times. For 
 vanity is simply the self-esteem of the modest man who depends for his 
 opinion of himself upon the opinion that others have of him — whose 
 opinion of himself, that is to say, is suggested to him by his environ- 
 ment, and who, in order to 'make this environmental opinion a good 
 one, is always trying to seduce the world to a good opinion of him by 
 every manner of artifice, trick and exertion. The proud man, however, 
 whose self-esteem arises from an inner knowledge of his value, and who 
 is, therefore, independent of environmental opinion, tends to become 
 extinct in democratic times. On the increase of vanity nowadays see 
 remarks by Arthur Ponsonby, op. cit., p. 124. 
 
 320 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 figure and in the homes of men, steadily becomes an ever 
 more common and every-day occurrence. 
 
 It is these evils which the racial pride and arrogant self- 
 esteem of all great races intuitively sought to guard 
 against and to avoid, by means of their unanimous and 
 vigorous distrust and contempt of the foreigner, the 
 stranger, or the " barbarian." Just as the man, conscious 
 of having reared a virtue in himself by the sedulous and 
 painstaking exercise of certain principles, has a just pride 
 in his achievement which safeguards him against a mis- 
 alliance which would too obviously imperil the transmission 
 of that virtue to his family; ^ so, as we have seen, the 
 nation which is conscious of having reared something 
 worth keeping in instinct, virtue, will and beauty, culti- 
 vates and nourishes a bitter, implacable and determined 
 feeling of distrust and contempt of the foreigner, who- 
 ever he may be, queen or king, noble or sage, god or 
 magiciain. 
 
 But, you will object, inbreeding cannot go on for ever. 
 In time sterility supervenes, blood is impoverished, con- 
 stitutions become enfeebled and stature declines. All this 
 is perfectly true, though extreme. 
 
 The reproductive powers which consist simply of a 
 periodical amputation from the body of forces which are 
 unamenable to the will — that is to say, which the will is 
 not sufficiently powerful to organise and to use for its own 
 purposes — would naturally tend to decline when, through 
 inbreeding, the will is driven up to its maximum of organ- 
 ising power, and when every degree of energy the in- 
 dividual body possesses can be given a task, a purpose, an 
 accomplishment, within the individual himself and not 
 outside him in the form of a bud or offshoot of himself, 
 with which his will was unable to cope. 
 
 The very rise of the reproductive powers, when an in- 
 bred race is mixed, shows through the coincident drop in 
 
 ^ That is why, in periods where there is little will and little virtue 
 abroad, mhalliances of the most outri nature are consummated with 
 such wantonness and levity. 
 
 Y 321 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 will power, explained in detail above, how deeply the two 
 are interdependent.^ 
 
 Thus vigorous and rich reproductive powers can always 
 be associated with a low order of will-power, and vice 
 versa. 
 
 Nevertheless, before that point is reached when, 
 although the constitution and blood are not impoverished, 
 inbreeding has so cultivated the will as to make its organ- 
 ising power sufficiently perfect to preclude all possibility 
 of generative amputations from the soma taking place, the 
 practice of inbreeding can last a very long while, and has 
 been known to last a very long while, in such nations, 
 for instance, as the ancient Hindus, the ancient Egyptians, 
 and even among certain divisions of the ancient Hellenes. 
 
 Admitting, however, that if the inbred race is to 
 survive, sterility must be corrected, even though constitu- 
 tional decline is still a very long way off, the question next 
 arises, what are the ultimate risks of a judicious mixture ? 
 
 "The principal effects of cross-breeding," says Reib- 
 mayr, " are the maintenance of constitutional vigour and 
 the modification of character. It keeps the blood and the 
 nervous system sound and active, and checks the pro- 
 duction of extreme characters. In its effects, it is thus 
 exactly the reverse of inbreeding, the operation of which 
 is to fix and petrify characters, to favour the rearing of 
 extreme idiosyncrasies, and in the long run to enfeeble 
 constitutional and sexual vigour." '^ 
 
 Thus, when that extremity is reached when an inbred 
 race is threatened with extinction through sterility, cross- 
 breeding, while giving fresh life to its constitution, under- 
 mines the character. This is the worst possible conse- 
 quence of the most extreme case. But, what indeed could 
 be worse.? To lose your character is to lose your iden- 
 
 ^ As far as I know this is the first time that this explanation of the 
 sterility of highly inbred races has been advanced. The first to suggest 
 that reproduction was a sign of a certain impotence of will was, however, 
 Friedrich Nietzsche. 
 
 * Inzttcit unJ Fermiseiung, Tpp. 70-71. 
 
 322 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 tity; it is practically to cease to be. It is to take leave of 
 everything that makes you yourself. 
 
 Of course, the larger the number of the original endo- 
 gamic community, the longer will it take for inbreeding to 
 show its evil effects. For instance in Sparta, which was 
 famous in antiquity owing to its capacity for permanence, 
 it took from six hundred to eight hundred years {i. e. 
 twenty to thirty generations) to reduce a ruling caste 
 which once consisted of from eight to nine thousand 
 families, to a class consisting of only a few hundred 
 families. But nowhere was inbreeding more severe than 
 in the nobility of Sparta. 
 
 Increase the number of the families in your endogamic 
 community and you naturally postpone the evil day of 
 reckoning, when all this rearing and cultivating of special 
 characters to a maximum degree must be paid for. Exer- 
 cise severe selective principles among them, principles as 
 severe if possible as some of Natures own, and you will 
 postpone the evil day still longer. 
 
 Sooner or later, however, if your community is to 
 survive, you must contemplate a cross of some kind with 
 a neighbouring people. 
 
 It is, however, quite ridiculous to suppose that, for the 
 purposes of the rejuvenation of stock, that cross must be 
 effected with a people as remote and as different as possible 
 from the inbred community in question. 
 
 It was this ridiculous error in cross-breeding that proved 
 so fatal to the communities of antiquity, and which ulti- 
 mately swamped their original identity completely out of 
 existence. 
 
 The Asiatic, Jewish and Northern barbarian slaves, as 
 Otto Sieck has so well shown,^ who ultimately mixed their 
 blood with the Roman, had very little in common with 
 the Roman people — so little, indeed, that where character 
 modification took place at all it was rather a process of 
 cancelling out until nil remained, thah of merely intro- 
 ducing conflicting tendencies which might be reconciled, 
 1 Op. cit., Chapter « Sklaven and Klienten." 
 3^3 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 or of which some might become supreme. And even 
 where the Asiatic character prevailed, as it sometimes did, 
 in its indolence, apathy and spirituality, it was scarcely of a 
 type to take over and -continue the strenuous far-reaching 
 and utilitarian work of the original Romans. 
 
 But, although every sort of cross while rejuvenating 
 stock must to some extent implant two voices in a man's 
 breast and thus, up to a certain point, destroy character, 
 it is not necessary, if the conflict be not too great, that this 
 destruction should be permanent. 
 
 A certain period of disturbed equilibrium must be over- 
 come, as in Egypt after the Hyksos invasion, but once the 
 effects of the mixture have been felt and its benefits to the 
 body fully enjoyed, another process begins to operate which 
 is most important for the future welfare and power of the 
 original race : the process of attaining once again to har- 
 mony or to regularity of character by a reconciliation of the 
 conflicting elements in each man's breast, or by the sub- 
 ordination of a part of them to a set of virtues, or to an 
 instinct which gains supremacy. 
 
 If the characteristics of the two stocks are not too far 
 asunder, this is possible and often beneficial. For, just as 
 a man's instincts, as I have shown, by struggling together 
 drive the potentially powerful one to its highest point of 
 vigour, so, in a crossed breed, after a period of doubt, weak- 
 ness and Recharacterisation, a struggle may ensue between 
 the voices of the two sets of ancestors in each man's breast, 
 which may prove the most potent spur to the supremacy 
 of the race's strongest and best potentialities. This, of 
 course, would be possible only if a period of severe in- 
 breeding followed upon a period of cross-breeding. It 
 would be quite impossible if, as we find men doing nowa- 
 days, cross-breeding were carried on promiscuously and 
 habitually with anybody and everybody without let or 
 hindrance. 
 
 The ancient Egyptians, for instance, suffering no doubt 
 from the evil effects of a too lengthy period of inbreeding, 
 were overcome and conquered by the Shepherd Kings. 
 
 324 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 What happened ? After a period of from four hundred to 
 six hundred years, during which the Shepherd Kings ruled 
 supreme in Egypt, and cross-breeding was practised be- 
 tween the two races, especially in the upper classes, without 
 restraint,^ the more highly cultured race showed itself pre- 
 potent, as it always does, recovered from the shock to its 
 character, absorbed the best from the Hyksos, successfully 
 drove them out, and rose from the experience a refreshed 
 and greater people; for now they had added the warrior 
 spirit of their late invaders to their "former character. 
 
 Thus, it is possible, when two races blend, for their 
 respective characters, after a struggle, to arrive at some 
 sort of harmony, and to grow, if anything, stronger in the 
 process of attaining to this harmony than they were before. 
 A judicious cross, therefore, while it will be sure to render 
 character unstable for a while, need not do so permanently. 
 The only thing that destroys character permanently is the 
 general, continual, indiscriminate, inter-class, international 
 and inter-racial cross-breeding that is the rule and custom 
 to-day, and which always becomes the rule and custom in 
 democratic times. 
 
 The mixture of race in the ancient Greeks, for instance, 
 though it never ultimately attained to any successful 
 harmony — for the Aryan and the Pelasgian were appar- 
 ently too hostile ever to come to a settlement in the breast 
 of the ancient Hellenes in so short a time — produced some 
 very great people while the struggle between the two 
 characters lasted; and without the insidiously destructive 
 action of the freedman and metic element, which was con- 
 tinually rising up into the ruling caste like mud from the 
 bottom of a pool, there is no tdling to what heights the 
 Greeks might have attained if the two original races in 
 their breasts had arrived at some adjustment. 
 
 The English, again, offer an example of a people who, 
 up to the time of Elizabeth, were very fortunate indeed in 
 
 1 The conquerors, being a less cultivated race than the Egyptians, 
 were proud to mix with the latter, and powerful enough to override 
 popular prejudice against such- unions. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 their crosses; for, in almost every case, save for their inter- 
 marriage with the Celts of their western and northern 
 provinces, their crosses have been with closely allied races 
 who could not introduce a very disturbing or degenerating 
 element into their characters. 
 
 Thus while an occasional cross, if consummated with a 
 people whose will and whose virtues have a direction not 
 too extremely hostile to their own, may prove the salvation 
 of a too highly inbred race, nothing could be more fatal 
 to the character of a people than the constant, indiscrimin- 
 ate and tasteless cross-breeding which we find comes into 
 fashion — nay is almost ie rigueur — in democratic times. 
 But whereas the nations of antiquity did not consciously 
 know this, and were blissfully unaware of the dangers they 
 ran by promiscuous cross-breeding, save that they knew 
 how their noblest ancestors had for some reason or other — 
 to them probably unknown — forbidden it; we of the 
 twentieth century know these things. We know what 
 constitutes character, and we know how character is de- 
 stroyed, and we can offer no excuse if we persist in errors 
 the consequences of which we can gauge and foresee. 
 
 Even the Emperor Constantino seems to have been 
 sufficiently modern to have known that although crossing 
 was bad, not all crossing was to be deprecated; for, while 
 we find him forbidding his son to marry a daughter of one 
 of the foreign princes of the north "without fame or 
 faith," he made an exception in the case of Bertha, 
 daughter of Hugo, the King of Italy. And why did he 
 make this exception.'' Because he esteemed the fidelity 
 and valotir of the Franks, and because Hugo was, more- 
 over, a lineal descendant of the great Charlemagne.^ 
 
 Reibmayr is quite clear on this point. He says : " The 
 crossing of varieties which are closely allied in bodily and 
 spiritual characteristics always produces the best results, and 
 is always the best means of keeping a race viable and pro- 
 lific and of checking the effects of severe inbreeding. 
 Whereas the experiments of animal breeders show that great 
 
 1 See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Vol. VI, Chapter 53, pp. 87-88. 
 
 326 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 disparity of race and character in cross-breeding only leads 
 to the formation of discordant, vacillating natures; in fact, 
 to characterlessness. That is why, as every one knows, all 
 caste-bastards — more particularly those that issue from the 
 union of castes very distant from each other in the matter 
 of character — have notoriously a bad name." ^ 
 
 Now, it is obvious that in all endogamic peoples, 
 whether of a mixed or pure race, who are so keenly con- 
 scious of differences and distinctions, and who are so very 
 much alive to that which separates them from other peoples 
 that they endeavour unceasingly to maintain their parti- 
 cular traits like treasure-trove, a very quick perception of 
 differences within their own community must be a per- 
 fectly natural possession. Where great stress is laid upon 
 the existence of any particular quality, and where such a 
 quality is jealously preserved, it stands to reason that the 
 different degrees of its purity or intensity within the con- 
 fines of a people will be speedily recognised and appreciated 
 by all members of the social body. 
 
 Indeed, so keen will this recognition and appreciation 
 be, tha! a sort of natural differentiation of man from man 
 and of woman from woman will grow up almost uncon- 
 sciously among them and give rise gradually to orders of 
 rank, wheresoever that order of rank is not in the first place 
 established in bi-racial peoples by the relation of conqueror 
 to conquered. 
 
 And it also stands to reason that according as the inten- 
 sity or purity of race-will, race-virtue, race-instinct, race- 
 beauty and race-vigour is either great or small in a certain 
 individual, so he will stand either high or low in the order 
 of rank. And if he stand high, he will be valued not 
 only because he is fair to look upon, not only because he 
 can be relied upon as a standard of the race's virtue and 
 instinct, and not only because he is something strong to 
 cling to, but also, and sometimes chiefly, because he is a 
 great achievement. It is felt, it is known, it is understood, 
 that in order to produce him, many generations must have 
 1 ln%ucht und Vermischmg, p. 50. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 garnered and accumulated untold treasure in virtue, 
 volition, vigour and beauty. It is realised that such inten- 
 sity and purity in a people's particular character is not 
 attained without an efFort, a prolonged and sometimes 
 patient struggle in silent and unostentatious paths, and that 
 therefore, such a man is to a very great extent a feat, a 
 prize, an achievement par excellence. 
 
 All grace, all beauty, all strength, all ease, has a past, 
 a long, arduous past, and it is because of this past, in addi- 
 tion to the practical value of the qoaalities above-mentioned, 
 that a race who knows what these things cost and how 
 difficult they are to obtain, prizes and values those of its 
 members who belong by nature to the first order of 
 rank. 
 
 Gradually, therefore, in all tasteful peoples who are self- 
 conscious about their virtues, a social ladder is formed in 
 which the "lucky strokes of nature," the examples of 
 '* flourishing life " inevitably stand at the top, to direct, 
 to lead, and to show by means of living examples to what 
 heights in virtue, beauty and will the type man can scale 
 if he choose. 
 
 And among these various grades or strata of people 
 within a community, very much the same feeling naturally 
 develops in their relations with each other, as obtains be- 
 tween the whole social body and the stranger or foreigner. 
 
 Knowing their beauty and their virtues to have been 
 acquired with great pains and with generations of efFort, 
 each division in the order of rank, proud and jealous of its 
 achievements, is naturally loth to part with them or to 
 have them undermined or destroyed by mesalliances. 
 
 Within an endogamic people you now find whole divi- 
 sions which practise on a small scale what the whole race is 
 practising on a large scale. Castes are formed and their 
 virtues and particular characteristics are as jealously 
 guarded against those of other castes, as the racial instinct 
 is guarded against the stranger and foreigner. Matri- 
 monial lapses, mesalliances, are strictly prohibited and 
 severely punished. It is realised that the preservation, even 
 
 328 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 of virtues, depends upon careful inbreeding, or upon the 
 most scrupulous care in selection, if cross-breeding becomes 
 a necessity. Down below, at the foot of the ladder, a 
 hotch-potch of outcasts eke out a humble and despised 
 existence. They are either foreigners, the fruit of crosses 
 with the foreigner, or the issue of flagrant breaches of the 
 matrimonial laws between the castes. It is generally under- 
 stood that they cannot be trusted, it is understood that they 
 cannot be used in any high office, it is believed that the 
 god of the race himself has condemned them to their 
 insignificant existence. 
 
 An aristocrat, overcome by momentary lust, who takes 
 one of the women of this lowest order to his bed, commits 
 the most heinous of crimes and will certainly go to hell. 
 A man of this lowest order who, meeting a daughter of 
 the aristocrat, succeeds in luring her to his bed, is instantly 
 killed on being found out. 
 
 It is felt that there is something worth preserving and 
 worth treasuring in this society, and the present keepers of 
 the Bank of England could not be more vigilant, nor the 
 present laws against thieving more severe, than are the 
 guardians and laws of such a society. 
 
 I am, however, not concerned with the whole society in 
 this essay; I am concerned only with those that stand first 
 in the order of rank. And to speak of these highest blooms 
 of a nation's virtue, beauty and will, as the true aristocrats, 
 as the only aristocrats, and as the creatures who, every time 
 that a high culture has developed in the history of the 
 world, have been responsible for that culture, is not a mere 
 romantic fiction; it is not a fantastic creation of the 
 imagination : it is one of the most solid historical facts and 
 truths we possess. 
 
 Whether we turn to the sacerdotal aristocracy of Egypt, 
 the Incas of Peru, the Brahmans of India, the Jews of the 
 desert, the Eupatrids of Attic Greece, the Patricians of 
 Rome, or the German nobility of the Middle Ages, we are 
 concerned in each case with the best that a particular people 
 were able to achieve in the rearing of flourishing speciniens ; 
 
 329 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 and the story of these people's high culture is the story of 
 the aristocratic influence they underwent. 
 
 In each case, too^ the class was a hereditary one, or at 
 least, its strongest prejudice was in favour of the hereditary 
 principle; though, as we shall see, fresh blood from other 
 castes was courted, if not coveted on occasion, by the wisest 
 among the aristocracies mentioned. We know that the 
 Egyptian priests, the Incas of Peru, the Brahmans and the 
 Jewish priesthood were, within certain weU-defined limits, 
 hereditary orders, while as to the others, their very names, 
 as Bluntschli points out, testify to their hereditary 
 character.^ 
 
 To deal with the Egyptians first, Herodotus tells us 
 that the aristocratic sacerdotal order which directed, guided 
 and watched over them with such paternal care, was a 
 hereditary order,^ and despite the doubt that has been cast 
 upon this statement of the great historian, there is probably 
 a good deal of truth in it. 
 
 ^ndogamic and proud of their race as the Egyptians 
 were, we do not require to be told that the feeling of dis- 
 tinction, of exclusion and separateness was most probably 
 extended from an inter-herd to an intra-herd application; 
 for, as we have seen above, it is the acquisition and con- 
 sciousness of particular virtues, produced at great cost, 
 that make men feel their distance from other men, and 
 make them anxious to preserve themselves from all those 
 influences which, in a matrimonial union, might under- 
 mine their stock. 
 
 1 See The Theory of the State (3rd Edition, Authorised Trans., 
 Clarendon Press), p. 121: " The old nobility (Adel) whom we find 
 in Europe in the earliest records, was everywhere a hereditary class, 
 and, as a rule, absorbed the chief functions of the two highest castes. 
 Language generally bears witness to its hereditary character : the 
 Athenian Eupatrtdae and Roman Patricii are so called from their descent 
 from noble fathers, while the German Adalinge derive their name from 
 the family (Adal) from which they drew their blood. . . . The 
 Lucumones of Etruria and the knights of the Gauls were a hereditary 
 nobility." 
 
 2 Book II, 37. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 Moreover, the Egyptians were among the few people 
 who were so keenly aware of the danger of inter-caste or 
 inter-class marriages that, like the Incas, they tolerated the 
 marriage of brotJhers and sisters in order to be quite sure 
 that the qualities not only of the individual caste, but also 
 of the individual family might be preserved. We can form 
 but an inadequate idea to-day, of the health and excellence 
 of bodily constitution that was required for such marriages 
 to have been as regular as they were in Egypt for cen- 
 turies, without causing grave physical degeneration. We 
 are all too ill nowadays to risk a marriage even between 
 first cousins — not to speak of brother and sister. But, if 
 you recollect that such close consanguineous marriages are 
 deprecated to-day only because they multiply the chances 
 of handing on to the offspring a hereditary family taint, 
 which here, in the marriage of brother and sister or of first 
 cousins, forms a double instead of a single stream; you will 
 be able to realise the great advantages secured through 
 such marriages by people who were healthy enough to 
 consummate them. What a multiplication of virtue, will, 
 beauty and vigour ! Not only the advice of the Eugenist 
 and moralist, but also the whole prejudice of modern 
 democratic and literal mankind, is, however opposed 
 nowadays to this exclusiveness and sense of distance and 
 distinction in the mating of couples; and, as Gobineau 
 says, the whole object of modern science as of modern 
 popular opinion is to show that the story of a race which 
 did and could perpetuate itself by intra-herd and intra- 
 family unions alone, is a dangerous and inadmissible 
 fiction.^ 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. xviii. " II fut un temps, et il n'est pas loin, oi les 
 prejuges contre les mariages consanguins ^taient devenus tels qu'il fut 
 question de leur donner la consecration de la loi. Epouser une cousine 
 Germaine ^quivalait i frapper i I'avance tous ses enfants de surdit6 et 
 d'autres affections h^riditaires. Personne ne semblait r^flechir que les 
 generations qui ont precede la n6tre, fort adonn^es aux mariages con- 
 sanguins, n'ont rien connu des consequences morbides qu'on pretend 
 leur attribuer ; que les Seleucides, les Ptoiemes, les Incas, epoux de leurs 
 scEurs, etaient, les uns et les autres, de tr^s bonne sante et d'intelligence 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 There can be no doubt, however, that the Egyptians 
 were such a race, and their very gods set them the best 
 example in this respect. The brothers Osiris and Set 
 married their sisters Isis and Nephthys; while, as for the 
 Egyptian Kings, close consanguineous marriages were not 
 only quite de rigueur in their families from the earliest 
 times, but the custom actually lasted as late as the Roman 
 period, and is said to be common, among the people, even 
 at the present day, in the form of first-cousin matches.^ 
 
 Thus we find that Ptolemy II married his daughter and 
 then his sister; Ptolemy IV married his sister; Ptolemy VI 
 and VII (two brothers) married, one after the other, the 
 same sister; Ptolemy VIII married, one after the other, 
 his two sisters; and Ptolemy XII and XIII married, one 
 after the other, their putative sister Cleopatra. 
 
 To raise doubts concerning the hereditary character of 
 the highest castes in such a nation, as some historians have 
 done, seems to me to be somewhat gratuitous, not to say 
 absurd. Nevertheless, knowing the profound wisdom of 
 the Egyptians, it is probable that whenever and wherever 
 the evil results of close inbreeding— -sterility, for example 
 — ^began to show signs of appearing, they not only 
 tolerated but encouraged inter-caste unions. 
 
 The two highest castes, for example, were the sacer- 
 dotal and the military; it was from either of these two 
 
 fort acceptable, sans parler de leur beautS, gin^ralement hors ligne. 
 Des fails si concluants, si irrefutable, ne pouvaient convaincre personne, 
 parcequ'on pritendait utiliser, bdn gr6 mal gr^, les fantaisies d'un 
 lib^ralisme, qui, n'aimant pas l'exclusivit6 capitale, ^tait contraire i 
 toute puret^ de sang, et l*on voulait autant que possible c^I^brer I'union 
 du nigre et du blanc d'oii provient le mulStre. Ce qu'il fallait 
 d^montrer dangereux, inadmissible, c'itait une race qui ne s'unissait et 
 ne se perp^tuait qu'avec elle-mSme." 
 
 ^ See Reibmayr, Inzucht und Vermischtmg, p. 165. "It is quite 
 certain that in the whole realm of Egypt, and throughout all its 
 historical periods, the closest inbreeding was regarded as something 
 perfectly natural and self-understood ; just as the marriage of first 
 cousins is regarded by modem Egyptians as the most obvious step, 
 commended equally by nature as by reason," 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 castes that the King was chosen; and we are told that it 
 was not uncommon for a priest to marry a daughter of 
 the military caste and for a warrior to take his wife from 
 the sacerdotal caste.^ While, as I shall show later, fresh 
 blood was even allowed to rise up from the very lowest 
 classes, in cases where exceptional ability was shown. 
 
 We may conclude, .therefore, that despite anything that 
 has been said to the contrary, Herodotus was probably 
 right in his claim that the castes were hereditary, and that 
 therefore the highest caste, the sacerdotal aristocracy, were, 
 within reasonable limits, a hereditary caste. As to their 
 ruler qualities, I shall speak later; but as to their beauty, 
 as Reibmayr says, to judge from the monuments, it must 
 have been of a very high order.^ 
 
 My insistence in the matter of the beauty of the trjie 
 aristocrat will strike many of my readers as strange. But, 
 as a matter of fact, it is only strange in modern ears. 
 Foolishly, recklessly and, as I think, at great national 
 peril, we have allowed the Christian doctrine of the soul 
 to mislead us and corrupt us on this point; but the healthy 
 truth nevertheless remains, that there can be no good 
 spiritual qualities without beautiful bodily qualities. Be 
 suspicious of everybody who holds another view, and 
 remember that the ugly, the botched, the repulsive, the 
 foul of breath, have reasons for adhering to this doctrine 
 that "a beautiful soul can justify and redeem a foul 
 body"; for without it the last passport they possess for 
 admittance into decent fragrant society is lost. Think of 
 the men who have created things worth having in their 
 lives; think of Kephren in the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt, 
 think of Pericles, of Alexander, of Caesar, of Mahommed, 
 of Cassar Borgia, of Napoleon, of Goethe; recall the 
 reputed beauty of the ancient Incas, the reputed beauty 
 of the gods — and you have a gallery of the most beautiful 
 beings that the mind of any artist could conceive. Now 
 
 1 The marriage of the legidator Joseph and the priest's daughter 
 Asenath is an example of this. 
 * Inzucht und Fermischung, "p. 171. 
 
 333 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 think of the men who have created or established things 
 that all good taste must deplore — things of which the 
 whole world will one day regret ever to have heard — 
 Socrates, Luther and Cromwell, and you have three of the 
 ugliest beasts. that have ever blighted a sunny day. 
 
 The prejudice of the ancients, as we know, and shall 
 also see, was entirely in favour of the theory of the con- 
 cord of bodily and spiritual beauty, and one has only to 
 think of the Greek phrase xaXos x' ayaAog,^ so frequently 
 applied in cases where in English phraseology we should 
 use the word "good" alone, in order to realise how 
 deeply the two ideas must have been welded together in 
 the hearts, at least, of the ancient Hellenes.^ 
 
 But, to return to the question under consideration, the 
 classical instance, of course, in regard to the exclusiveness 
 of the caste system is afforded by the society of the ancient 
 Hindus. 
 
 The aristocratic Brahman was perfectly self-conscious of 
 all his virtues, and in the Law Book of Manu, we get an 
 ingenuous proof of the pride of this great caste, and the 
 jealousy with which they preserved their purity. 
 
 "Of created things," we read in Manu, "the most 
 excellent are said to be those which are animated; of the 
 animated those which subsist by intelligence; of the 
 intelligent, mankind, and of men, the Brahmanas. 
 
 "A Brahmana, coming into existence, is born as the 
 highest on earth, the lord of all created beings, for the 
 protection of the treasury of the law. 
 
 " He sanctifies any company which he may enter." ' 
 
 People who feel like this about their order are not 
 playing a part; they are too deeply conscious of the sacred- 
 
 ^ This phrase seems originally to have been applied to the noikt or 
 gentlemen : L^t. optimates, like the old French prudhommes, German gute 
 MSnner ; but later, as in Aristophanes, it meant a perfect man, a man 
 as he should be (see Liddell and Scott). 
 
 ^ See on this point a few notes on pp. 1 1 and 1 2 of this book. 
 
 * Chapter I, 96, 99, 105, The Laws of Manu (translated by 
 G. Buhler), i886. 
 
 834 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 ness of their privileges. They know the kind of fibre and 
 stamina required for a knowledge of the greatest things, 
 and they are aware that not only they themselves, but 
 even knowledge itself is abased, when the right to possess 
 it is given into the hands of those who have not either 
 this fibre or stamina. 
 
 " Sacred learning approached a Brahmana and said to 
 him : ' I am thy treasure, preserve me, deliver me not 
 to a scorner; so preserved I shall become supremely 
 strong ! 
 
 " ' But deliver me, as to the keeper of thy treasure, 
 to a Brahmana whom thou shalt know to be pure, of 
 subdued senses, chaste and attentive. 
 
 " ' Even in times of dire distress a teacher of the Veda 
 should rather die with his knowledge than sow it in barren 
 soil.' " 1 
 
 The best light thrown on the relative importance of the 
 fou<r ancient Hindu castes, seems to me to consist of 
 verses on names. 
 
 " Let the first part of a Brahmana's name denote some- 
 thing auspicious; a Kshatriya's be connected with power; 
 and a Vaisya's with wealth; but a Sudra's express some- 
 thing contemptible. 
 
 " The second part of the Brahmana's name shall be a 
 word implying protection; of a Vaisya's a term expressive 
 of thriving; and of a Sudra's an expression denoting 
 service." " 
 
 And now see how the pride and self -preservative instinct 
 of this ancient people led them to ensure for all time the 
 purity and excellence of their aristocratic stock — 
 
 " By practising handicrafts, by pecuniary transactions, 
 by begetting children on Sudra females only, by trading in 
 cows, horses, and carriages, by the pursuit of agriculture 
 and by taking service under a king. 
 
 "By low marriages, by omitting the performance of 
 secret rites, by neglecting the study of the Veda, and 
 
 1 Chapter II, 113, 114, n J. * W'V., 31, 32. 
 
 335 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 by irreverence towards Bndtunahas, great families sink 
 low." ^ 
 
 And listen to this — 
 
 " A Brahmana who takes a Sudra wife to his bed, will 
 after death sink into bell, if he begets a child by her, he 
 will lose the rank of a Brahmana. 
 
 " The manes and the gods will not eat the offering of 
 that man who performs the rites in honoxxr of the gods, 
 of the manes, and of guests, chiefly with a Sudra wife's 
 assistance, and such a man will not go to heaven. 
 
 "For him who drinks the moisture of a Sudra's lips, 
 who is tainted by her breath, and who begets a son on her, 
 no expiation is prescribed." " 
 
 Not only the health but the beauty of the Brahman 
 must be preserved, therefore he is recommended most 
 urgently to select a beautiful woman,^ and to avoid her 
 who " has black hair on her .body," or who is " subject to 
 hemorrhoids, or phthisis, or weakness of digestion, or 
 epilepsy, or white and black leprosy." * Neither must he 
 marry a girl with a " redundant member," nor " one whp 
 is sickly." * 
 
 Although he must not insult the maimed, the botched, 
 and the inferior, he must be brought up to avoid them. 
 He must understand, and rightly too, that a certain stigma 
 attaches to disease and ill-health, which nothing can 
 remove. Thus the sick and the bungled themselves learn 
 to know their proper place on earth and their proper worth, 
 and are not encouraged as they are to-day to push them- 
 selves insolently to the fore, and regard themselves as 
 the equals of the sound and the healthy, simply because 
 of the pernicious doctrine of the redeeming soul. 
 
 A Brahmana must " not insult those who have redun- 
 dant limbs or are deficient in limbs . . . not those who 
 have no beauty or wealth, nor those who are of low birth; 
 but he must carefully avoid their company. Thus he 
 
 ^ Chapter III, 63, 64. * UU., 17-19. 
 
 9 Uid., 60-62. « Uid., 7. 5 liij^^ §^ 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 must avoid : eunuchs/ one afflicted with a skin disease/ 
 a physician/ those who subsist by shopkeeping/ a man 
 y/ith deformed nails or black teeth/ one suffering from 
 consumption/ one whose only or first wife is a Sudra 
 female/ a one-eyed man/ a drunkard/ him who is 
 afflicted with a disease/" an epileptic man/^ one who 
 suffers from scrofulous swellings of the glands/^ one 
 afflicted with leprosy/* a madman/* a blind man/^ the 
 glub-footed man." i 
 
 This valuation of the diseased, the misshapen, the 
 bungled and the botched, is more merciful and more prac- 
 tical than the methods of isolation, segregation and 
 sterilisation proposed by the Eugenists; because, if the 
 fact of bungledom and disease is bravely faced by the 
 sound and the sick alike, so that they may each feel they 
 are a class apart that must never mix, all compulsory pre- 
 nuptial separations and prohibitions from the quarter of 
 the Eugenist's surgery become superfluous. What is cruel, 
 what is inhuman, is to rear people in the sentimental and 
 quasi-merciful belief that there is nothing degrading and 
 " unclean " (the good Old Testament adjective applied to 
 disease) in disease and bungledom, but that a beautiful 
 soul justifies everything; and then, when the world has 
 got into such a state of physical degeneration through this 
 doctrine, to suggest the organisation of a pre-nuptial check 
 on all unions contemplated under the influence of this 
 belief, without making any attempt to alter values. But 
 this is just the sort of cruelty which becomes indispensable 
 after too long a spell of sentimental nonsense. 
 
 Thus we see that everything possible was done to pre- 
 serve the Brahman, the superior caste of the Hindus, from 
 
 ^ Chapter III, 150. 
 
 8 UU., 152. 
 
 ^ UU., 153. 
 
 » Uid., 155. 
 
 » lii^., 159. 
 " UU., 161. 
 13 Hid., 1 6 1. 
 " I6id., i6r. 
 
 2 UU., 151 
 
 * UU., 152 
 
 * Uid., 154 
 
 * liid., 155 
 " I6U., 159 
 12 UU., 161 
 14 liU., i5i 
 i« I6id., 165 
 
 337 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 degeneration by cross-breeding either with a lower caste, 
 a diseased or bungled stock, or an ugly family. But the 
 people, of whose laws the Book of Manu is but a codifica- 
 tion, were a wise people, and they knew perfectly ,well 
 that a loophole of escape must be left open to the highest, 
 in order that, if they liked, they might help to regenerate 
 their stock by marrying outside their caste, when inbreed- 
 ing threatened to produce sterility. And, in Chapter X, 
 all those laws and regulations are to be found dealing with 
 the issue of such mixed marriages and with the number 
 of generations the progeny has to wait, before it is in- 
 cluded in the highest caste. For instance : " If a female 
 of the caste sprung from a Brahmana and a Sudra female 
 bear children to one of the highest rank, the inferior tribe 
 attains the highest caste with the seventh generation." ^ 
 
 Inbreeding with the occasional alternative of refreshers 
 from the other castes, this — as in all other wisely adminis- 
 tered aristocratic states — ^was the rule among the Hindus. 
 
 Turning now to the Jews, we find much the same 
 system, on a less complicated scale. But in this case we 
 are particularly fortunate in being able actually to trace 
 the rise of their aristocracy to a single family — an authentic 
 instance of a rule which probably holds good for the origin 
 of all aristocracies.* 
 
 In Apocryphal and Rabbinical literature, Levi, the third 
 son ^of Jacob and Leah, is represented as a person of great 
 piety, a visionary who foresaw the glory of his family, and 
 to whom Jacob, his father, entrusted the secret writings 
 of the ancients, in order to keep them in his family for 
 all time. At the time of Israel's entrance into Egypt, we 
 are told that this Levi had three sons, Gershon, Kohath 
 and Merari; ^ but, when we reach the date of the exodus 
 which, according to the Bible, is 430 years later,* these 
 had grown into a numerous tribe. 
 
 Now about eighty years before the departure of the 
 Jews from Egypt, " there went a man of the house of 
 
 ^ Chapter X, 64. * See also p. 330. 
 
 » Gen. xliv. 11. * Exod. xii. 4.1. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi." ^ This man 
 was Amranij and his wife was Jochebed, his father's sister.^ 
 " And the woman conceived, and bare a son : and when 
 she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three 
 months." ^ 
 
 This child, brought up by an Egyptian princess and 
 consequently learned in the science of Egypt, became the 
 man Moses, who ultimately, as we know, led the Israelites 
 out of Egypt. 
 
 Whatever distinction the house or tribe of Levi might 
 have enjoyed previous to the exodus from Egypt, it is 
 obvious that once two such members of it as Moses and 
 his elder brother Aaron had appeared, its destiny as a 
 leading caste was assured. And, indeed, we find that very 
 soon after the people of Israel had entered the wilderness, 
 and Moses had given them their laws and had built them 
 their tabernacle, Aaron and his sons are chosen for the 
 priest's office.* A little later the office is made a heredi- 
 tary privilege of the whole family when God commanded 
 Moses, concerning his brother and his nephews as follows — 
 
 "And thou shalt bring Aaron and his sons unto the 
 door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and wash them 
 with water. 
 
 "And thou shalt put upon Aaron the holy garments, 
 and anoint him and sanctify him; that he may minister 
 unto me in the priest's office. 
 
 " And thou shalt bring his sons, and clothe them with 
 coats : 
 
 "And thou shalt anoint them, as thou didst anoint 
 their father, that they may minister unto me in the priest's 
 office : for their anointing shall surely be an everlasting 
 priesthood throughout the generations." * 
 
 What happens here is perfectly plain. In the presence 
 of a people whom they had greatly benefited, and who had 
 followed their leadership and had accepted their guidance 
 without question, the heads of the tribe of Levi consecrate 
 
 1 Exod. ii. I. * Exod. vi. 20. * Exod. ii. 2. 
 
 * Exod. xxviii. I, 3, 41. * Exod. xl. 12-15. 
 
 339 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 their tribe the aristocrats, for all time, of the Jewish 
 people. And in the face of all they had done, and promised 
 still to do, it is not surprising that their dependents and 
 followers in the desert acquiesced without a murmur in 
 this self-appointed aristocracy.-^ 
 
 Simple and comprehensible as this story is, it must 
 represent fairly accurately that which has always occurred 
 when a true aristocracy has raised itself to power, particu- 
 larly among nations in which the conquerors themselves 
 do not constitute the acknowledged rulers of a subject 
 people different in race from themselves. And it is such 
 aristocracies, taking their strength from the approval and 
 admiration of the people, which naturally have the greatest 
 promise of permanence and power. It is significant, how- 
 ever, that the Israelites, coming from a land in which the 
 highest caste was that of the priests, should have instituted 
 a sacerdotal aristocracy themselves. 
 
 About fourteen months after the flight from Egypt, 
 when Moses is commanded to number the people, in order 
 to determine "all that are able to go forth to war in 
 Israel," we find not only that Aaron's and Moses' branches, 
 but that of the whole family of Levi, is now treated with 
 special distinction. 
 
 " Even all they that were numbered were six hundred 
 thousand and three thousand and five hundred and fifty. 
 
 ^ Joshua, the successor to Moses, also has an interesting history. 
 The grandson of Elishama, who was the chief of the tribe of Ephraim, 
 he was the descendant of that remarkable cross between the minister 
 and legislator, Joseph, and Asenath, the daughter of an Egyptian priest. 
 Thus he had the very best traditions in his veins, and probably some 
 of the best blood both of Egypt and Israel. For it need not be 
 supposed that Jacob's preference for his grandson Ephraim (who, by 
 the by, received the rights of the firstborn from his grandfather, 
 despite the fact that Manasseh was the elder), was based upon a mere 
 whim. This incident alone shows how elastic the idea of the first- 
 born actually was, and how infinitely more probaible it is that the 
 firstborn was simply the pick of the brood, selected by one who could 
 tell what men were, rather than the first in order of birth. For we 
 have the case of Esau whom Isaac rejected most probably because certain 
 of his deeds were distasteful to his parents (see p. 341). 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 " But the Levites after the tribe of their fathers were 
 not numbered among them. 
 
 " For the Lord had spoken unto Moses, saying, 
 
 " Only thou shalt not number the tribe of Levi, neither 
 take the sum of them among the children of Israel : 
 
 "But thou shalt appoint the Levites over the taber- 
 nacle of testimony, and over the vessels thereof, and over 
 all things that belong to it : they shall bear the tabernacle, 
 and all the vessels thereof; and they shall minister unto 
 it, and shall encamp round about the tabernacle." ^ 
 
 And to show that this was no ordinary privilege, no 
 trivial exaltation, but one which enjoyed the mark of 
 the most solemn sanctity, Moses is told " the stranger 
 that cometh nigh [to the tabernacle] shall be put to 
 death." "■ 
 
 Previous to this self-exaltation of the sacerdotal aris- 
 tocracy of the tribe of Levi, the leaders of the people, the 
 priests of Israel, had been the firstborn. Thus Isaac is 
 his own priest, Jacob is his own priest, and when a family 
 divided, each man as he became the head of a family also 
 became his own priest. A certain sanctity attached to the 
 firstborn among the Israelites, and one of the reasons 
 p-iven in the law for this sanctity is that " he [the firstborni 
 is the beginning of his [the father's] strength." ' And 
 the Old Testament has many instances of the expression 
 " firstborn " being used as an adjective meaning the 
 highest, or the greatest, or the superlative of a certain 
 order.* 
 
 In placing the firstborn at the head of affairs, it was 
 thus thought that the best strength of the nation would 
 be drawn into the governing body, and, all conditions 
 being favourable, that is to say, when there was a strong 
 desire for a male child, as there always was in Jewish 
 families on the part of both parents, and when these 
 parents married in their prime and had a strong desire, 
 
 1 Num. 1. 46-50. ^ Num. i. 51 and iii. 6 et seq. 
 
 3 Deut. xxi. 17. 
 
 * See Job xviii. 1 3 ; Isa. xiv. 30 ; Col. i. 15 (see note, p. 340). 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 one for the other — there is a good deal to be said for the 
 plan; the firstborn in such circumstances, like the pro- 
 verbial love-child, who is almost always a first child, must 
 spring from the best of the parents' strength. 
 
 This idea of the " best," however, had to be overcome, 
 before another " best " could be put up, and we, therefore, 
 find Moses recording God as having said — 
 
 " And I, behold, I have taken the Levites from among 
 the children of Israel instead of all the firstborn that 
 openeth the matrix among the children of Israel : therefore 
 the Levites shall be mine." ^ 
 
 " And the Lord spake unto Moses sayirig, 
 
 "Take the Levites instead of all the firstborn among 
 the children of Israel, and the cattle of the Levites instead 
 of their cattle; and the Levites shall be mine: I am the 
 Lord." " 
 
 Like most aristocracies, this aristocracy of the Levites 
 thus superseded an older aristocracy — that of the firstborn; 
 but we shall see that the firstborn were not altogether 
 excluded from the priesthood. 
 
 The next question that arises is: Was the Jewish aris- 
 tocracy a select, inbreeding caste ? Within the usual wise 
 limits, I think we shall find that it was. 
 
 In the first place, as we have seen, its greatest members, 
 Aaron and Moses, were the issue of a marriage which at 
 the present day would be considered incestuous, and this 
 fact alone gives us some idea of the closeness of the in- 
 breeding practised by the tribes. Moses' mother was also 
 in the position of his great-aunt — the sister of his grand- 
 father — and it is impossible, when contemplating the will, 
 the reputed beauty and the force of character of Moses, 
 to ignore the circumstance of his origin. 
 
 It is true that, after the people of Israel had been long 
 in the wilderness, it was thought expedient, if not im- 
 perative, to put an end to these closely inbred matches; ' 
 
 ^ Num. iii. 12 and 41. 
 
 * Num. iii. 44, 45 ; see also Num. viii. 9-26. 
 
 * See Lev. xviii. and xx. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 but the promulgation of these laws which form the basis 
 of our own table of Kindred and Affinity "wherein who- 
 soever are related are forbidden in Scripture and our Laws 
 to marry together," could not have taken place until at 
 least one hundred years after the marriage of Amram and 
 his aunt Jochebed, when the evil effects of a too lengthy 
 period of such close inbreeding may probably have been 
 beginning to make themselves felt. 
 
 In any case, the promulgation of the ordinance concern- 
 ing unlawful marriages does not forbid inbreeding within 
 the tribe, and it is certain that the tribe of Levi must, 
 with very few exceptions, have bred among themselves 
 for many generations. They were, in any case, careful of 
 avoiding women lacking in virtue, and they are told dis- 
 tinctly that their high priest, at least, should take to wife 
 " a virgin of his own people." ^ The fact, however, that 
 the circumstance of a priest's daughter being married to a 
 stranger (i. e. a man not of the tribe of Levi) is mentioned 
 specially as a condition precluding her from attending her 
 father's board, ^ proves two things : first, that a certain loss 
 of privilege was involved by a priest's or aristocrat's 
 daughter marrying out of her people; and, secondly, that 
 such marriages must have occurred, however seldom, 
 otherwise this special reference to and provision for, them 
 would have no point. We certainly know, from chapter 
 xxxvi of the Book of Numbers, that, at least among 
 the propertied members of the various tribes, the daughters 
 were commanded by God to choose husbands in the tribes 
 of their respective fathers, so we cannot be far wrong in 
 assuming that inter-tribe marriages were rare in the ruling 
 caste. 
 
 In addition to inbreeding, however, there were other 
 
 1 Lev. xxi. 14. 
 
 * Lev. xxii. 12-13: "If the priest's daughter also be married unto 
 a stranger, she may not eat of an offering of the holy things. But if 
 the priest's daughter be a widow, or divorced, and have no child, and is 
 returned unto her father's house, as in her youth, she shall eat of her 
 father's meat ; but there shall no stranger eat thereof." 
 
 343 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 expedients resorted to for keeping the superior caste free 
 from degenerate, ugly, diseased or other undesirable 
 elements. And again in this case, as in that of the 
 Brahmans, although there is no question of insulting the 
 unfortunate examples of Nature's failures, they are declared 
 most distinctly to be undesirable, and to be deprived by 
 the mere fact of their botchedness of the privileges of 
 their high birth. 
 
 " And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 
 
 " Speak unto Aaron, saying, Whosoever ne be of thy 
 seed in their generation that hath any blemish, let him 
 not approach to offer the bread of his God. 
 
 "For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he 
 shall not approach : a blind man, or a lame, or he that 
 hath a flat nose, or anything superfluous, 
 
 "Or a man that is broken-footed, or broken-handed, 
 
 " Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish 
 in his eye, of be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones 
 broken; 
 
 "No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron 
 the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the 
 Lord made by fire : he hath a blemish ; he shall not come 
 nigh to offer the bread of his God . . . 
 
 "... He shall not go in unto the vail, nor come 
 nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he 
 profane not my sanctuaries : for I the Lord do sanctify 
 them." ' 
 
 What could be wiser than this precaution! Bravely, 
 honestly, squarely, without any lachrymose sentimentality, 
 these people realised that a great nation, in order to last, 
 must have healthy bodies, and that a great aristocratic 
 order, above all, can be permanent and powerful only if 
 it casts a stigma upon physiological botchedness and 
 bungledom among its members — a stigma recognised by 
 all, and the apparent justice of which grew up in the 
 hdarts of the people; so that it became a natural intuitive 
 ^ Lev. xxi. 16-23. 
 
 544 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 feeling to avoid those who had a blemish? For did not 
 even Jehovah Himself acknowledge that if they approached 
 His sanctuaries they would profane them ? 
 
 Hard and unmerciful as this may seem at first sight, 
 it is not nearly so hard and unmerciful as the measures 
 to which modern Eugenists wiU soon have to resort in 
 order to prevent the excessive multiplication of the ugly 
 and the physiologically bungled and botched, reared 
 through the fact that long centuries of the gospel of the 
 soul have at last killed healthy man's natviral mclination 
 to avoid the imperfect, the foul of breath, the ugly and 
 the deformed. 
 
 Fancy a God of Love declaring that a man with a flat 
 nose could profane His sanctuaries! But if we under- 
 stand what love is, and realise that the greatest love to 
 humanity would leave no stone unturned to keep the 
 human species healthy and beautiful, we perceive at once 
 that only a God of Love could have held such a view. 
 Because a God of Love must be truthful and straight- 
 forward with His people, and He cannot rock them by 
 highfalutin fairy tales about the beauty of the soul into 
 a slumbering neglect of the body — only to be forced to 
 waken them brutally later on by means of a terrific night- 
 mare in which threats of " segregation," " isolation " and 
 "sterilisation" figure more prominently than anything 
 else. 
 
 But this by the way. What is important is to observe 
 the caution with which this aristocracy of the people of 
 Israel, like the Brahmans of India, set about the task of 
 preserving their beauty and their virtues. As to a pro- 
 vision against the evils of too close breeding, which, as 
 we have already seen, was made both by the Egyptians 
 and the ancient Hindus, there can be no doubt that such 
 a loophole of escape from the confines of the tribe did 
 actually exist among the Levite aristocracy. We have 
 seen how occasionally a daughter married out of her tribe 
 — 2l liberty which must have had its counterpart in the 
 men of the tribe — and how only for the high priest is 
 
 345 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 it strictly stated that a wife should be found " of his own 
 people." There can be no doubt that, among a patriarchal 
 people like the ancient" Jews, such loopholes of escape as 
 existed according to the law were used only with the 
 permission and at the discretion of the elders of the family; 
 but the fact that, in the case of families who clearly 
 required refreshing, such permission or abetment was given 
 or proffered long before it was even solicited can scarcely 
 be questioned for one moment. 
 
 When, in addition to this, it is remembered that fresh 
 blood must in all probability have been poured steadily 
 into the aristocracy by a modified and improved survival 
 of the "firstborn" custom of old,^ which made all the 
 firstborn of the land the possession of the Lord and His 
 priests, and which was never quite extinguished even after 
 the triumph of the Levites, it will be seen that the priestly 
 aristocracy possessed all the necessary checks against the 
 evils of too close inbreeding, if they cared to use them. 
 
 I have already referred to the hereditary character of 
 the Greek Eupatrids and of the Roman Patricians, and 
 now I think I have collected enough data to sum up 
 and draw general conclusions. 
 
 In the first place, we have seen that all nations of 
 antiquity who attained to any culture, and who may be 
 called the founders and creators of all this earth's civilisa- 
 tion, and of all that is still best in it, were undoubtedly 
 opposed to the stranger and the foreigner, whatever his 
 degree of refinement might be. Whether it was from a 
 jealous self-consciousness of their own beauty and virtues 
 in the mass of the people, or from the initiation of pene- 
 trating, discerning and tasteful leaders, it is difficult to 
 
 ^ From the number of names of priests in the Old Testament who 
 were not descendants of Levi it is pretty certain that many of the first- 
 born of other tribes continued to be accepted into the priesthood, even 
 after the substitution of the Levites for the firstborn sacerdotal body, 
 referred to above. But whereas in former times they belonged to this 
 body by right, after the exaltation of the Levites, it is probable that a 
 more severe method of selection was exercised, and that only the very 
 best were admitted. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 determine; but in any case we find that amoiig those people 
 who — ^whether originally pure or mixed — ^had at least 
 passed through a period of inbreeding sufficiently pro- 
 longed to have arrived at a harmonious working adjust- 
 ment of their instincts there obtained a profound prejudice 
 against the alien and against matrimonial unions with him. 
 Sometimes this prejudice was linked up with a religious 
 belief, sometimes it was not; but in any case there seems 
 to have been a sort of half-conscious, semi-lucid notion 
 among these peoples that instincts and valuable virtues, 
 as the possession of cultured ganglia, can be destroyed 
 only by a confusion of the ganglia by crossing — a con- 
 clusion that Gobineau draws in his book, VlnegalitS des 
 Races Humaines, which I have sufficiently quoted. 
 
 We have also seen that within these endogamic peoples, 
 provided the race were, to begin with, at all prone to a 
 high state of civilisation, culture has risen to very high 
 levels — and this in a comparatively short space of time; 
 whereas in exogamic peoples, or in peoples like the 
 Fuegians, who were not younger but different from the 
 races capable of civilisation, a high culture was either not 
 reached at all, or at least only approached at an extremely 
 slow rate of progress. 
 
 The nature of instinct, will, beauty and virtue having 
 been explained, it was shown how utterly the balance and 
 strength of these possessions could be undermined by 
 introducing into the same body which possessed them 
 other instincts and other kinds of will, beauty or virtue; 
 and thus the conclusions that Gobineau draws were made 
 a little more comprehensible. 
 
 Attention has likewise been called to the fact that once 
 endogamy and the development of a certain distinct culture 
 had created a sharp distinction between a race and its 
 neighbours, further distinctions within the race itself were 
 bound to occur, owing to the long practice of particular 
 virtues on the part of the different strata of the race — 
 these strata all being created originally, as I have suggested, 
 by a bodily differentiation which initiated the virtue. 
 
 347 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Once these distinctions arose, the various strata or 
 classes would feel the same jealous love for their particular 
 virtues and their accompanying bodily beauty as the race, 
 generally, felt for all those things which differentiated it 
 from other races. And thus would arise the feeling of 
 caste : the pride of the aristocrat, the pride of the warrior, 
 the pride of the agriculturist and the pride of the artisan, 
 with a corresponding disinclination to mix, unless it meant 
 to rise. 
 
 Now all this is not a romantic dream. It is what actually 
 has happened, and does happen, wherever a race attains 
 to any high culture of which it can be proud, and whenever 
 within the race a certain number of people acquire any 
 virtues of which they can justly be proud. 
 
 It now remains for me to point out to what extent I 
 differ from Gobineau and incline to Reibmayr's side. 
 
 Gobineau would like to prove that all crossing, all 
 mixture, leads to degeneration; in fact, that crossing is 
 degeneration. 
 
 Now I should be the last, after all I have said, to 
 underrate the value of race. No one realises better than 
 I do how intimately a strong character and long, uninter- 
 rupted tradition are related. But the history of peoples 
 shows me, in the first place, that purity of race, even as 
 far back as the earliest Egyptians, is a quality which can 
 scarcely be posited with any certainty, not to speak of 
 irrefutable proof; and also that in those cases where a 
 definite cross has been made and has been followed by 
 a renewed period of inbreeding, none of the evil result^ 
 which Gobineau classes under degeneration have neces- 
 sarily followed; owing, as I have pointed out, to the for- 
 tuitous triumph of one set of instincts and virtues over 
 the other set (a triumph which sometimes occurs) and the 
 consequent increased strength of the triumphant party, 
 together with the enhanced bodily vigour gained from a 
 cross after a too prolonged period of inbreeding. 
 
 But I should like to emphasise the fact that when I 
 speak of a salutary cross in this sense, I do not mean tliat 
 
 3+8 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 sort of mixing which goes on to-day in our age of 
 democracy and of the belief in the supposed equality of 
 all men, according to which all peoples marry all peoples, 
 and all classes all classes, without any interval of inbreed- 
 ing or of isolation, during which the result /of the cross 
 can work out its destiny in the hearts of a nation. The 
 process to-day is not the crossing of two races or two 
 classes, it is sheer confusion, complete chaos, and as such 
 can lead, and does lead, only to the utter loss of all wiU, 
 instinct, virtue and beauty, and therefore to the decline 
 and evanescence of character. In an age like the present 
 you may be certain that ideas of race-character and the 
 transmission of acquired characteristics will be scouted, 
 because nothing is done, nothing is coveted or desired, 
 which could make either of these two ideas realities in 
 our midst. 
 
 Let us, however, return to the original point. With 
 Reibmayr, then, I believe not only that a cross need not 
 necessarily lead to degeneration, even though I admit that 
 it temporarily and sometimes permanently destroys char- 
 acter; but also that it is sometimes fruitful of the best 
 possible results. It must not, however, be indiscriminate, 
 nor must it be between peoples who are obviously poles 
 asunder, and whose instincts could never arrive at a strong 
 and creative readjustment, once they had come into conflict 
 through mixture. 
 
 What applies to races or peoples applies equally well 
 to classes within a race or castes within a people. It is 
 absurd and rornantic to suppose that any virtue or ability 
 can remain the possession of a people if everybody in that 
 people is allowed to marry anybody of whatever class. 
 But it is equally absurd to suppose that a people can 
 maintain its castes permanently at a given standard if 
 inbreeding within each caste is to be an absolutely 
 inviolable custom. And, as we have seen, all the great 
 peoples of the past, the Egyptians, the Hindus and the 
 Jews — ^and the world has seen no greater races than these 
 since — understood this need and provided for it. The 
 
 349 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Egyptians, despite their excessive bias in favour of in- 
 breeding, not only allowed the highest castes to inter- 
 marry, but made it possible, as we shaU see, for exceptional 
 ability among the lower classes to rise to the topmost 
 pinnacle of the state, as the Chinese do. The Hindus 
 did not even preclude Sudra blood from the highest caste, 
 provided, after a number of generations, it showed itself 
 by virtue and ability worthy of a Brahman's admiration; 
 and the Jews, by their custom of the firstborn and his 
 provisional right to the priesthood, ensured a constant flow 
 of fresh and good blood from below into the aristocracy. 
 
 Thus, as we have seen, the matter which concerned 
 these people, and which still concerns us, is not that an 
 occasional cross between a higher and a lower caste should 
 not be made, but that it should be, in the first place, 
 absolutely necessary and judicious, and that the blood from 
 the lower caste should be of the best. Again, the process 
 which the laws and customs of these ancient races tried 
 to prevent was not occasional refreshment from below, but 
 constant indiscriminate mesalliances which are so destruc- 
 tive of aU virtue and of all character, and which bring 
 about the decline of an aristocracy even more quickly than 
 they compass the doom of a nation. 
 
 No discussion on the question of aristocracy would have 
 been complete without this examination of the practice 
 and prejudice of the founders of human culture in regard 
 to the relationship of virtue, character, etc., to race and 
 race-mixture. It is for this reason that I have gone into 
 the question with what may seem to some unnecessary 
 elaboration. This chapter, however, has not only given 
 me an opportunity of stating my position definitely con- 
 cerning such debatable terms as will, instinct, virtue and 
 beauty — a, task which in any case I should have had to 
 perform as a digression in another chapter; but it has also 
 allowed me to enter more deeply into the nature, the rear- 
 ing, the production and the cost of the example of flourish- 
 liife who is but one of nature's lucky strokes among the 
 highest caste of a nation, and to show to what an extent 
 
 350 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT AS AN ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 and with what justice such a creature, with all his acquired 
 virtues, sharpened senses, widened intelligence, discerning 
 vision and splendid traditions may be called an achieve- 
 ment, an arduous and creditable achievement on the part 
 of. those who have preceded him, of those who support 
 him, and of those on whose shoulders he has been able to 
 climb to the highest pinnacle of his people, to guide and 
 direct them for their general weal. 
 
 3S^ 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 " For my own part, I should consider it a misfortune if the hereditary 
 element, of which it [the Upper Chamber in the English Legislature] is 
 now mainly composed, were not still largely represented in it." — ^Lecky, 
 Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 381. 
 
 Those who have read my thesis in Chapter VI with 
 any sympathy, and who have likewise appreciated the 
 principles laid down in the chapter immediately following, 
 wiU hardly require to be told that the present aristocracy 
 of England do not by any means represent what I iinder- 
 stand by the best. 
 
 Such readers will also understand, without my requiring 
 to go into any very elaborate analysis of the actual state 
 of the classes in England, that those classes immediately 
 below the aristocracy are now, on the whole, not a very 
 favourable soil for the rearing of candidates for the aris- 
 tocratic dignity, whenever and however the aristocratic 
 body might require refreshment. 
 
 The occupation of buying and selling for profit, though 
 it remain in certain families for many generations, is not 
 in itself of a nature capable of rearing virtues and qualities 
 or of establishing a tradition which can be valuable, when 
 those who pursue that occupation and the kind of life that 
 it now involves are able to raise themselves by wealth into 
 influential circles ; neither are the decharacterising and 
 emasculating labours of the lowest classes that form the 
 ultimate soil from which aU ranks receive fresh recruits 
 calculated to make even the most successful members of 
 these lowest classes very desirable additions to any superior 
 class, however eff^ete. And it should be remembered that 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 the occupation of buying and seDing for profit, and the 
 decharacterising and emasculating labours of the lower 
 classes are drawing ever greater and greater numbers of 
 the nation under their influence. 
 
 Nevertheless, this book would have accomplished a very 
 useless and futile purpose if it had been written merely 
 to show that the plight of a true aristocracy in England 
 was utterly hopeless. 
 
 In certain quarters of the Empire, in certain dignified 
 occupations, and among certain distinguished, respectable 
 or simply industrious people I believe that there are still 
 to be found men and women of good tradition, possessed 
 of will, virtue, beauty and sound instinct; nor do I think 
 that the system of uncontrolled commerce or mechanical 
 industry has nearly succeeded yet in making the numbers 
 of such people so desperately or ridiculously small that 
 their total may be considered a too insignificant factor 
 with which to reckon. 
 
 The influence of uncontrolled commerce and of 
 mechanical industry, coupled with that most baneful 
 outcome of democracy which causes all unostentatious 
 and concealed work to be shirked, because it is beneath 
 the free vote-possessing citizen whose lot in life it is to 
 perform this work,'- are both decimating these last veterans 
 of a better and more civilised state, and are thus steadily 
 reducing virtue in our midst. But it is because I feel that 
 this devastating work of the modern " system," coupled 
 with democracy, has still not done its worst; it is because 
 I believe that there is still a considerable amount of solid 
 virtue and sound tradition in the country, that I am con- 
 vinced of the hopefulness of any counter-movement that 
 will enlist these better elements into its ranks. 
 
 Only thus, in any case, can that soil be formed upon 
 which a healthy aristocracy can stand and act beneficently; 
 only thus can that atmosphere be created which, as I 
 
 ^ This is only one of the many influences that are underminmg all 
 good service, all conscientious labour and — what is a little less obvious — 
 all cleanliness and care in small matters. 
 
 ** 353 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 pointed out in Chapter VI, is favourable to the self- 
 assertion of the truly superior man. 
 
 Turning to the aristocrats themselves, I should be 
 loath, in these days of the hypertrophy of the soul and 
 of the intellect, to be confounded with those who are 
 agitating for an aristocracy of brains or of the sages of 
 science; and I trust that I have made it sufficiently obvious 
 in the statement of my thesis that I stand for neither of 
 these supposed desiderata. While as for the cry of "a 
 government of business men," the reader will realise that 
 I have replied sufficiently fully to that in my two chapters 
 concerning the Stuarts and the Puritans. 
 
 Hostile as I am, therefore, to much which characterises 
 the present House of Lords, and conscious as I feel of the 
 incalculable distance which all too frequently separates the 
 members of it from the true aristocrat who is the example 
 of flourishing life, I cannot help recognising that it con- 
 tains many of the elements of a sound aristocratic powerj 
 and would be able to disarm much criticism, if only the 
 sense of duty at its back, if only its consciousness of the 
 sacredness of power, could be regenerated in such a manner 
 as to bring home to its members a deep conception of the 
 terrific responsibility of their position, the magnitude of 
 their powers for good or evil, and the high services 
 compatible with their exceptional privileges. 
 
 Some of you in reading this book will contend that I 
 have laid too many of the errors of England's social 
 organisation at the door of a mistaken and undutiful 
 aristocracy. You will say that a good many of the charges 
 I bring against them cannot be upheld in view of the fact 
 that the Lower House, the Commons, where the repre- 
 sentatives of the people were assembled, always participated 
 in the work of legislation. This objection would be sound 
 enOTiigh, if it were actually a fact that the House of 
 Commons had acted entirely or even preponderatingly as 
 the representatives of the people, and had so influenced 
 legislation as to make it the combined work of the masses 
 and of the aristocracy. 
 
 354 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 But, unfortunately for the apologist of the English 
 House of Lords, this, as we know, is not a fact. 
 
 It is indeed strange to see how the prophetic feeling 
 of the noble Earl of Strafford concerning the new spirit 
 of the Commons in the seventeenth century proved 
 ultimately to be correct. Strafford refused to trust the 
 government of England to Parliament, because he knew 
 that the lawyers and country gentlemen who sat in it only 
 partially represented the nation. He also knew that these 
 country gentlemen " too often used the opportunities of 
 their wealth to tyrannise over their poorer neighbours." 
 He foresaw that the victory of the Parliamentary system 
 would give the territorial aristocracy an opportunity of 
 using the forms of the constitution " to fill their own 
 pockets at the expense of the nation and to heap honours 
 and rewards upon their own heads." ' 
 
 How sound and true his feelings were! For it is since 
 his death and that of his master that the power of Par- 
 lia,ment has been most unquestioned and the liberties of 
 the people most ignored. And, as Lecky has so ably 
 shown in the work to which I have already referred, ever 
 since the extension of the franchise through the three 
 Reform Bills, the desire for equality has done so much 
 more to animate the deliberations of the lower legislative 
 assembly than the desire for liberty that the latter is still 
 the neglected principle of government. For equality is 
 naturally hostile to true liberty, and the much vaunted 
 freedom of our national life has declined rather than 
 
 ^ Gardiner, ne Personal Government of Charles I, Vol. I, pp. i68 
 and 281. See also Benjamin Disraeli's 5y3t7 (Longmans, Green and 
 Co., 1899), p. 35.' "A spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating 
 all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England 
 for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform 
 Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple worship. To 
 acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic 
 phrases, to propose a f^topia to consist only of Wealth and Toil, this 
 has been the breathless business of enfranchised England for the last 
 twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail 
 of intolerable serfage," 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 increased since the inclusion of the popular vote.^ But 
 I have already shown conclusively enough how the inclu- 
 sion of the popular vote could not possibly have improved 
 anything or anybody. 
 
 To return, however, to the point under discussion, 
 practically ever since the Revolution of 1688, and up to 
 the time of the first Reform Bill, aristocratic influence 
 in the Constitution had been paramount, though not 
 absolute. In the latter half of the eighteenth century it 
 was possible for Paley to write that only one-half of the 
 House of Commons was elected by the people — an under- 
 statement rather than an overstatement of fact — and that 
 the other half consisted of the nominees of the governing 
 classes.^ And this controlling power of the aristocracy 
 over the House of Commons lasted well into the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 During the existence of the Irish Parliament matters 
 were not very different, for in 1785, of the 300 members 
 constituting that assembly scarcely a third were elected by 
 the people. 
 
 Mr. James Macintyre gives the following statement 
 of the general plan of the parliamentary representation of 
 England during the great revolutionary war, and down to 
 the year 1832.* 
 
 ^ For Lecky's illuminating arguments on this point see Democracy and 
 Liberty, Vol. I, Chapter III, pp. 212-215. 
 
 ^ Sir Thomas Erskine May, in his Constitutional History of England 
 (Vol. I, pp. 332-333), says: "No abuse was more flagrant than the 
 direct control of peers over the constitution of the Lower House. 
 The Duke of Norfolk was represented by eleven members ; Lord 
 Lonsdale by nine ; Lord Darlington by seven ; the Duke of Rutland, 
 the Marquess of Buckingham and Lord Carrington, each by six. Seats 
 were held, in both Houses alike, by hereditary right." This abuse was 
 indeed flagrant ; but, if only it had recoiled to the honour and genuine 
 prosperity of the people of England, no one would ever have dreamt of 
 raising a voice against it. For, if the aristocrats had really been worthy of 
 their dignity, the fact that they nominated members to the Lower House 
 would have proved an advantage rather than a disadvantage to the nation. 
 
 s Political History of England, Vol. X, by W. Hunt, p. 288. 
 
 * See The Influence of Aristocracies on the Revolution of Nations, p. 246, 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 " Members returned to Parliament, supposed to 
 have been the representatives of the people of 
 England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland . . .658 
 
 Returned as follows — 
 
 By 80 or 90 Peers for England and 
 
 Wales 218 
 
 By 20 to 25 Peers for Scotland . -31 
 By 32 to 36 Peers for Ireland . . 51 
 By 90 Commonersfor England and Wales 137 
 By 14 Commoners for Scotland . • ^4 
 By 19 Commoners for Ireland . .20 
 By Government . . . . ,16 
 
 Total returned by denomination of 
 
 individuals . , . . . 487 
 Leaving returned by constituencies 
 not altogether dependent upon 
 patrons . , . . • 1 7 1 
 
 300 
 
 187 
 
 Total . . . .658 
 
 Thus it would hardly be fair to exonerate the aristocracy 
 from the chief blame for any evils which might be traced 
 to bad government, or to institutions and innovations 
 allowed to establish themselves, between the years 1688 
 and 1832.^ Indeed, if ever the Ehglish aristocracy had 
 a chance of vindicating its right to rule, subsequently to 
 the Grand Rebellion, it was in. the eighteenth and early 
 nineteenth centuries. But, as we have seen, is was pre- 
 cisely during that period, and particularly the latter part 
 
 1 It is difficult to listen with patience to those who, while talking 
 glibly of the great progress of England since the Revolution of 1688, 
 abuse and revile the Hou«e of Lords. If rea/ progress there has been, 
 if we, as a people, have truly improved since the seventeenrii century, 
 and if this age, which is the outcome of the eighteenth and early nine- 
 teenth centuries, actually is an age to be admired, then, to the Lords, 
 and to the Lords alone, who guided and directed the fate of present 
 England throughout its period of incubation, so to speat, is certainly 
 due all the credit of the supposed wondrous changes. 
 
 3S7 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of it, as Holland Rose tells us, that " misery " proved' to 
 be " the chief propelling power of democracy." 
 
 It is not in the nature of a wise people to abandon or 
 to resist their rulers, if they recognise that it is to their 
 advantage to continue submissive and obedient. On the 
 contrary, the natural inclination of the class which is 
 immersed in the daily task and in the struggle for a com- 
 petence which will enable it to enjoy its modest share of 
 domestic comfort and pleasure, is to be enduring, long- 
 suffering and patient, even under the harshest oppression, 
 rather than to concern itself with matters which its best 
 instincts tell It are beyond its highest powers. 
 
 It was with such a populace that the landed aristocracy 
 of England had to deal for many a score of years, and yet, 
 if we watch the gathering of the storm which, beginning 
 in 1782, ultimately gave rise to the three Reform Bills of 
 1832, 1867 and 1885; if we contemplate the work of such 
 agitators as Major Cartwright, Home Tooke, William 
 Cobbett, Henry Hunt, William Lovett, Henry Vincent, 
 Hetherington, John Cleave, William Carpenter, etc., and 
 if we remember the misery of the masses, the tyranny of 
 such institutions as tbe press-gang, and the constant intro- 
 duction of all kinds of interested and untried institutions 
 in their midst, in addition to all the other abuses of which 
 I have given a selection in Chapter II, we cannot help 
 acknowledging that the aristocracy of England failed 
 hopelessly in its task. 
 
 Everything was in its favour — the price of newspapers 
 was prohibitive, a tax on paper checked the dangers of 
 cheap knowledge, the orthodox Church was on its side, 
 even the natural conservatism of the masses was a bulwark 
 it knew how to use; and yet the whole movement of the 
 people in England, from 1780 to 1911, can be said to have 
 consisted of one long struggle to limit and restrict 
 aristocratic power! 
 
 The Lords forgot that they could not have it both ways. 
 They overlooked the fact that if they failed too long in 
 protecting their charges — the people — these would find no 
 
 358 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 other alternative than that of trying to protect them- 
 selves; and since at that time the masses did not know 
 how impossible, how futile, and how dangerous such an 
 undertaking would prove, since the people of the nine- 
 teenth century had not a notion of the stupendous diffi- 
 culty of the task they had appointed themselves, the 
 principle of aristocracy, which is the principle of life, was 
 reviled and sacrificed, simply through the incompetence of 
 its representatives, and not through any flaw or error in 
 the principle itself. 
 
 For, let it be remembered, and well understood, that 
 one of the most vehement, determined and unflinching 
 opponents of the Reform Bill of 1832, and the leader of 
 the opposition in the House of Lords to the Reform Bill 
 of 1867 and the Ballot Act of 1872, was none other than 
 the noble-minded, generous and hard-working protector 
 of the people, their wives and children-^-the celebrated 
 seventh Earl of Shaftesbury! 
 
 Why was this ? To the average Englishman there will 
 seem to be something incongruous, inconsistent and 
 muddled in the atitude of this great Earl. Why stand in 
 opposition to the so-called "rights of the people," if, at 
 heart, you are in very truth a protector of the people.? 
 
 As a matter of fact, there is nothing at all inconsistent 
 about this attitude on the part of Shaftesbury. It was 
 precisely because he knew himself able and ready to protect 
 the people, and to guide and direct them, that he naturally 
 resented the introduction of measures which not only 
 would render him powerless to perform his beneficent 
 functions, but would also transfer political power from 
 those who, if they were made of the proper material, and 
 were willing, could have wielded it for the general good, 
 to those who, however much they tried, could not, under 
 any circumstances whatever, wield it even for their own 
 individual good. 
 
 For it is an empty and exploded illusion to suppose, as 
 Bentham supposed, that "because each man sought his 
 own happiness, the government of the majority would 
 
 359 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 necessarily pursue the interests and the happiness of that 
 miajority." ^ A perusal of history for the last forty years, 
 apart from the contention in my thesis, would be suffi- 
 cient to disprove this supposition. And that is why, to the 
 Earl of Shaftesbury, the word " democracy " was always, 
 and rightly, a term of "reproach." ^ 
 
 Another protector of the people, a commoner, Mr. 
 Michael Thomas Sadler, was also an uncompromising 
 opponent of political freedom, and for exactly the same 
 reasons; and, if we examine the names of those whom we 
 find opposed to the social reforms patriarchally introduced 
 by the Earl of Shaftesbury and Thomas Sadler, we shall 
 not be surprised to find among them the very men who 
 were most energetic in their advocacy of an extended 
 franchise. 
 
 People like Gladstone and Cobden, who had not the 
 faintest idea of what was meant by protecting the masses, 
 or by genuine aristocratic rule, naturally opposed anything 
 in the way of patriarchalism in order with clap-trap and 
 tinselled oratory to introduce the absurd and hollow ideal 
 of a self-ruled and self-guided nation ! 
 
 And thus a whole century was wasted and squandered, 
 and a whole Empire tricked and deluded. For, the real 
 question, the burning question, the question that was 
 shelved for over one hundred years, was, or ought to 
 have been: "How could the rulers of the country be 
 improved.?" npt "How could the common people be 
 converted into rulers ? " 
 
 But men like Gladstone, Cobden and even Bright, were 
 too stupid to see this point, and men like Shaftesbury and 
 Sadler were kept too busy by the wail of suffering arising 
 all around them, to think of anything else than the redress- 
 ing of evils, and the abolition of abuses as quickly as 
 possible- 
 It is only now, after all the tumult and clamour of the 
 
 ^ See Tie Rise of Democracy, by J. Holland Rose, p. 34. 
 * See Tie Seven/A Earl of Shaftesburys K.G., by Edwin Hodder, 
 p. 14. 
 
 360 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 utterly futile and fruitless battle that has raged around 
 the " vote," is over, that a few, here and there, are begin- 
 ning to realise that, in spite of it all, it is still rulers that 
 we want, and that not a thing has been done to meet this 
 need, which was felt as early as 1780, and which will con- 
 tinue to be felt as long as men are men, and as long as 
 some are born to lead, to direct, to choose and to guide, 
 while others are born to follow, to enjoy simple and lowly 
 forms of power, and to be happy in obeying those who 
 understand them and those whom they feel they can trust. 
 
 I shall now discuss as briefly as possible those essential 
 factors in the maihtenance of an aristocracy which either 
 are or are not to be found observed in the organisation of 
 the aristoO"acy constituting our House of Lords, and I 
 shall make various suggestions as to the lines along which 
 reforms, if they are to be undertaken, should be made. 
 
 I have said that the present aristocracy of England do 
 not by any means represent what I understand by the best : 
 let us now attempt to discover why this is so, and by 
 what means matters could be altered. 
 
 In the first place, let me state it as one of the most in- 
 controvertible facts of science and human experience, that 
 there is extraordinarily little chance and accident in the 
 production of great and exceptional men. Reibmayr, in a 
 work that has been very helpful to me,^ maintains, and I 
 think proves, the proposition that " the appearance of a 
 talented man, or a man of genius, is not to be ascribed to 
 any phenomenon akin to blind chance.'* The two volumes 
 of his study constitute a most able and learned discussion 
 of this question, and show the extent to which a sound 
 tradition is necessary, if not to ensure, at least to render 
 likely, the production of exceptional men — z. conclusion 
 to which the science of heredity is slowly but surely 
 tending. 
 
 ^ Die Entwicklun^geschichte dies Talentes und Genies, Vol. I, p. 3 : 
 " Ztoelfellos ht das Erscheinen eines Talentes und Genies ieinen blinden Zufdtl 
 unterworfenP 
 
 361 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Now it can be kid down almost as a law concerning 
 most European aristocracies, that they have always relied 
 more or less indolently and ignorantly upon chance and 
 accident, rather than upon wilful and deliberate design and 
 intention in the rearing of their great examples. 
 
 And if we turn to the English aristocracy, in particular, 
 we find this principle carried to an absurdly dangerous 
 extreme. 
 
 The production of a creature who is to be an example 
 of flourishing life, involves four essential conditions: (i) 
 Race; (2) Long, healthy and cultured tradition; (3) Rigor- 
 ous discipline in early life, and (4) An optimum of con- 
 ditions away from the vortex of a sordid struggle for 
 existence. 
 
 Number four is the only one of these conditions which 
 can with any justice be said to have been fulfilled in the 
 life of the average English aristocrat; but, although it is 
 important and indispensable, it is not in itself sufficient. 
 
 It is foolhardy and ridiculous to suppose that greatness 
 will continue to show itself, generation after generation, 
 if the very first conditions for its production are per- 
 sistently scouted and ignored. As Reibmayr says,^ even 
 a shepherd would hesitate to take as a sheepdog an animal 
 that had not all the innate qualities and training of that 
 particular class of canine creatures, and yet for the most 
 difficult of all arts, the art of ruling men,'* people are 
 selected and reared, almost at random and with the most 
 frivolous carelessness imaginable. 
 
 You will tell me that the English aristocracy does not 
 represent a class that is selected at random, and reared with 
 a careless indifference to its ultimate purpose. I shall show 
 you that it does to a very large extent. 
 
 To begin with, take the question of the internal dis- 
 cipline of the body itself. What sort of an organisation 
 have the aristocracy of England evolved, among them- 
 selves, whereby they can exercise some powers of censure, 
 
 ^ Die Enttoickluhgsgeschkhte des Talentes und Genies, Vol. I, p. 143. 
 * " Die scitaierigste aller KUnste, die Menschenbeherrschung." 
 
 362 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 selection, criticism, emulation, discipline and chastisement 
 one upon the other ? In view of the tremendous gravity 
 of the issues at stake, in the face of the far-reaching con- 
 sequences to their nation and even to the world at large, 
 of their deliberations and judgments, what attempt have 
 they made rigorously to exact a certain high standard of 
 competence, efficiency and even ability, from the members 
 constituting their body? You would have thought that 
 their self-preservative instinct, alone — apart from any 
 other consideration — ^would have prompted them to exer- 
 cise some disciplinary powers over each other, in order 
 that any weakness in their organisation might be dis- 
 covered, checked and corrected by themselves, long before 
 its consequences could be felt, or become known, by the 
 general public. This is one of the many precautionary 
 measures against decline and disorganisation which might 
 have contributed to their permanence and greatness, but 
 we find it utterly overlooked by them in their scheme of 
 life. 
 
 Take the principle of primogeniture, for instance! If 
 such an inner council of discipline, selection and criticism 
 as I suggest, had ever existed within the body of the 
 peerage, this very principle could have been made more 
 elastic, less rigid and less inviolable. When it is a ques- 
 tion of saving the prestige of a whole body of rulers, the 
 elders of that body constituting its inner circle, might with 
 the enormous majesty of their high functions, easily pre- 
 vail upon one family, or even upon several families, to 
 iiistitute exceptions, to waive even a regular custom. For, 
 although a sound tradition makes the likelihood of the 
 appearance of hereditary characteristics very great, It does 
 not ensure their appearance in the firstborn.^ A selecting, 
 
 "^ As an instance of this, think of the case of Pitt. Whatever one 
 may say about the elder Pitt's qualities— whether they were admirable 
 
 or not they certainly did not descend to his first, but to his second 
 
 son ; and scores of similar instances could be given. Moses, Charles I 
 and Richelieu, were all second sons. Napoleon and Nelson were both 
 third sons, and Wellington was a fourth son. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 wisely disGerning inner council, therefore, wotild, after the 
 style of Isaac and Jacob, sometimes have felt itself com- 
 pelled, for the sake of the vigour of the exalted class to 
 which it belonged, to waive the law of primogeniture in 
 favour of a second, third, fourth or even fifth son. When 
 great issues hang upon the breaking of an arbitrary and, 
 in many respects, unjustifiable law, it is merely an ordinary 
 act of commonplace mediocre judgment, to allow excep- 
 tions to that law, or to render it at least sufficiently elastic 
 to enable men of wise judgment to decide when exceptions 
 should be tolerated or even insisted upon. 
 
 And this is only one of the many possible ways in which 
 such an inner council of discipline, selection and criticism 
 might have acted for the general good, the general vitality, 
 vigour and quality of the whole body of the peerage. 
 Decline rftust be warded off; bad, inferior blood, must at 
 all costs be kept out; a high standard must be maintained 
 — surely the need of being vigilant here, of being drastic 
 and hypercritical here, ought not to be overlooked! But 
 it has been overlboked — nay, it has never even entered into 
 the organisation of the British aristocracy ! 
 
 And the fact that it was overlooked by previous aris- 
 tocracies, constitutes one of the causes of their failure also. 
 If with Professor Bury you trace the gradual transforma- 
 tion of the aristocracy of Athens into a timocracy, you will 
 find that it was precisely because there was no attempt 
 made to maintain such a standard as I mention — apart 
 from pfoperty and birth — and no one to see that it was 
 maintained, that the conversion of the aristocrat into a 
 mere plutocrat was made so simple and so inevitable a 
 process.^ Because where birth and property alone con- 
 stitute the qualifications for political powfer, and where 
 no higher standard of fitness for rule is exacted, or striven 
 after, mere wealth and property, by virtue of their being 
 a much more tangible and more self-evident claim to power 
 than mere birth, are bound in the end to establish their 
 supremacy over the other qualifications. But mere wealth, 
 1 History o/Greece (edit. 1906), pp. 173-177. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 as a standard, inasmuch as it allows the man of no birth 
 and no tradition to press himself into the ruling body, is 
 bound, as Bury shows,^ to pave the way- to democracy, 
 and even ochlocracy^ and is the surest foundation to all the 
 evils and abuses incidental to such orders of society. 
 
 Again, if we watch the rise and fall of the aristoaatic 
 Fujiwara family in Japan during the Heian Epoch (from 
 the end of the eighth to the middle of the twelfth cen- 
 turies), we find that their decline, at the close of this epoch, 
 was due to the fact that, in the zenith of their greatness, 
 they had foolishly made their hereditary tenure of power 
 independent of all qualifications to exercise it, with the 
 consequence that, after a number of generations, during 
 which they admittedly produced many geniuses, " they 
 had ultimately ceased to possess any qualifications what- 
 ever." In this way, when their privileges were challenged 
 and usurped by the rising military clans of the provinces, 
 they were as powerless to defend them as the ancient 
 patriarchal families had been to defend theirs, at the time 
 when the Fujiwara themselves had been the usurpers.^ 
 
 These military clans, however, whose highest types 
 were the bushi or samurai, certainly did not follow the 
 example of their predecessors in power, in so far as in- 
 dividual and co-operative discipline was concerned. On 
 the contrary, as an aristocracy of warriors, their mutual 
 supervision and chastening influence was of the severest 
 order. We are told that a Japanese classic of the seven- 
 teenth century was able to lay down as a maxim that 
 " it is impossible for an evil-hearted man to retain pos- 
 session of a famous sword," ^ and in every respect the 
 Bushi-Do, or the way of the warrior, seems tp have 
 been a way which was the very reverse of smooth and 
 easy-going. 
 
 Truthfulness and the most unfailing and unremitting 
 
 1 History of Greece (edit. 1900), pp. 118 and 175. 
 * See Japan, its History, Arts and Literature, by Captain F. Brinkley, 
 Vols. I and II, Chaps. VI and VII and I respectively. 
 » Ibid.,Yo\. II, p. J 50. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 self -control^, seem to have been expected from all who 
 claimed the privilege of the bushi's or samurai's sword, 
 and these virtues were practised with such persistence and 
 steadfastness, that they gradually became the characteristics 
 of manliness fpr the whole nation. 
 
 Captain, Bpinkley, speaking of the bushi's or samurai's 
 morality, says: "This doctrine [of truthfulness 'for the 
 sake of the spirit of uncompromising manliness '] grad- 
 ually permeated society at large. In the seventeenth 
 century, written security for a debt took the form not of 
 the hypothecation of property, but of an avowal that 
 failure to pay would be to forfeit the debtor's title of 
 manhood." ^ To this extent are an aristocracy able, if 
 they chpose, to establish an ideal, and a lofty, practical 
 course of conduct for a whole people ! ^ 
 
 The severity with which the virtues, the deeds and the 
 beliefs of the ancient Brahmans were controlled and kept 
 up to standard, by the religion with which their functions 
 and privileges as aristocrats were connected, may be learned 
 in the pages of Manu, and there can be no doubt that 
 this severity afforded this Indian aristocracy a check 
 against degeneration, without which it is difficult to con- 
 ceive of any institution or body whatsover lasting very 
 long after the death of its original founder. 
 
 In the same way the Holy Catholic Church has achieved 
 relative permanence. For it is impossible to imagine that 
 it could have lasted all this while, in spite of its many bad 
 leaders, without a system which involved a rigorous dis- 
 cipline and control of the large body of its priesthood. 
 
 ^ Brinkley, op. cit.. Vol. II, p. 183 : "The Bnshi was essentially 
 a stoic. He made self-control the ideal of his existence, and practised 
 the courageous endurance of suffering so thoroughly that he could 
 without hesitation inflict on his own body pain of the severest 
 description. 
 
 2 Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 200. 
 
 ' See Aristotle, Politics, Book II, Chap. XI, 1,27 ia, b : "For 
 what those who have the chief power regard as honourable will neces- 
 sarily be the object which the citizens in general will aim at." A 
 reflection for the leaders of modern society ! 
 
 366 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 Venice, however, offers the most astounding example 
 in Europe of a community governed by a well-disciplined 
 and highly tasteful aristocracy. For, as Lecky observes : 
 " It should not be forgotten that the most enduring 
 aristocratic government that the modem world has known 
 was that of Venice, the work of a landless and mercantile 
 aristocracy." ^ And, I add, that in order for them to last 
 as they did last, and to accomplish, in order and culture, 
 what they were able to accomplish — not to speak of matters 
 of honour, art and beauty generally — that aristocracy must, 
 and we know it did, exercise the severest discipline upon 
 the members of its own body. The Council of Ten, which 
 formed the most powerful bulwark of the state, was just 
 such an inner council as I have suggested once or twice 
 above, and the control it exercised was essential to the 
 health and vitality of the whole community. The punish- 
 ments inflicted upon members of the aristocratic body, who 
 failed to maintain the standard of their rank, seem some- 
 times to have been out of all proportion to their crimes; 
 but, if we remember exactly what was at stake, if we 
 think of the authority, the trust, the prestige, the recti- 
 tude, the lofty altruism, the presbyopic wisdom, and 
 above all the taste, which were here indispensable and 
 practically inviolable, we shall take a more reasonable view 
 of these expiatory degradations which sometimes shat- 
 tered the body and spirit of the aristocratic delinquent.* 
 
 Finally, to turn once more to a people often mentioned 
 with reverence in these pages — that is to say, the ancient 
 Egyptians; there can be no doubt that their sacerdotal 
 
 ^ Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 354. 
 
 ^ The terrible discipline exercised by the Inquisitori del Doge dejunto 
 in Venice, should also be remembered in this connection. "They 
 were three in number," says Alethea Wiel, "and were to examine 
 into the rule and administration of the late Doge, to see whether he 
 had lived up to the promises made by him in his Promissione, and if in 
 any case they found him wanting they would call vipon his heirs to 
 atone as far as possible for the shortcomings laid against him." — See 
 Venice, by Alethea Wiel, p. 155. For a similar custom in Egypt, see 
 Wilkinson, op. cit., Vol. Ill, pp. 453-454.. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 aristocracy was even more unremitting than the Brahmans' 
 themselves in its self-discipline and its supervision of the 
 members of its caste. They even taught and trained the 
 Pharaoh himself, in all things connected with his duties. 
 Wilkinson concludes his remarks vipon their rule as fol- 
 lows : " The system and regulations of the Egyptian 
 priests were framed with wisdom, and tended to the happi- 
 ness as well as to the welfare of the people." ^ 
 
 Such results are not attained over a long period of time 
 without the strictest and most untiring control being 
 exercised over the elements constituting the aristocratic 
 body; and, indeed, if we inquire into the matter, we find 
 that the severest rules governed their mode of life, both 
 as private and public men. They were austere in their 
 outlook on life, abstemious in their habits, guarded and 
 dignified in their behaviour; carefully avoiding all ex- 
 cesses, and paying the most scrupulous " attention to the 
 most trifling par4iculars of diet." ^ They were, moreover, 
 extraordinarily careful of their bodies and of their raiment; 
 observed the strictest rules of cleanliness, and their fasts, 
 some of which lasted from seven to forty-two days, were a 
 constant exercise in self-control and self-denial. For dur- 
 ing these fasts, not only were certain foods forbidden, but 
 all indulgence of the passions was absolutely prohibited. 
 Nothing, in fact, was neglected, nothing forgotten, which 
 tended not only to rear rulers, but to maintain them up 
 to a given standard of excellence. 
 
 And now, if we look back upon the hundred and fifty 
 years, or thereabouts, during which the aristocracy of 
 England had the greatest opportunity for good and for 
 power, of any aristocracy that has ever attempted to assert 
 its sway over a people, do we see any approach to this 
 element in the organisation of this body .' We see nothing 
 of the sort ! We see rivalry, indeed, and bitter animosity 
 and hatred, between different political groups; we see an 
 assumption of virtuous indignation on the part of one 
 
 ^ Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 178. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 179. [The italics are mine. — A. M. L.] 
 368 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 group when its political enemies in the other are guilty 
 of any State or civil crime. But there is no sign of that 
 internal machinery for discipline and for the vigorous 
 maintenance of a certain standard, which is beyond party 
 and beyond rivalry, and which has for its aim the preserva- 
 tion of a high level of rulership and a regard for the 
 nation's prestige and welfare. For, truth to tell, if we 
 could see a sign, in the British aristocracy, of this essential 
 element in the organisation of any highest ruling caste 
 that strives to be permanent, it would be hard to under- 
 stand how the events of the nineteenth century ever came 
 to pass, and still harder to realise the full significance of 
 the Parliament Act of 191 1. 
 
 It would seem to be a first principle, therefore, of all 
 aristocratic government, that the aristocrats themselves 
 should exercise some powers of selection, censure, criticism, 
 emulation, discipline and chastisement over each other; 
 and any aristocracy that aspired to be relatively perma- 
 nent, would sooner or later find it absolutely necessary 
 to evolve some such controlling power within its own 
 body. 
 
 Only a deep, solemn and almost religious sense of the 
 great and sacred things that were at stake for the nation at 
 large and for the aristocracy itself, could, however, render 
 such an inner council at all practicable, or compel those who 
 came before it to accept its judgment with reverence and 
 submission. The fact, however, that such powers have 
 been exercised in the world before, and that kindred powers 
 are still exercised within the centria,l controlling bodies of 
 all great armies and navies, shows conclusively that they 
 are not only necessary but eminently practical. 
 
 The absence of any such feature from the aristocratic 
 organisation of England, shows the happy-go-lucky, care- 
 less and foolhardy fa$hion, in which great possibilities, 
 great expectations and almost fabulous potentialities for 
 good, have been deliberately allowed to slip the grasp of 
 the most favoured body of men in this kingdom for the 
 last two centuries. 
 
 BB 369 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Now, to my next point ! I contend that the rearing of 
 our ajristocracy has been a random process. How so ? 
 
 This question brings me to the much disputed problem 
 of heredity, which we shall now face; but before plung- 
 ing into this labyrinth of controversy, let me first call 
 attention to one of the hitherto neglected aspects of the 
 question. 
 
 A very valuable and interesting fact to grasp in this 
 matter is, that the enormous stress which is at present 
 laid upon the one probleijiatic and debatable question of 
 heredity in rulers, as affecting the destiny of nations or 
 institutions, owes more than half its force and relevancy 
 only to the chaotic and disintegrated nature of our socid 
 system. 
 
 When you find so much importance attached to the 
 inheritance of particixlar human qualities by individuals 
 in the position of power, you will probably be very wide 
 indeed-of the mark, if you do not also. suspect an unstable 
 and fluid coiidition of the laws and customs prevailing in 
 that part of the world where this particular attitude towards 
 hereditary political rule obtains. 
 
 For wherever laws and customs are not fluid, and are 
 not in a state of very unstable equilibrium; where, more- 
 over, a whole people are led, and have been led for 
 generations, by one general aspiration and idea, and where 
 customs and laws have endured so long and satisfactorily 
 as to have reared almost instinctive co-operative and 
 harmonious action in a nation, the mere accident of person- 
 ality in the seat of power, though important, is by no 
 means so vital a consideration in actual practice as it 
 would seem to be at first sight. 
 
 AH great social systems, all great hierarchies and cul- 
 tures, based upon the solid bedrock of the inveterate habits 
 and inipulses of a people, have been able to survive tem- 
 porary unfortunate lapses on the part of the law of heredity. 
 If they could not have done so, they would have been 
 unworthy of the name of a social system, a hierarchy or a 
 culture, as we understand it. I do not mean to suggest 
 
 370 ' 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 that a prolonged abuse of the seat of power is not a thing 
 to be guarded against and an evil which might lead to the 
 most serious consequences in the body even of the most 
 stable nation. I am merely insisting upon the fact that a 
 large amount of the excessive stress which is now laid upon 
 the hereditary principle in the ruling caste, and upon the 
 so-called dangerous pranks it may play with a nation's 
 destinies, derives by far the greater part of its force from 
 the circumstance that at the present day the liquid dis- 
 integrated state of our customs, institutions, ideals, aspira- 
 tions and morals, actually does make the mere breath of 
 personality a highly important and momentous considera- 
 tion. At a time when the mere eloquence of a few Radical 
 politicians can lead to the modification of our constitution, 
 people naturally expect the roof to fall in at the slightest 
 sign of vibration. When the smallest breeze can produce 
 a dangerous wave, things are in such a state that the fierce 
 force of a gale cannot be faced, much less weathered. Per- 
 sonality is all-powerful to-day because tradition has gone 
 to pieces, and a general landslide of principles, values, 
 customs, virtues and instincts has occurred, which has ren- 
 dered all things the prey of any momentary and transient 
 influence that may happen to arise. But wherever stability 
 reigns in the customs and aspirations of a people, wher- 
 ever virtues are firmly rooted, and it is possible to make 
 some reasonable forecast of the nation's behaviour, not only 
 for a week, a fortnight, or three weeks, but for three cen- 
 turies ahead; whenever, in fact, the nation has in its heart 
 the natural corrective for all tricks of heredity in the seat 
 of power, upon the surface of such a people even a hurri- 
 cane of temporary misrule could not produce more than a 
 ripple, while slight gusts of abuse would pass by quite 
 unobserved. 
 
 I would like to repeat that I do not underrate the im- 
 portance, nay, the essential need of a high traditional 
 standard in the seat of power — truth to tell, the whole of 
 my book reveals the importance I attach to this need — but 
 I merely point out that all the frantic stress now laid upon 
 
 371 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 this element in discussing the principle of hereditary ruler- 
 ship, is largely due to the fact that the modern historian, 
 like the modern man, sees life through the glasses of his 
 age, and cannot help magnifying the significance of the 
 mere personality of him who is at the head of a system; 
 because this age and its culture and organisation are so 
 feeble and so shaky as to render personality all important. 
 Place Napoleon in Egypt at the zenith of its life as a well- 
 ordered state, and his personality loses more than half of 
 the importance it had in disordered and disorganised 
 France immediately after the Revolution. 
 
 Thus all aristocracy may regard itself as hopelessly in- 
 secure and ephemeral, where the people over which it rules 
 are not led, guided and inspired by one general idea which 
 animates all their hopes and plans, colours all their deeds 
 and endeavours and kindles all their passions and desires; 
 where they are not governed by the same inviolable values 
 that permeate all their loves and hates, aU their virtues and 
 vices, ahd aU their domestic and public manners,^ and 
 where there are no superior minds to give them what even 
 John Stuart Mill — of all people! — acknowledged they 
 could not discover or create for themselves, namely, " the 
 initiation of all wise or noble things." 
 
 For, as he says, they could never "rise above medio- 
 crity " " except in so far as they " let themselves be guided 
 (which in their best times they have always done) by the 
 
 1 See Aristotle, Politics, Bopk II, Chap. VII, 1,266^: "For it is 
 more important that the citizens should entertain a similarity of senti- 
 ments than an equality of circumstances." See also Lecky : " All real 
 progress, all sound national development, must grow out of a stable, 
 persistent national character, deeply influenced by custom and precedent 
 and old traditional reverence." — Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 1 27. 
 
 * This, of course, is Mill's owrn expression, and I need hardly say 
 that I heartily disapprove of it. For there is absolutely no need for 
 them " to rise above mediocrity." There is nothing disreputable in 
 mediocrity as such. Mediocrity simply wants to be preserved against 
 its own mistakes ; it does not want to rise above itself— the idea is 
 absurd and romantic ! All it requires is to have its lack of taste and 
 judgment supplemented from on high. In this sense what Mill says has 
 some meaning for me. 
 
 372 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and 
 instructed One or Few." ^ 
 
 I shall now attempt to deal with the question of heredity, 
 and in all my observations upon it I will take for granted 
 the conclusions drawn in Chapter VII; while here and 
 there many statements left inadequately supported in that 
 chapter will find scientific confirmation. 
 
 There is no doubt that the general consensus of opinion 
 among all wise men and races, has always been that, 
 although the offspring of the same parents can show huge 
 divergences, and can differ as individuals sometimes to an 
 enormous extent, from their progenitors as individuals, the 
 total sum of qualities distributed among a single family of 
 children will always be found to be stock qualities or 
 family qualities, appearing in a lesser or greater degree of 
 intensity in each individual child. By stock I mean the 
 whole family with its main and collateral branches. 
 
 In the history of a family, the changing opportunities 
 offered by its fluctuating fortunes, may occasionally blind 
 us to this general resemblance, and seem to pick one out of 
 the rest of a single generation or line, so as to make him 
 appear utterly different from and unrelated to the rest; 
 but if we look into the matter more closely, we shall find 
 that it is more frequently a difference of degree rather than 
 of kind which has caused the salient distinction, and often 
 a difference of degree which is smaller than we might at 
 first expect. 
 
 If we can recognise a general resemblance of features 
 between the members of a whole stock — as we usually can 
 — it is ridiculous to suppose that a correlated similarity of 
 
 1 The paragraph continues : "The initiation of all wise or noble 
 things comes and must come from individuals ; generally at first from 
 some one individual. The honour and glory of the average man is that 
 he is capable of following that initiative ; that he can respond internally 
 to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open." — 
 This from the democrat Mill ! (On Liberty, Chapter : " The Elements 
 of Well-being"). 
 
 373 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 character and disposition is not also present. And for all 
 practical purposes, we can state it as a law, that, provided 
 a family of children be sufficiently large, at least one if not 
 two of the children will hear a strong individual resem- 
 blance to one of the parents, at least one if not two will he 
 a fair blend of both parents, and the rest will be more or 
 less simple or complex combinations of the general stock 
 qualities. 
 
 What has made the law of heredity so difficult to uphold 
 and so apparently easy to refute, especially in respect to 
 the families of geniuses, artists, high-born aristocrats and 
 other great men, is that, as a rule, their families are so 
 absurdly small that the necessary quantum of chances 
 allowed for a fair series of possible combinations of parental 
 and stock features to be born is never reached, with the all 
 too frequent result that various combinations of the stock 
 features alone appear, twice, thrice, or sometimes four 
 times, and then no more children are born. With the law 
 of primogeniture, especially among the aristocracy, this 
 evil is intensified; for, apart from the fact that there is 
 nothing in the law of heredity to guarantee that the first- 
 born will necessarily be the child who will have most of 
 the parental qualities, there is not necessarily any induce- 
 ment to continue adding to the family for long after the 
 first or perhaps the second son's birth. 
 
 Thus the Royal Psalmist, who said, " Happy is the man 
 that hath his quiver full of them " [children], uttered a 
 very much more profound truth than most people imagine. 
 For, in the light of the desire to transmit a great tradition, 
 a quiverful of children certainly provides a much better 
 chance of achieving this end than one, two or three.' 
 
 This is a fact upon which sufficient stress is never laid, 
 in discussions upon heredity. Here in England we have 
 got firmly fixed in our minds the two notions — primogeni- 
 ture and heredity. Again and again, though not always of 
 course, we have seen that heredity seems to fail, and we 
 
 ^ The very lavishness of Nature's provision in the matter of germ 
 cells lends colour to this contention. 
 
 374 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 never trouble to inquire whether nature, or whether a 
 foolish custom based upon an ignorant solution of the 
 problem of inheritance, be at fault. 
 
 The sort of arguments usually advanced by those who 
 question the general fact of heredity are of the following 
 kind : They say that Marcus Aurelius, who was one of the 
 greatest of the Roman Emperors, had a worthless and dis- 
 solute son, the notorious Commodus; that Napoleon — the 
 great general, thinker, statesman and man of power— had 
 an insignificant nincompoop like the Duke of Reichstadt 
 for heir; that Goethe, one of the greatest geniuses the 
 world has ever seen, had in August Goethe a son utterly 
 unworthy of his father; or that Louis XIII, the weak tool 
 of Richelieu, was the son of Henry IV, surnamed the 
 Great.^ 
 
 All these statements are very true; but, as arguments 
 against the general fact of heredity, they are utterly 
 ridiculous. 
 
 Apart from the fact that such cases as Hannibal, the 
 worthy son of Hamilcar; Alexander, the worthy son of 
 Philip of Macedon; Titus, the worthy son of Vespasian; 
 and a host of others, including such modern men as Dumas 
 Fils, the brilliant son of Alexandre Dumas; and John 
 Stuart, the worthy son of James Mill; may be quoted 
 against a list like the preceding one, the circumstance that 
 should always be borne in mind when dealing with a law 
 so complicated as that of heredity, is that these sons, Com- 
 modus, the Duke of Reichstadt and August Goethe, were 
 the only legitimate sons of their respective fathers. Now 
 it is known — everybody knows — that the happiest com- 
 bination of two parents' qualities, or even the happiest 
 replica of a single parent, does not necessarily appear first 
 among the children of every family. As I said above, " it 
 is necessary that a certain quantum of chances should be 
 
 1 Sometimes they add to this list the son of Luther^ who is said to 
 have been violent and insubordinate. But surely this is the best proof 
 of heredity one could have. Was not Luther himself a revolutionary, 
 and violent and insubordinate towards the Church of Rome ? 
 
 375 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 allowed for a fair series of possible combinations " to be 
 born. How then can a law, the working of which depends 
 upon the various adjustments of three factors : the father's, 
 the mother's and the stock's influences — ^be rightly judged 
 by a family consisting of one? In any case it would be 
 ridiculous to judge it by such a case, and to declare it 
 refuted, because the solitary child happened to have the 
 least significant of the stock's qualities, instead of the best 
 of the parents' or vice versa. 
 
 Do the people who advance such arguments as these 
 bear in mind that if the families of Charles Darwin, the 
 Earl of Chatham, Handel, Machiavelli, Cavour, Sebas- 
 tian Bach, Disraeli, Rembrandt, Rubens, Wagner, Emily 
 Bronte, Bacon, Boileau, William Pitt the younger, Moses, 
 Caesar Borgia, Charles I, Richelieu, Napoleon, Nelson, 
 Wellington, Beethoven, Shakespeare and a host of others, 
 had consisted only of one child, those eminent people whom 
 I have just mentioned would never have been seen. Are 
 these people aware, moreover, that if Darwin's father had 
 been contented with three children, the great naturalist 
 woidd never have been born; that if Wellington's and 
 Rembrandt's fathers had been content with three sons, the 
 victor of Waterloo and the painter of the Night Watch 
 would never have been born ; that if Edmund Nelson and 
 Bonaparte's father had been content with two sons, neither 
 Napoleon nor Nelson would ever have been born ? — not to 
 speak of Joseph, Boileau and Bacon who, if their fathers 
 had been satisfied with five or more sons would also never 
 have been heard of ! 
 
 It is idle to question the general fact of heredity from 
 the evidence of small families. For, the above instances 
 ought to sufiice to show us that the happiest combination 
 of parental, or stock qualities, are by no means certain to 
 appear in the first, or in the second, or even in the third 
 born. 
 
 That is why, I repeat, the Royal Psalmist's maxim was 
 deeper and truer than most people think; and, in order to 
 carry on a great tradition, in order even to have an ordi- 
 
 376 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 nary chance of so doing, a large family, which is also, by 
 the by, the healthiest and happiest family, must be 
 regarded as a necessity, as a duty, as a privilege. 
 
 .1 am' fully aware of the vast number of eminent people 
 who have been first or only sons : Velasquez, Hobbes, 
 Bolingbroke, Hawke, Meredith, Matthew Arnold, Isaac 
 Newton, Julius Caesar, Alexander, Gibbon, Milton, Dr. 
 Johnson, Shelley, Bismarck, Columbus, Heine, Goethe, 
 Colbert, Corneille, Moliere, Nietzsche, etc., etc. But, as 
 I have already said (on p. 341), all the circumstances being 
 favourable, a first son is likely, as the Jehovah of the Old 
 Testament put it, to be the " beginning " of his parent's 
 ** strength." Nevertheless I have also shown how elastic 
 this rule was made, both by Isaac and Jacob, who thus 
 established a precedent for allowing the fuU force of the 
 law of heredity to operate in the families of their people. 
 Jacob's favourite, for instance, is not Reuben, his firstborn, 
 but Joseph, who ultimately proved himself to be the most 
 distinguished of the sons of Jacob.^ 
 
 As I say, I am fully aware of the vast number of eminent 
 men who have been first or only sons; and in view of the 
 relatively small families reared by the majority of men, it 
 is fortunate for mankind that the percentage of great men 
 who are of the firstborn should be so large. This, how- 
 ever, is only one pt-oof the more of the general reliability 
 of the law of heredity; for it shows that there is at least 
 a slight natural bias in favour of early happy combinations. 
 
 To allow the law the greatest possible number of chances 
 of operating, however, remains the soundest principle 
 in practice, and any custom^ or social condition which 
 
 ^ This fact rather shows how competent Jacob must have been as a 
 judge of men, and explains the wonderful submission which was shown 
 when he deliberately placed Ephraim above Manasseh, although 
 Manasseh was the elder (see Gen. xlviii). 
 
 2 This reminds me of a passage in one of Darwin's letters to J. D. 
 Hooker. Writing on January 25, 1862, Darwin said : "I have some- 
 times speculated on this subject ; primogeniture is dreadfiitty opposed to 
 selection ; suppose the firstborn bull was necessarily made by each farmer 
 
 377 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 prevents a good valuable stock from doing this, is the 
 creation of an error of taste and judgment, which, in the 
 end, . can only rarif y and decimate good qualities in a 
 people. 
 
 Save when it is thwarted, therefore, the law of heredity 
 may be regarded as the most reliable for all practical pur- 
 poses that could be found; and this view has generally been 
 in agreement with the consensus of wise opinion on the 
 subject in healthy times. 
 
 I have shown in sufficient detail what the ancients 
 thought upon the question of heredity. It is evident from 
 the elaborate precautions they took, both as races and 
 castes, to preserve a type pure, once it had been attained, 
 that experience must have told them that which science 
 now generally takes for granted, viz. : " That the present 
 is the child of the past, that our start in life is no hap- 
 hazard affair, but is rigorously determined by our parent- 
 age and ancestry; that all kinds of inborn characteristics 
 may be transmitted from generation to generation." ^ 
 
 " In short," as Professor Thomson concludes, " the 
 fundamental importance of inheritance was long ago 
 demonstrated up to the hilt." ^ 
 
 But behind the usual modern arguments against 
 heredity there is an element far more profound and far 
 more irresistible than mere foolishness. There is the 
 fundamental dislike and distrust which all democrats feel 
 towards all distinctions and differentiations between one 
 nian and another. Under the growing influence of demo- 
 cratic ideas; with the spread of the doctrine of universal 
 human equality, a certain prejudice has grown up against 
 the old and well-established habit of attaching importance 
 to birth, to blood, and to pedigree in men. As Reibmayr 
 says : " People nowadays attach more importance to the 
 pedigrees of domestic animals than to the pedigrees of 
 
 the begetter of his stock ! " — Life and Letters of C. Darwin, Vol. II, 
 
 P- 385- 
 
 ' Professor Thomson, Heredity, p. 9. ^ Ibid. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 men." * The democrat prefers to ascribe individual excel- 
 lence or superiority to accident, to some inexplicable force 
 which he likes to call " the madness of genius," * and to 
 a spurious notion of individual effort (self-help) — as who 
 should say the leopard can change his spots if he likes — 
 rather than to the greatest of all determinants, high innate 
 quality, lofty inborn potencies, good blood in fact. 
 
 There is something less humiliating to the low-minded 
 man in thinking that inequality of environmental condi- 
 tions rather than the fundamental inequality of man is a 
 paramount factor here. And when he Is faced by such 
 cases as Commodus, August Goethe, the Duke of Reich- 
 stadt and Louis XIII, he much prefers to think that there 
 can be nothing really true about this boasted claim of 
 superior stock, rather than to suppose that although the 
 probabilities undoubtedly were all in favour of Henry IV 
 of France, of Goethe, of Marcus Aurelius and of Napoleon 
 having one, two, or even more superior men as sons, they 
 either did not give the law of heredity a sufficient number 
 of chances to hit the happy combination which they would 
 have been quite justified in expecting, or else their mates 
 were too great a disturbing influence. 
 
 And this brings me to another aspect of the modern 
 prejudices against the heredity principle — an aspect upon 
 which Th. Ribot rightly lays some stress, without, how- 
 ever, drawing my ultimate conclusions from it. 
 
 The appearance of the above-mentioned men — Louis 
 XIII, August Goethe, Commodus and the Duke of Reich- 
 stadt, is susceptible to two explanations, or to a blend of 
 the two. Up to the present I have only suggested one — 
 the likelihood of their having been unhappy combinations 
 
 ''■ Inzucht und Vermischung, p. 82 (note). 
 
 * Lombroso's book, Ike Man of Genius, in which the author attempts 
 to show that all genius is insanity or degeneration, was a masterpiece of 
 democratic insolence. But its tremendous success shows the eagerness 
 and enthusiasm with which people were ready to receive a scientific 
 consolation for being mediocre. " We are mediocre, it is true," the 
 middling people of a democratic age were able to say ; " but at least we 
 are not mad." 
 
 379 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of stock or parental qualities, which in itself is not a refu- 
 tation, but simply another form of proof of the principle 
 of heredity. But, as Ribot says, " the maternal heredity of 
 Commodus, Louis XIII, August Goethe and the Duke of 
 Reichstadt is clear," and explains a good deal.* 
 
 This factor, the choic6 bf a mate, in the case of a man 
 who has a valuable tradition to transmit, or in the case of 
 every man for that matter, is a most important and most 
 vital concern. How can we tell now to what extent the 
 mother, and not merely an unfortunate shuffling of the 
 stock's and the father's qualities, was responsible for 
 Pericles' foolish sons Paxalos, Xantippos and Clinias; or for 
 Aristippos's infamous son Lysimachus, or for Thucydides' 
 poorly gifted offspring, Milesias and Stephanos.? How 
 can we tell that the mother was not behind the unworthy 
 sons of Sophocles, Aristarchos and Themistocles .? ^ 
 
 Nothing could be more far-reaching, more serious in its 
 consequences than this matter of choosing a mate — more 
 particularly when great issues depend upon it, as they 
 generally do in royal lines, in aristocracies, and in all 
 families in which there is something worth preserving, 
 worth enhancing or intensifying. 
 
 Take the case of Dante, for instance. From his first 
 wife, Dante's father, Alighiero, had a son Francesco, over 
 whom the breath of centuries has passed in silence; but with 
 his second wife. Donna Bella, he had Dante. I do not 
 mean to suggest that in his second marriage Alighiero 
 exercised more conscious discrimination than in his first; 
 but certainly he must have exercised better taste uncon- 
 sciously. Again, in the case of the Czar Alexei, his second 
 wife must certainly have been selected with finer discrimi- 
 nation than his first, for, by the latter he had two sons, one 
 delicate and the other weak-minded; while by the second 
 he had Peter the Great. And the same observations apply 
 both to Bacon's father and to Boileau's. We hear no 
 mention of the three sons who were born to Bacon's father 
 
 1 PHeredite Psyciohgifue (Paris, 1882), p. 230. 
 * See Ribot, op. cit., 229-230. 
 580 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 by his first wife; but the second son of his second wife 
 became Lord Verulam. Boileau's father had five sons from 
 his first wife and from his second three,* the third of whom 
 was Nicholas Boileau, the illustrious French poet and 
 critic.^ 
 
 These four cases are interesting as showing how the 
 same father can have a son of great or of mediocre gifts, 
 according to his choice of a wife; and when, as in the case 
 of Boileau, we find all three children by the second wife 
 showing some distinction, we realise that Boileau himself 
 cannot be explained as a mere " sport " or " mutation." 
 
 When we think of the great issues depending upon a 
 man's choice of a mate, it seems ridiculous that this matter 
 should so frequently have been taken so lightly, and con- 
 tinues to be taken so lightly by some. 
 
 Take the case of Henry IV of France! What curse, 
 what damnable evil genius, cast its fatal spell over this man 
 in order that, after ridding himself of Marguerite de 
 Valois, he should turn his eyes towards Marie de Medici ? 
 Who knows, who can reckon, the incalculable loss that 
 was suffered not only by France but also by England, as 
 the result of that accursed second match! Think of the 
 situation ! 
 
 France was being ruled wisely, ably, justly and benefi- 
 cently; her most trusted servant under the King was the 
 great Sully himself. Even if Henry IV had died as pre- 
 maturely as he actually did, aftei" having married a better 
 wife than Marie de Medici, at least the chances were that 
 his great example would have been ably followed during 
 the regency, his sons would have been greater men, and 
 the Revolution, comparatively so near, might never have 
 occurred, might never have been provoked! 
 
 1 The two elder brothers of Boileau were also very gifted. Gilles, 
 who was for some time a court oiEcial, became a member of the French 
 Academy, and Jacques was a learned priest. 
 
 ^ Handel was also a second son of a second marriage, his father, 
 George Frederick Handel, having already had by his first wife, Anna 
 Oettinger, six children of whom the world has never heard. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 In England, too, the great beneficent ruler Charles I 
 would have been wedded to a better wife, a wife who would 
 have had the untainted traditions of a great ruler in her 
 veins, and who would not only have borne him better 
 sons, but would also have abstained from certain frivolities 
 and weaknesses which, although never disastrous or serious, 
 often lent a disagreeable colour to the captious and bitter 
 criticisms of his worst enemies. The Grand Rebellion 
 might have taken place notwithstanding; for nothing can 
 ward ofF the results of a hatred so secret, surreptitious and 
 cowardly as that of the anarchist who places a bomb beneath 
 a fine structure; but its reaction, guided by the sons of 
 Charles I and of this hypothetical daughter of Henry IV, 
 would at least have made the England of the eighteenth 
 century a very different country from that England which 
 was destined ultimately to give birth to the present age; 
 with the consequence that, to-day, instead of having to 
 execrate our rulers for the past century and a half, we might 
 all be singing their praises, we might all be proud of our 
 country on their account alone, and might place the matter 
 of our total annual exports and imports a little lower in 
 the hierarchy of our idols. 
 
 But as the accursed luck of England and France would 
 have it, Henry IV was deeply indebted to the Medici 
 family. He did not particularly care for Marie de Medici, 
 or want her, although her portrait did not displease 
 him. 
 
 But, in view of his huge indebtedness to the Florentine 
 magnates, it was thought that it would be a reasonable, 
 judicious, expedient marriage.. In this way the commercial 
 and banking profits of these Italian plutocrats became the 
 price of the order and good government of both France 
 and England, and Henry IV married a woman whom he 
 never liked, with whom he was constantly quarrelling, and 
 who was a thousand times uglier and less attractive than 
 her portrait. And thus this weak, violent, intriguing, 
 obstinate woman, arrogant and servile by turns, according 
 to her fortunes, and possessing but one quality which 
 
 382 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 happened to be hereditary in her family — the bve of 
 letters and the fine arts — ^became the mother of France's 
 royal children and the grand-dam of England's kings ! 
 
 And this is but one example in a thousand. If it were 
 possible to know the secret history of all European aristo- 
 cracies, it would be simply one example in a million. 
 
 Listen to these words of Karl Pearson! "Looked at 
 from the social standpoint we can see how exceptional 
 families, by careful marriages, can within even a few 
 generations obtain an exceptional stock, and how directly 
 this suggests assortive mating as a moral duty for the 
 highly endowed.^ On the other hand, the exceptionally 
 degenerate, isolated in the slums of our modern cities, can 
 easily produce permanent stock also : a stock which no 
 change of environment will permanently elevate, and which 
 nothing but mixture with better blood will improve.^ But 
 this is an improvement of the bad by a social waste of the 
 better." ^ 
 
 This is all obvious, self-evident, trite! Moses knew 
 it, the ancient Egyptians knew it, the ancient Hindus 
 knew it, the Greeks at their zenith knew it, and so did 
 the Romans. But in our times we have to be told these 
 things afresh, at the cost of tremendous pains and infinite 
 patience, by a power called Science, which every day gets 
 to look more and more like a gigantic unwieldy and 
 inadequate substitute for the things that men, unguided 
 by superior taste, are liable to forget. 
 
 Now, what is meant precisely by " assortive mating " 
 from my point of view? It is obvious that if, as ought 
 always to be the case, the object to be attained is the 
 consolidation of character — the fixing or enhancing of a 
 certain will, of distinct virtues and of a particular kind 
 of beauty — assortive mating means simply the deliberate 
 selection of mates who in their tradition, their aspirations 
 and their class are as much like yourself as possible. Then 
 
 ^ [The italics are mine. — ^A. M. L.] 
 
 * Tie Grammar of Science, 2nd edition, 1900, p. 486. 
 
 383 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY ■ 
 
 all that you possess in will, virtue and beauty finds itself 
 preserved, confirmed, accentuated, often multiplied, in 
 your oflFspring. 
 
 The proud, tasteful man who is conscious of his pos- 
 sessions in instinct, will, virtue and beauty, who is aware 
 how much of them he owes to his ancestors and how much 
 to his own individual efforts and self-discipline, and who, 
 therefore, wishes to preserve them and if possible to fix 
 them, is intuitively disinclined, unless he be prevented 
 by democratic or romantic notions, to marry some one 
 who is not his like; because he feels that there his instincts, 
 his virtues, his will and his beauty, instead of being 
 preserved, will be diluted, thwarted, decimated, crossed! 
 
 If he can, he will, as far as possible, marry within his 
 family; for it is there, as a rule, that he is most certain 
 of finding his like. If he fails to find his mate in his own 
 family, he will turn his attention to the select circle of his 
 nearest friends; and if he fail again, he will at least try 
 to keep within his class. For if a whole class has for 
 many generations pursued the same aims and shared the 
 same traditions, a man may often run just as good, and 
 sometimes a better, chance of finding his like in his class 
 than in his family. 
 
 In this way character is built up and fixed, and beauty 
 is attained, and generations are produced even in the 
 lower classes which, if not necessarily capable of ordering 
 things themselves, are at least amenable to and fond of 
 order. 
 
 I shall now suggest two reasons why the democrat and 
 a democratic age are opposed to the kind of assortive 
 mating described above. 
 
 (i) Concurrently with the decline of really superior 
 men — of the specimens of flourishing life, as I call them 
 — through the neglect of the principles which rear such 
 men, there has also taken place a decline in that element 
 of taste whereby ill-health and degeneracy are warded off 
 and eliminated. And the inevitable consequence has been 
 that both ill-health and degeneracy have seized a fast hold 
 
 384 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 upon the populations of modern civilised countries. In 
 England, alone, for instance, the report of the Lunacy 
 Commissioners for 1913 records the fact that insanity is 
 on the increase; and, in view of the supposed marvellous 
 strides of medical and surgical skill in this country, the 
 continued high percentage of physiological botchedness 
 and bungledom shows that disease is, if anything, increas- 
 ing by leaps and bounds. 
 
 Together with this general sickness which, as I have 
 already shown, is largely the outcome of democracy and 
 democratic conditions, there has developed a concomitant 
 and very natural dread of marrying one's like, and more 
 particularly a relative. " The idea that the marriage of 
 near kin," says Professor Thomson, " is a cause of degene- 
 racy seems to be relatively modern." ^ Certainly it is 
 modern! But it is obvious why it should be modern. 
 Democracy finds itself in a vicious circle. It is sick for 
 the want of proper guidance.^ The only thing that rears 
 character and produces specimens of flourishing life, how- 
 ever, is inbreeding; while that which causes the disin- 
 tegration of will and character is persistent cross-breeding. 
 But, inbreeding multiplies disease wherever it is present, 
 and intensifies a taint. Ergo : the only kind of mating 
 that sick democratic conditions allow — the choice of a mate 
 as remotely different from yourself as possible — simply 
 increases the democratic diseases, lack of character and 
 weakness of will. 
 
 Mr. George Darwin has argued very powerfully in favour 
 of the view that consanguineous marriages are not in 
 themselves causes of degeneracy,^ and Professor Thomson, 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. 391. 
 
 ^ To those who may rightly point out that long before a democracy 
 was established in England, this country had already been made sick for 
 want of proper guidance, I reply, not only that their contention is 
 perfectly correct, but also that they should remember how, in times 
 when the rulers of a country — however aristocratic their c/aims may be — 
 are not true aristocrats as defined in this book, the same conditions 
 prevail as in a democracy, i.e. good taste is not the guiding power. 
 
 * See a paper read before the Statistical Society, March 16, 1875, on 
 cc 385 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 voicing almost the whole sentiment of antiquity on 
 this point, says : " Biologically it seems certain that close 
 inbreeding can go far without affecting physique, and 
 that it is very useful in fixing character and developing 
 prepotency." ^ 
 
 I have referred to the Incas and to the Egyptians; but 
 Professor Thomson provides us with two modern instances 
 — the Norfolk Islanders and the people of Batz on the 
 lower Loire — among whom, he says, close inbreeding has 
 not been followed by ill-effects.^ 
 
 But he argues, just as the ancients would have argued : 
 " It seems equally certain that, if there be any morbid 
 idiosyncrasy, close inbreeding tends to perpetuate and 
 augment this." ^ 
 
 All of which simply confirms some of my conclusions 
 in Chapter VII. 
 
 Thus the natural prejudice of the democrat ag^nst the 
 idea that there can be anything worth preserving pure 
 by a marriage with his like, or with the closest approxima- 
 tion to his like, is seen to be simply the self-preservative 
 bias of a sick man. It is, in fact, a symptom of sickness. 
 And it is curious to note how this sick prejudice against 
 a first or second cousin has grown into a general prejudice 
 against one's like. 
 
 You hear people talking foolishly and romantically 
 nowadays about the desirability of marrying one's com- 
 plement, one's opposite, one's other extreme! A pseudo- 
 scientific maxim is hawked about in the guise of wisdom, 
 and people repeat mechanically that nature is always seek- 
 ing to establish a steady level, hence the marriage of tall 
 
 "Marriages between First Cousins in England and their EfFects," in 
 which, on p. 172, the author concludes, "there is no evidence whatever 
 of any ill results accruing to the offspring in consequence of the cousin- 
 ship of their parents." 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 391. " Op. cit., p. 391. 
 
 ' Ibid. See also p. 392 : "It goes without saying that if there is a 
 diseased stock, or rather a stock with an hereditary predisposition to 
 disease to start with, then the evil results of inbreeding will soon be 
 evident." Of course bad, like good, qualities are intensified by endogamy ! 
 
 386 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 with short, fat with lean, dark with fair, beautiful with 
 ugly! All these are the ideas of sickness and of morbid 
 self-contempt. There is no such thing as this search after 
 a dead level in nature; the only dead level that is sought 
 in the world to-day is that which the democrats themselves 
 are trying to establish. If there really were this apparent 
 levelling tendency in nature, whence would come the 
 superbly magnificent feline race, with aU its beauty. 
 Strength, grace, courage and agility, side by side with the 
 race of the sloths, of the skunks, and of the toad and the 
 tapeworm? Such ideas are all nonsense, and when you 
 find them in scientific text-books, be quite sure that they 
 have crept in there unawares, like microbes, from the mass 
 of decaying democratic carrion outside. 
 
 And this brings me to the second reason why the demo- 
 crat and a democratic age are necessarily opposed to the 
 kind of assortive mating described above, in which it is 
 sought to preserve, intensify or fix instincts, will, virtues 
 and beauty. 
 
 (2) I have shown in Chapter VII what I mean by 
 instinct, will, virtue and beauty. Now it must be obvious 
 that if strong, desirable character, which is the sum of 
 aU these, is to be preserved, indiscriminate cross-breeding 
 between nations and classes must not be allowed to go on 
 persistently. But this is precisely what is allowed — ^nay, 
 abetted — ^in democratic times, under the belief in the 
 equality of aU men. 
 
 What happens then.? Instinct, will, virtue and beauty 
 gradually decline, and ultimately disappear. Nobody is 
 deeply, proudly, almost religiously conscious of possess- 
 ing something or having acquired something dviring his 
 lifetime which is worthy of preservation and perpetuation 
 in his family line. Things are even worse than this. 
 There is scarcely a man to-day who does not believe that 
 it is his duty in mating to choose a creature utterly difFereat 
 from himself, so great is his inner and often unconscious 
 self-contempt. Having no real pride either in his will, 
 his instincts, his virtues or his beauty, he feels intuitively 
 
 3'87 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 that his object must be to find a corrective — that is to 
 say, something that will modify, transform, or conflict with 
 his own nature. And the popular mind is gradually pos- 
 sessed by the idea that a man shoiild select his opposite, 
 his complementj his other extreme ! 
 
 Confusion thus rapidly mvdtiplies; everybody becomes 
 a coil of petty conflicting motives, desires, likes and dis- 
 likes, prejudices and prepossessions, diluted vices and 
 diluted virtues; and weakness, doubt, discontent and 
 sorrow begin to take up their permanent headquarters 
 in the hearts of men and women. Nobody knows what 
 he wants, nobody has any fixed belief, nobody is capable 
 of any permanent sentiment or passion, and nobody is 
 capable of steadfastness or staunchness and constancy in 
 matters of principle. For in order to have an aim, a con- 
 viction, a cheerful trustfulness in life, and permanent 
 passion or sentiment and steadfastness or staunchness in 
 matters of principle — ^virtues, instincts above all, and will 
 are necessary and indispensable. 
 
 We must, therefore, take no notice of a violent pre- 
 judice against the idea of " blood " and of its preservation 
 in modern times, even when the prejudice dons a scientific 
 garb; because it is only a symptom of a state of degeneracy 
 already becoming an intuitive guide to conduct. 
 
 It is known that persistent cross-breeding among the 
 lower animals will make cultivated types vdtimately return 
 in looks and habits to the type of their original ancestors 
 — ^Darwin's experiments with pigeons proved this. Now 
 is it not perhaps possible that the present lack of culture, 
 the present worship of Nature and of the immature, may 
 have a similar cause.? The prevalent bias in favour of 
 pure unhandseled Nature, free from the hand of man, the 
 prevalent bias in favour of all that is primitive, free and 
 uncultured, might be the inevitable outcome of such a 
 long mixture of men that in the very heart of big cities, 
 nowadays, true barbarians are being produced whose only 
 modern characteristic is the cowardice and weakness neces- 
 sarily associated with the poor physique they derive from 
 
 388 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 the nature of their conditions. At all events, the faces 
 and tastes of the modern mob lend colour to the sugges- 
 tion, although its truth is in no way essential to my 
 argument. 
 
 To sum up, then, there are three reasons why the claim 
 of distinction, and of the duty to maintain it, are hateful 
 to the modern man — 
 
 (i) Because, with his belief in the equality of all men, 
 he is suspicious and intolerant of all distinctions. 
 
 (2) Because he is sick, and can save himself only by 
 seeking a mate different from himself. 
 
 (3) Because, having nothing to preserve,^ and feeling 
 that his characteristics require correcting rather than inten- 
 sifying, he seeks his opposite rather than his like. 
 
 There remains one aspect of the question of heredity 
 which now requires to be elucidated. I refer to what is 
 called the transmission of characteristics acquired in a 
 single generation, or in the lifetime of a single individual. 
 
 It would be more than presumptuous on my part to 
 pretend in this book that I am able to make any dogmatic 
 or categorical statement concerning a matter which, if 
 modern scientists are to be believed, is so exceedingly 
 problematic. But perhaps the little I have to say on the 
 subject will not be without interest. 
 
 Proved, or not proved, the transmission of acquired 
 characteristics is not nearly so important to the advocate 
 of the hereditary principle in great families or great classes 
 as is that pre-disposition to acquire good characteristics 
 which finds its root in the inborn virtues and instincts 
 of a good family or caste. 
 
 Nevertheless, since the cumulative result of the trans- 
 mission of acquired characteristics would prove, in the 
 
 ^ It should be remembered that even if a man to-day have anything 
 to preserve either in virtue, will, or beauty, the very values prevalent 
 about him are so opposed to the idea of his preserving them in the 
 proper vi^ay that when he comes to think about marrying the conscious- 
 ness of their possession alone will frequently be an insufficient ground for 
 his acting contrary to the strong prejudice of his age. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 long run, enormous, it is a matter which must interest 
 any one who is concerned about the improvement or the 
 selection of stock. 
 
 Defining an acquired characteristic as a quality which 
 has become the possession of one individual or one genera- 
 tion, alone, and the very latest and most recent feature 
 of that individxxal or generation, it wiU readily be under- 
 stood how easily such a possession will yield before the 
 prepotency of earlier and more long-established qualities 
 in the type, and what a small chance it has of contending 
 with success against these for a place in the offspring of 
 the individual. 
 
 Just as a highly cultured and inbred type with a long 
 pedigree, is prepotent when crossed with a less cultivated 
 type, owing, apparently, to the strength garnered through 
 long tradition,^ so, too, it seems obvious that the older 
 and more long-established qualities of a stock must be 
 prepoteat as against the more recently acquired qualities. 
 
 Example : A young man whose family has been in 
 commerce for five generations may, owing to sudden 
 extraordinary prosperity, find himself able to study art, 
 or literature, or music, as an amateur, and even to attain 
 to some proficiency in one of these piorsuits. As an 
 individual who has acquired this new feature during his 
 lifetime, however, it is obviously very doubtful whether 
 he will be able to transmit this newly acquired attribute 
 to his offspring. The older tendencies, rooted more 
 deeply in his ancestral line, will certainly stand a better 
 chance of being transmitted. 
 
 This is simply common sense, and by experiments on 
 yourself you can even gauge the different strengths of 
 your acquired characteristics themselves. 
 
 Take, for instance, the gift of speech — everybody is 
 born with that, for it is simply the potentiality of being 
 able to express one's needs, one's emotions, one's feelings 
 by articulations. A baby and a deaf child articulate. But 
 
 ^ For confirmation of this see Professor J. A. Thomson, op. cit., 
 pp. 1 13-116 and 138. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 as no form has fet been given to their articulations (and 
 can never be given in the case of the deaf child), they are 
 incomprehensible to their elders who have acquired a 
 certain arbitrary form — say English, French, or German. 
 
 One of the baby's first acquired characteristics, there- 
 fore, will be the particular form given to his power of 
 articulating, or to his powers of speech. And if he is 
 English, that form will be the English form. If, later 
 in life, however, that baby, now a youth of fourteen, learn 
 French very well indeed, his power of speech will then 
 have been given two forms. 
 
 Now, suppose he is exiled to Germany or to Sweden 
 for the rest of his life, after his acquisition of French — 
 which acquired form of speech will he be likely to lose 
 first ? Obviously the French form, because the other will 
 have taken firmer root, and will have been in his possession 
 for a much longer period of time. 
 
 What is true of the individual here, I imagine, is also 
 true of the race. The more recent acquisitions, owing to 
 their being less deeply and less firmly rooted in the ganglia 
 of the body, are not nearly so readily or so easily retained 
 as the older and more traditional qualities. 
 
 This fact, I believe, is the cause of a good deal of the 
 doubt which has been cast upon the possibility of acquired 
 characteristics being transmitted. 
 
 To argue from this fact, however, that acquired charac- 
 teristics are not transmitted seems to me to be the height 
 of unscientific and excessive caution. Naturally, the very 
 circumstances of the case i^ould render the slight modifica- 
 tion caused by an acquired characteristic a very difficult 
 feature to trace among all the stronger and older charac- 
 teristics in the offspring. But to say that no ti-ansmission 
 ever occurs, simply because frequently it is for all practical 
 purposes invisible, or because, often, it actually does not 
 occur, is surely ridiculous. 
 
 Moreover, when one sins here, by affirming the fact 
 of the transmission of acquired characteristics, it should 
 be remembered that one is doing so in excellent company. 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 Lamarck, Darwin, Spencer and many lesser biological 
 lights also held this view. 
 
 What are the strongest arguments brought against the 
 position of those who claim that acquired characteristics 
 are transmitted? 
 
 They are most of them based on the most absurd and 
 most hopelessly senseless experiments which could possibly 
 be imagined — experiments which are a disgrace both to 
 science and to the modern scientist alike. 
 
 Remember that you have in the average highly organ- 
 ised animal — whether a frog or a French poodle — a 
 creature of a very superior grade of sensitiveness, of 
 nervous energy, power and control. Any experiments 
 made upon such a creature with the view of discovering 
 the extent to which acquired characteristics are transmitted 
 ought surely to have reckoned with this nervous system, 
 which is a system of control and of memory as well as 
 of communication. 
 
 When one remembers that the mere expectation of his 
 meal by a dog will cause his gastric juices to flow as if 
 food were in his mouth; and when, moreover, the intimate 
 relationship of function to instinct, or organ to mental atti- 
 tude, and of member to mental idiosyncrasy, is thoroughly 
 grasped, it is obviously preposterous to question the ner- 
 vous control of our highly organised animals — in short, 
 it is unscientific to forget the spirit. 
 
 And yet the average naturalist, setting about the task 
 of discovering whether acquired characteristics are trans- 
 mitted, began by cutting off rats' tails, docking ears and 
 generally mutilating unfortunate animals' bodies in every 
 conceivable way, and then setting them to breed to see 
 whether they would produce maimed offspring! 
 
 The veriest dolt could have told beforehand that such 
 experiments were absolutely futile and inconclusive. 
 Because that which results from a vis major, descending 
 unexpectedly in the form of an outside, unknown cause 
 upon an animal's body, can have no possible relation to 
 the inner workings of that body, or to the causes which 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 make it grow. To cut off a rat's tail does not eVen 
 amount to removing the cause of the growth of the tail 
 — ^unless the tail is its own cause; how, then, could the 
 cutting off of the tail be transmitted as an acquired 
 characteristic to the rat's offspring? The cause of the 
 growth of the tail is still inextricably associated with the 
 rat's whole life and growth, it is still part of its nature. 
 Cutting the tail off has removed a manifestation of rat- 
 nature, it has not necessarily modified rat-nature itself. 
 
 This is not the way animals lose their parts. An 
 animal's body knows nothing about knives or about 
 amputations. How could the repetition of its controlling 
 nervous system in its offspring repeat an experiment it 
 knows nothing at all about — save that a vis major appeared 
 one day, and that thenceforward it had no tail.'* 
 
 Watch the way animals — tadpoles, for instance — 
 gradually lose their parts, either tails or gills, or fins or 
 what-not, and you will find that the process has nothing 
 whatever to do with knives. But the way in which a 
 tadpole loses its tail is understood by Nature, and on those 
 lines Nature can work. 
 
 The correlation of will and instinct to part should not 
 be overlooked, especially by naturalists. The correlation 
 of will to part is intimate, it is certainly incomprehensible; 
 some have declared that it is creative. But at all events 
 any forcible extirpation of a part will not create another 
 will in the individual which is capable of turning a tailed 
 race into a tailless race. 
 
 The argument that acquired characteristics are not trans- 
 mitted because mutilations are not transmitted is, there- 
 fore, as utterly insane as any argument possibly could be, 
 and none but supinely mechanical minds could ever have 
 dreamt of such experiments as a test of transmission. 
 
 The next argument is that no mechanism is known by 
 which acquired characteristics can be transmitted. Accord- 
 ing to Weismann the germ-plasm is quite independent 
 of the soma or body, and is unaffected by the latter's 
 vicissitudes; or if it be claimed that it is affected by the 
 
 393 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 ktter's vicissitudes, "we cannot imagine how a modifica- 
 tion might, as such, saturate from body to germ-cells." 
 But, as Professor Lloyd Morgan says, "this does not 
 exclude the possibility that it may actually do so"; ^ but 
 there is another objection — ^why should the process be a 
 mechanism, as we understand that expression? Dr. 
 George Ogilvie observes : " In a subject so involved in 
 obscurity the present incomprehenability of certain rela- 
 tions can hardly serve as an argument against their exist- 
 ence." ^ This is the only honest thing that science can 
 say at present on the qjiestion — not, remember, because 
 the transmission of acquired characteristics is not a possible 
 and proven phenomenon, but because it is one of the demo- 
 cratic rules of modern science to take nothing for granted 
 which cannot be made comprehensible by a diagram or a 
 mechanism to every Tom, Dick and Harry. 
 
 The fact, however, that the only experiments which 
 have shown the smallest measure of success have been 
 carried out on the nerves and not on the muscles of animals 
 proves that the nearer you get to that seat of control which 
 consists of the instinct-saturated ganglia,^ the more likely 
 you are to make a deep-rooted and permanent impression 
 upon the parent animal, and therefore upon the offspring. 
 Because the ganglia know how to lose things or grow 
 things. They are the storehouse of the race-memory. It 
 is they who generalise from experience, and who organise 
 and control accordingly. Touch them, through their 
 members, the nerves, and you are very near the directing 
 force of the whole animal. 
 
 In this way, in modifications of the ganglia, in modifica- 
 
 ^ See Professor J. A. Thomson, op. cit., p. 200. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 201. 
 
 ' Ibid., p. 1 68 : " It is hard to find evidence of the power of the 
 personal structure to react upon sexual elements that is not open to 
 serious objections. That which appears most trustworthy lies almost 
 wholly in the direction of nerve-changes, as shown by the inherited 
 habit! of tameness, pointing in dogs, and the results of Dr. Brown- 
 S6quard's experiments on guinea-pigs." 
 
 3,94 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 tions of the wiU, it seems to me that a particular kind of 
 training, especially when it becomes traditional in a line, 
 must in the end show by its cumulative results, however 
 imperceptible at first, marked changes in the aptitudes 
 and proclivities of a race; and if it does, the theory of the 
 perfectly isolated unaltered germ-plasm must be to a great 
 extent sadly at fault. For is not all modification effected 
 through the will, even in one's own lifetime? Is not 
 training in itself but the habituation of the ganglia to 
 certain processes, the giving of a particular direction to 
 the will ? 
 
 See the shifts to which scientists are driven whoj in 
 the face of all evidence to the contrary, still maintain that 
 acquired characteristics are not transmissible, even in their 
 cumulative results. Professors Mark Baldwin, Lloyd 
 Morgan and H. F. Osborn suggest that " adaptive 
 modifications may act as the fostering nurses of germinal 
 variations in the same direction." ^ 
 
 What need is there of these roundabout explanations, 
 depending upon chance for their existence, when we know 
 that, though the process is often an invisible one in its 
 initial stages, persistently acquired characteristics all of a 
 like nature do in the end produce tangible results ? Surely 
 all culture, all rapid advance or decline in any direction, 
 involves a process more reliable and more certain in its 
 action than the mere chance production of germinal varia- 
 tions of a similar nature to the acquired characters. But, 
 in any case, where is the advantage of substituting an 
 accidental and unaccountable process here for an orderly 
 and acc9un table one.'' As Reibmayr points out, "the 
 speed with which the culture of a nation develops depends 
 to a very great extent upon the transmissibility of acquired 
 characters." ^ However much the course of evolution, 
 which has no set plan, may have been determined by 
 spontaneous mutations, surely it seems a little far-fetched 
 to explain the course traversed by a developing culture 
 
 ^ Professor J. A. Thomson, op. cit., p. 243. 
 ^ Inzucht und Fermixhung, p. 6. 
 
 395 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 which is founded in the taste of its leaders also to spon- 
 taneous mutations ! Nor does the argument depending 
 upon spontaneous mutations stand on any sounder facts 
 than the argument for the transmission of acquired charac- 
 teristics. All we know is that spontaneous mutations 
 occur — ^just as we know that certain cases of transmission 
 of acquired characteristics occur — ^we know nothing about 
 their mechanism! 
 
 Taking it all in all, the statements of the two Professors, 
 V. A. S. Walton and L. Doncaster, sum up the question 
 exceedingly well for the scientific school, and show how 
 great is the uncertainty still reigning in this department 
 of biology. The former says : " To sum up the main 
 argument, it must be said that there is some presumptive 
 evidence in favour of the inheritance of acquired character- 
 istics, but that direct experiments have given positive 
 results of only the most meagre and inconclusive kinds." ^ 
 
 We know what these experiments have been, for the 
 most part; and is it not possible that even the best experi- 
 ments have been carried out with too sanguine expecta- 
 tions? Seeing, as I said at the opening of the inquiry 
 on the subject, that all acquired characteristics are recent 
 and short-rooted, and therefore, that they must yield to 
 the older and more traditionally established characteristics 
 in the order of precedence, is it not obvious that any trace 
 of them in the first generation must be very faint, however 
 considerable and unmistakable their cumulative effect 
 may he? 
 
 Doncaster writes as follows : " The tendency of bio- 
 logical thought is towards a recognition of the unity of 
 the organism as a whole, including its germ-cells, and 
 especially where the organism adapts itself to change, it 
 seems possible that this adaptation is transmissible. The 
 belief that somatic changes could not be transmitted rests 
 largely on the idea that every character is determined by 
 a factor or determinant In the germ-cell, but it is clear 
 that any character is not developed directly from the 
 1 Heredity (T. C. and E. C. Jack), p. 42. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 germinal determinant, but by the relation existing between 
 the determinant and its surroundings, viz. the body of 
 the organism." ^ 
 
 This shows which way the wind is blowing in the world 
 of science, and I have no doubt that, one day, biologists 
 will return as resolutely to Darwin's and Spencer's belief 
 in the transmission of acquired characteristics, as they 
 turned against it under the influence of Weismann. But 
 with good reason they will probably maintain, as I main- 
 tain, that it is absurd to expect the same conspicuous and 
 unmistakable evidence of the transmission of acquired 
 characteristics, as of the transmission of racial and long- 
 established ones, because the former, being so recent and 
 so lightly and shallowly rooted in the parent nature, can 
 make but the faintest modification in the offspring, and 
 can be detected probably only after a long series of 
 generations, when their cumulative results begin to be 
 substantial. 
 
 All people, then, who believe in the power of high 
 culture over a race that is susceptible to high culture, 
 must take for granted the cumulative effects of imper- 
 ceptible transmissions of acquired characteristics, and must 
 believe in the miracles that can be, and are, worked by 
 long tradition. 
 
 For even if those biologists are right, who maintain 
 that while there is no such thing as the transmission of 
 persistent modifications, there is a tendency for germinal 
 variations of a like nature to be preserved by them, 
 tradition still remains the important factor; and, to keep 
 that as unbroken as possible must be the chief aim of all 
 educators and cultivators. 
 
 This reconciliation of the two hostile scientific camps 
 in the one word tradition,' ought to be sufficient for the 
 ordinary man. Both the believers and the disbelievers 
 in the transmission of acquired characteristics, believe in 
 
 ^ Heredity in the Light of Recent Research, p. 97, note. 
 * See L. Doncaster, op. cit., p. 50. 
 
 397 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the importance of imbroken tradition — and this, after all, 
 is sufficient for my purpose. 
 
 The Incas, the Brahmans, and the Egyptian aristocracy 
 understood perfectly well how important tradition was, 
 if virtue, will and beauty are to be reared in the body of 
 a nation and kept there. Indiscriminate crossing between 
 the castes, each of which had its particular occupation, was 
 loathsome to the ancient Hindu. It was also loathsome 
 to the Inca and to the Egyptian. Indeed, so far did the 
 two latter nations go in trying to prevent a break in 
 tradition, and in thus preserving virtues from degenera- 
 tion, or dilution, that, in addition to casting a stigma upon 
 half-caste people and doing all they could to avoid their 
 multiplication, they even encouraged the retention of the 
 same occupation in a family from generation to generation.^ 
 
 Speaking of the Egyptians, Diodorus says : " For 
 among these people only is the whole artisan class accus- 
 tomed to take no part in any occupation . . . other than 
 that which is prescribed to them by their laws and handed 
 down to them by their ancestors." * 
 
 Wilkinson denies that this principle was insisted upon 
 by law, and he says that it was merely customary, as it is 
 in India and China, where the same trade or employment is 
 followed in succession by father and son.* 
 
 It is sufficient for my purpose, however, to know that 
 it was so general a practice as to be regarded almost as 
 an unwritten law, and the fact that Diodoirus took it to 
 be compulsory, only supports this view. In any case. 
 Dr. Henry Brugsch Bey supplies an interesting piece of 
 evidence, showing the extremes to which the EgyptiajDS 
 sometimes went in observing the custom of hereditary 
 
 1 A certain Inca, Terpac Jupangi, expressed himself as follows on 
 this point : " II faut que, parmi le peuple, chacun apprenne le metier 
 de son p4re ; car ce n'est point au vulgaire i commander aux autres ; 
 et c'est faire tort aux charges publiques que de I'employer." — Ch, Letour- 
 neau, PEvolution de ^Education, p. 199. See also p. 304 of the same 
 book for evidence of similar customs in Egypt. 
 
 2 Book I, 74. ' Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 157. 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 occupations. It relates to the pedigree of the architect 
 Knum-ab-ra (490 B.C.), chief minister of works for the 
 whole country. He was the twenty-fourth architect of 
 his line; his remote ancestor Imhotep, who lived in the 
 third dynasty, having been an architect of Southern and 
 Northern Egypt and a high functionary under King 
 Zasar.-^ 
 
 This, together with a healthy distinction between high 
 and low, man and man, which is always felt in inbreeding 
 classes, is the only way in which virtue, strength and will 
 can be garnered and stored over generations, in order at 
 any time to produce a crop of fiae, conscientious and 
 skilful artisans, or artists, or leaders of men. In itself the 
 custom seems natural, obvious, I would almost say, in- 
 evitable enough; and provided it have just that amount 
 of elasticity that can allow of exceptional men breaking 
 themselves free from their family tradition, in order to 
 attempt higher things — a possibility provided for in 
 Egypt, China and India — ^and to allow of cross-breeding 
 in cases of real effeteness, which are, at all events, rare 
 when an inbred class is large, only good can be expected 
 to come of it. 
 
 Thus alone can that culture be reared which is based 
 upon solid virtue; for the bodily reward of any occupa- 
 tion, if it be noble and healthy, is the acquisition of 
 certain virtues — dexterity, strength, self-control, self- 
 reliance, patience, endurance, perseverance, regularity, 
 reliability, not to mention again, will-power and beauty. 
 And wherever an occupation is constantly changed, either 
 in a single lifetime or in the life of a family, or wherever 
 its nobility declines — as, for instance, when a man is asked, 
 as he is nowadays, to turn a lever from left to right all 
 his life-^the stored up virtue of generations must gradu- 
 ally be dissipated until none remains. When such things 
 
 1 History of Egypt, Vol. II, p. 309. The retention of certain profes- 
 sions and trades within a family in antiquity was not, however, 
 restricted to ancient Peru and ancient Eigypt. Hippocrates, for 
 instance, was the seventeenth medical practitioner in his family. 
 
 399 
 
A DEFENCE OF. ARISTOCRACY 
 
 happen not only the working classes, but the nation itself 
 is in danger.^ 
 
 For virtue, like will and beauty, is no accident. It is 
 invariably the outcome of long traditional effort, it is 
 always the achievement of a long line of people who have 
 stored it, built it up, garnered it and laboured for it. 
 Just as a falling object gathers momentum as it descends, 
 and may attain an almost irresistible power if the descent 
 be long enough, so if in a family line the jvill has been 
 concerned long enough with the same occupations, 
 problems and obstacles, the momentum it acquires in its 
 descent may also prove well-nigh irresistible. It is, in 
 fact, in matters of will and virtue, the only possible source 
 of power; and though a man can add his own strength 
 to it in his lifetime, if it is truly great in him, at least 
 the major part of it is the work of his predecessors, i. e. 
 the distance it has already covered. It is for this, reason 
 that traditional occupations are important, not only among 
 an aristocracy, but among a people; because the people, 
 who are the ultimate source of refreshment for an aris- 
 tocracy, cannot supply that refreshment unless they too 
 have acquired through traditional occupations the first pre- 
 requisites of aristocratic equipment — ^will and virtue. To 
 point out that this is precisely the reverse of the principles 
 we see practised to-day is a sufficient comment on our age. 
 
 Summing up now, on the question of the transmission 
 of acquired characteristics, we see that, although the 
 acquired characteristics of an individual, owing to the very 
 recent nature of their citizenship in his body, make a 
 much fainter impress upon, and are much more imper- 
 ceptible in, his offspring than the older and more tradi- 
 tional characters of his race, they must be there in humanly 
 imperceptible form, otherwise it is impossible to explain 
 results which can only be ascribed to their cumidative 
 
 1 See At'istotle, PoMtics, Book VIII, Chapter II, 1,337.5 : "Every 
 work is to be esteemed mean, and every art and ev^ry discipline which 
 renders the body, the mind, or the understanding of freemen unfit for 
 the habit and practice of virtue." 
 
 400 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 effects in subsequent generations. Even if those are 
 wrong, however, who ascribe these perceptible modifica- 
 tions — as, for instance, the gradual high culture of a 
 people — to the cumulative effects of transmitted acquired 
 characteristics, they and their opponents are at one on 
 the matter of tradition, which is essential to both hypo- 
 theses, i. e. either to the hypothesis which postulates the 
 cumulative result of acquired characteristics as a factor in 
 modification (in addition, of course, to mutations); or to 
 the hypothesis which postulates mutations alone, fostered 
 by persistent modifications of the same nature, as the cause 
 of all development or retrogression. 
 
 Thus unbroken tradition comes out of the discussion 
 without a stain upon its character; and to-day, just as it 
 was four thousand years ago in Egypt, we must conclude 
 that it is the greatest force in the rearing of all virtue, 
 will, beauty, or quality of any sort in the body of a nation, 
 and especially among the members of an aristocracy. 
 
 Turning now to the English aristocracy represented in 
 the House of Lords, how does the above examination of 
 the question of heredity help us.? 
 
 In speaking about the principles upon which a sound 
 aristocracy should be based, the criticism recently levelled 
 by the more rabid Radicals against the present House of 
 Lords will not be found to be of much service, and might 
 just as well be left out of our reckoning altogether. The 
 war-cries of political parties, in the thick of a party 
 struggle, are not as a rule reliable, even as sign-posts, for 
 the purpose of the investigator. Nevertheless, there was 
 one criticism which figured very prominently and very 
 frequently above the rest, and that was the criticism of 
 the hereditary principle. It is not implied here that any 
 Radical who voiced this criticism understood its full 
 political import or depth — otherwise he would probably 
 have been less lavish in his repetition of it; nor is it sug- 
 gested that the criticism itself was based upon a sound 
 analysis of the question of heredity in general. As a war- 
 
 D D 401 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 cry, however, it certainly pointed to the kernel of the 
 whole question of traditional rule and government, and 
 no aristocracy now aiming at permanency can hope to 
 arrive at a sound foundation for its order, unless it face 
 this question, in the light of history and science. And 
 the more it draws from the former, and the less it draws 
 from the latter, the better. 
 
 The bitter hatred of the hereditary principle, however, 
 has not found expression only in the mouths of Radical 
 orators, or in the columns of Radical newspapers; it is to 
 be found even in the pamphlets and books which purport 
 to deal seriously with the question of aristocratic rule. 
 
 Such writers as John Hampden,'^ J. Morrison David- 
 son,^ and Howard Evans,* lay it down as a fact that the 
 hereditary principle must be bad; while in a compilation 
 published in 1898, almost every writer shows himself 
 hostile to the idea that the right of ruling should descend 
 from generation to generation in the same family.* 
 
 After what we have said and seen on the matter of 
 heredity, and even on the matter of the influence (I will 
 not say the inheritance, as the point is still unsettled in 
 many distinguished minds) of acquired qualities, it seems 
 strange that there should be this bitter hostility on the 
 part of many thinking men towards hereditary rulership." 
 
 Is it not possible, however, that after inquiry we may 
 find that this hereditary principle of the House of Lords, 
 is merely in superficial appearance the cause of the 
 trouble? No one, I believe, could speak more severely 
 on the misrule of the English aristocracy than I have 
 spoken in this book; and yet I absolutely decline to ascribe 
 this misrule either to the evil effects of inbreeding or to 
 
 ^ ne Aristocracy of England. 
 
 * Book of Lords. ' Our Old Nobility. 
 
 * The House of Lords Question. Edited by A. Reid. 
 
 * Even aristocrats themselves, or at least the more stupid ones, are 
 beginning to feel that there may " be something in it." They are 
 beginning to be converted unthinkingly to the Radical position, simply 
 because its features have been voiced and urged so repeatedly of late. 
 
 402 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 the supposed unreliability of the hereditary principlei. 
 And all those who do account for it in this way, show 
 themselves to be utterly shallow investigators into the 
 problem. 
 
 I say that, whatever the misrule of the English aris- 
 tocracy may have been, it is not the outcome or the evils 
 resulting from inbreeding or from the alleged freaks of 
 the hereditary principle : in the first place, because the first- 
 named evils have literally not had the time to be brought 
 about; and secondly, because it is ridiculous to call the 
 House of Lords essentially a hereditary Chamber at all, 
 even if the law of heredity, starting with good material, 
 had been allowed its full modicum of chances by the peers. 
 I would go even further, and declare most emphatically 
 that if the hereditary principle had only had a chance of 
 working on the foundations of good stock, there would 
 to-day be absolutely no outcry against the House of Lords 
 and its methods of rulership. 
 
 Let me enter briefly into the recent history of the House 
 of Lords. 
 
 Not more than 29 temporal peers received Writs 
 of Summons to the first Parliament of Henry VII; 
 Henry VIII never summoned more than 51; and at 
 the death of Queen Elizabeth this number had increased 
 only to 59. James I created 62; Charles I 59; ^ 
 Charles II 64; and James II 8.^ Thus, at the end of 
 the Stuart line, the peerage should have numbered 252, 
 but during the Stuart reigns 99 peerages became extinct, 
 so that at the Revolution of 1688 the peerage stood at 
 
 ^ J. Bernard Burke, in his Anecdotes of the Aristocracy (Vol. I, p. 105), 
 speaking of Charles I's creations, says : " They were all selected from 
 old and well-allied families." 
 
 * Lord Erskine, in The Constitutional History of England (Vol. I, p. 274), 
 makes an interesting comment on the Stuart creations. He says : " As 
 many of the peerages were sold by James I and Charles II it is sur- 
 prising that the creations were not even more numerous." When we 
 compare the twenty-two years of James's reigji with the fifty-nine years 
 of George Ill's reign, during which the number of creations amounted 
 to 388, we realise the full significance of Lord Erskine's remark. 
 
 403 
 
A DEFENCE OF. ARISTOCRACY 
 
 about 150. William III and Queen Anne increased this 
 further to 168, and the first two kings of the House of 
 Hanover continuing to make additions to the peerage, 
 brought it in 1760 up to 174. 
 
 Then followed one of the worst reigns for political 
 corruption and general jobbing in titles and peerages that 
 England has ever seen. Places in Parliament were bought 
 outright, men who held seats were bribed with money, 
 knighthoods, baronetcies or peerages to give them to a 
 certain party, and altogether from 1760 to 1820 no less 
 than 388 creations were made. 
 
 One of the worst oiFenders in this indiscriminate 
 augmentation of the hereditary lords was William Pitt 
 the younger,^ and there is no doubt that if the prestige of 
 our aristocracy has considerably diminished in the last 
 hundred years, and if, as men of wisdom, ruler power and 
 ruler gifts, their credit is low, it is largely to Pitt that 
 the country owes this unfortunate change. Referring to 
 Pitt's creations. Green writes as follows — 
 
 "The whole character of the House of Lords was 
 changed. Up to this time it had been a small assembly 
 of great nobles, bound together by family or party ties 
 into a distinct power in the state. From this time it 
 became the stronghold of property, the representative of 
 the great estates and great fortunes which the vast increase 
 of English wealth was building up." * 
 
 Thus, upstart capitalists began to form a large per- 
 centage of the Upper Chamber, and there was often abso- 
 lutely nothing in their past lives or in their achievements 
 to show that this highly influential position in the legis- 
 lature would be filled by them witii ability or success. 
 
 1 See Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. V, 
 p. 275. Referring to Pitt's creations, he says : " He distributed peerages 
 with a lavish and culpable profusion." And on p. 292 : "No previous 
 minister created peers so lavishly for the purpose of supporting his 
 political influence, or affected so permanently and so injuriously the 
 character of the House of Lords." 
 
 A Short History of the English People (i 891), p. 816. 
 
 404 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 Speaking of this class of peer, Lecky says : " They were 
 nearly all men of strong Tory opinions promoted for 
 political services, the vast majority of them were men of 
 no real distinction, and they at once changed the political 
 tendencies and greatly lowered the intellectual level of the 
 assembly to which they were raised." ^ 
 
 Now even if inbreeding had had time to work its worst 
 evils among the descendants of these peers, which it cer- 
 tainly had not, what in any case could have been expected 
 from the progeny of such men ? The law of heredity does 
 not work miracles, it cannot turn sows' ears into silk 
 purses; and if by 1820 there was already some outcry 
 against the hereditary chamber, let us be quite satisfied 
 that this outcry was not provoked by the degeneration 
 through close intermarriage of these eighteenth-century 
 creations — numbers of which were not yet fifty years 
 old. 
 
 It is only stupidity and ignorance that can make a man 
 ascribe all the misrule of the House of Lords in the latter 
 half of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nine- 
 teenth centuries, to the evils of close inbreeding and to 
 the sad uncertainty of the hereditary principle. For, in 
 the first place, close inbreeding would have to go on for 
 a very long time indeed, far longer than the existence of 
 the majority of the present peerage, before its evils could 
 begin to show themselves; and, secondly, if you have bad 
 material to start with, it is ridiculous to ascribe to the 
 hereditary principle an evil which it has never been claimed 
 that it can remove. 
 
 Considering that in 1 8 60, a century after the accession of 
 George III, no more than 98 of the odd 450 peers could 
 claim an earlier creation than the reign of that monarch, 
 it would be far more just, far more historically correct, 
 and far more penetrating, to say that the incompetence and 
 general lack of ruler ability (in my sense, not in the Radical 
 sense) which characterise the House of Lords, were due to 
 the method of selection rather than to the hereditary 
 ^ History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. V, p. 293. 
 
 '405 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 principle.^ But selection is precisely what the Radicals 
 are clamouring for! The very principle which has been 
 pursued with such disastrous results ever since 1760, is 
 that which the Radicals would fain put in the place of the 
 supposed hereditary principle which not only has never 
 had a fair chance of showing its true merits, but has also 
 been the subordinate principle in the House for over one 
 hundred years! 
 
 When you bear in mind that since the year 1760 over 
 600 new peers, i. e. more than nine-tenths of the whole 
 House — and that since 1820, at least three-quarters of the 
 total number of members of the House of Lords have 
 been created; when, moreover, you recollect that there are 
 twenty-six bishops and forty-four Irish and Scottish Peers 
 — all selected, the hereditary character of the peerage 
 begins to acquire a very insignificant character indeed ; and 
 if incompetence and misrule are noticeable in it, they must 
 surely be traced to another source than to close inbreeding 
 and the hereditary principle. 
 
 Let me quote the following figures from the Constitu- 
 tional Year Book of 1913, to yiow the number of additions 
 to the House of Lords made since 1830 alone — 
 
 Undxr Liberal Ministkikb 
 
 Under Conservative Ministries 
 
 Earl Grey 
 
 Viscount Mel- 
 bourne 
 
 Lord John Rus- 
 sell 
 
 1830-1834 
 1835-1841 
 
 1846-1852 
 
 37 
 46 
 
 12 
 
 Sir Robert Peel 
 
 Id. 
 
 Earl of Derby 
 
 Id. 
 
 Id. 
 
 1834-1835 
 1841-1846 
 1852 
 
 1858-1859 
 1 866-1 868 
 
 6 
 6 
 
 3 
 10 
 
 7 
 
 Earl of Aber- 
 
 1853-1855 
 
 I 
 
 Mr. Disraeli . 
 
 1868 
 
 9 
 
 deen 
 
 
 
 Earl of Beacons- 
 
 1874-1880 
 
 29 
 
 Lord Palmers- 
 
 1855-1858 
 
 12 
 
 field 
 
 
 
 ton 
 Id. 
 
 1859-1865 
 
 15 
 
 Marquess of 
 Salisbury 
 
 1885-1886 
 
 II 
 
 ^ Of course, as Lord Erskine points out (op. cit., p. 282), "this fact 
 [the number 98 who can claim an earlier creation than the reign of 
 George III] is an imperfect criterion of the antiquity of the peerage. 
 When the possessor of an ancient dignity is promoted to a higher grade 
 in the peerage, his lesser dignity becomes merged in the greater, but 
 more recent, title." 
 
 406 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 Under Liberal Ministriej 
 
 Under Coniervative Ministries 
 
 Earl Russell . 
 Mr. Gladstone 
 Id. 
 Id. 
 
 1865-1866 
 1868-1874 
 1880-1885 
 1886 
 
 8 
 39 
 
 28 
 
 8 
 
 Marquis of 1 886-1 892 38 
 
 Salisbury 
 Id. . . 1895-1902 44 
 Mr. Balfour . 1002-1905 18 
 
 Id. 
 
 Earl of Rose- 
 
 1892-1894 
 
 II 
 
 
 bery . 
 Sir H. C. Ban- 
 
 1894-1895 
 1905-1908 
 
 5 
 21 
 
 
 nerman 
 
 
 
 
 Mr. Asquith 
 
 1908-Dec. 191 2 
 
 52 
 
 
 Total created 
 
 in 47 years 
 
 295 
 
 Total created in 34 years 1 8 1 
 
 
 
 -^ 
 
 ■ 
 
 This gives us a grand total of 476 creations in eighty- 
 one years! In the face of these figures it is not only 
 absurd, but literally dishonest to inveigh against the 
 hereditary Chamber as if it consisted of a body of effete 
 aristocrats, so closely inbred for centuries that all the evils 
 of sterility, degeneracy and feebleness had now seized upon 
 them. Neither is it sensible to say that in view of their 
 misrule the law of heredity must have failed. 
 
 If the Lords have on the whole shown themselves 
 unworthy of their high position in the State, and if from 
 1688 to 1832 they showed themselves unworthy of having 
 all the power in their own hands, it is because the majority 
 of them were not the right sort from the start. Com- 
 mercial magnates, without any claim to distinction, apart 
 from their wealth; borough-mongers, devoid of all public 
 spirit and patriotism; and bribees of all descriptions — 
 these are not the people who by their deeds can shake our 
 faith in the value of aristocratic government. To set a 
 jester on the throne is not to refute monarchy. 
 
 It is perfectly true, of course, that the hereditary prin- 
 ciple, alone, cannot improve such stock; but that is not 
 the fault of the principle. If it could, it would be less 
 reliable than it is. 
 
 " A body so constantly changed and recruited from all 
 
 407 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 classes of society," says Lord Erskine, "loses much of its 
 distinctive hereditary character. Peers sitting in Parlia- 
 ment by virtue of an hereditary right, share their privilege 
 with so many who by personal pretensions have recently 
 been placed beside them, that the hereditary principle 
 becomes divested of exclusive power and invidious 
 distinction." ^ 
 
 Not only, then, has the selective principle been far more 
 active than the hereditary one in increasing the peerage, 
 "but also the very method of selection itself, has been so 
 faulty, so foreign to any proper consideration of what true 
 rulership means, that it was bound to fail, bound to be 
 found out, and bound to drag the name of true aristocracy 
 through the dust.'' 
 
 But if there is little, for instance, in the successfid 
 banker, factory owner, ship-builder or general trade 
 magnate to make one take for granted that he is fit to be 
 one of the first rulers of a great nation, what on earth is 
 there in the lawyer to make one think that he, too, after 
 attaining to a certain high position in his profession, should 
 necessarily be fit to govern ? 
 
 The Earl of Strafford was suspicious enough of lawyers 
 as legislators, and rightly too, I think. But what would 
 he have said if he could have seen the following list of 
 lawyers who between 1691 and 191 2 have been elevated 
 to tie peerage ? ' 
 
 ^ Tie Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, p. 285. 
 
 ' Mr. Luke Owen Pike, who, in his Constitutional History of the House 
 of Lords, does not set up nearly so high a standard of aristocratic power 
 as I do, is yet able to write as follows : " In one respect the House of 
 Lords fails, and has always failed, to reflect the powers of the nation. 
 The new men who have made their way into it have always been men 
 of action rather than men of thought. . . . The robes of the judge, the 
 wealth of the financier, the pomp and circumstance which attend the 
 victorious general strike more deeply into the popular imagination than 
 the untiring industry, the silent meditation, and the unseen flash of 
 intellect, which brings into being things that the world has never seen 
 before." 
 
 ' This list, with three or four omissions and several additions, is taken 
 from John Hampden's Ihe Aristocracy of England, p. 302. 
 
 408 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 PRESENT TITLE 
 
 MAN ENNOBLED 
 
 LEGAL POST 
 
 1693 
 
 1695 
 
 I69I 
 
 I7I4 
 1784 
 
 179s 
 
 1765 
 1789 
 1793 
 
 1767 
 1799 
 1782 
 
 1783 
 1776 
 1788 
 1768 
 1765 
 I7IS 
 
 1776 
 
 I7I5 
 
 1783 
 I78Q 
 
 17+4 
 1778 
 
 «743 
 1823 
 1830 
 1841 
 1836 
 
 1834 
 1802 
 
 1806 
 1824 
 
 Earl of Guildford 
 
 Earl of Lisburn . 
 
 Earl of Stair . . 
 
 Earl of Aylesford . 
 Baron Alvanley . 
 
 Vise. Avonmore . 
 
 Marq. of Camden 
 Earl of Clare . 
 Earl of Clonmell . 
 
 Earl Cowper . . 
 Earl Eldon . . 
 Baron Grantley . 
 Earl of Hardwick . 
 Earl of Harrowby 
 Baron Kenyon 
 Baron LifFord . 
 Earl of Lovelace . 
 Earl of Macclesfield 
 
 Earl of Mansfield . 
 
 Vise. Middleton . 
 Earl of Roden . . 
 Earl of Roslyn 
 Lord Talbot . . 
 Baron Thurlow . 
 Baron Walsingham 
 Earl of Abinger . 
 Baron Brougham . 
 Baron Campbell . 
 Baron Cottenham . 
 Baron Denman 
 Earl of Ellen- 
 borough 
 Baron Erskine . 
 Baron Gifford . . 
 
 Edward Nash 
 
 John Vaughan . 
 
 James Dalrymple 
 
 Heneage Finch . 
 Richard Pepper 
 
 Arden 
 Barry Yelverton . 
 
 John Pratt . . 
 John Fitzgibbon . 
 John Scott . . 
 
 William Cowper 
 John Scott . . 
 Fletcher Norton . 
 Philip Yorke . . 
 Dudley Rider 
 Lloyd Kenyon . 
 James Hewitt 
 Peter King . . 
 Thomas Parker . 
 
 William Murray . 
 
 Allan Brodrick . 
 Robert Jocelyn . 
 Alex. Wedderburn 
 Charles Talbot . 
 Edward Thurlow 
 Wil. Walsingham 
 James Scarlet . . 
 Henry Brougham 
 John Campbell . 
 Charles C. Pepys 
 Thomas Denman 
 Edward Law . . 
 
 Thomas Erskine . 
 Robert GiiFord . 
 
 409 
 
 Chancellor of Court of 
 Augmentations 
 
 Lord Chief Justice Com- 
 mon Pleas, Ireland 
 
 President of Court of 
 Session 
 
 Attorney General 
 
 Ld. Ch. Just. Com. Pleas 
 
 Ld.Ch.Bn.of Exchequer, 
 
 Ireland 
 Ld.Ch. Jus. Com. Pleas 
 Lord Chancellor 
 Ld. Ch. Jus. King's 
 
 Bench, Ireland 
 Lord Chancellor 
 Ch. Jus. Com. Pleas 
 Ch. Jus. in Eyre 
 Ch. Jus. King's Bench 
 Ch. Jus. King's Bench 
 Ch. Jus. King's Bench 
 Ld. Chancellor, Ireland 
 Ld. Ch. Jus. Com. Pleas 
 Lord Chief Justice of 
 
 Queen's Bench 
 Lord Chief Justice ot 
 
 King's Bench 
 Ld. Chancellor, Ireland 
 Ld. Chancellor, Ireland 
 Ch. Jus. Com. Pleas 
 Lord Chancellor 
 Lord Chancellor 
 Ch. Jus. Com. Pleas 
 Ld. Ch. Bn. of Exchequer 
 Lord Chancellor 
 Lord Chancellor 
 Lord Chancellor 
 Ch. Jus. King's Bench 
 Ch. Jus. King's Bench 
 
 Lord Chancellor 
 
 Ld. Ch. Jus. Com. Pleas 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 DATt 
 
 PRESENT TITLE 
 
 MAN ENNOBLED 
 
 LEGAL POST 
 
 I83I 
 
 Vise. Guillemore . 
 
 Standish O'Grady 
 
 Lord Chief Justice, 
 Exchequer, Ireland 
 
 I8I9 
 
 Earl of Hadding- 
 ton 
 Baron Langdale . 
 
 Thos.Haddington 
 
 Lord Advocate, Scotland 
 
 1836 
 
 Henry Bickersteth 
 
 Master of the Rolls 
 
 I8OZ 
 
 Vise. Melville . . 
 
 Henry Dundas . 
 
 Ld. Chancellor, Scotland 
 
 1800 
 
 Earl of Norbury . 
 
 John Toler . . 
 
 Lord Justiqe Common 
 Pleas, Ireland 
 
 1827 
 
 Baron Plunket . . 
 
 William Conyng- 
 
 Lord Chancellor, Ire- 
 
 
 
 ham Plunket 
 
 land 
 
 1802 
 
 Baron Redesdale . 
 
 John Milford 
 
 Ld. Chancellor, Ireland 
 
 1827 
 
 Baron Tenterden . 
 
 Charles Abbott . 
 
 Lord Chief Justice, 
 King's Bench 
 
 1838 
 
 Marquis of Win- 
 chester 
 
 William Paulet . 
 
 Lord Chancellor 
 
 1829 
 
 Baron Wynford . 
 
 Wm. Draper Best 
 
 Ch. Jus. Com. Pleas 
 
 1885 
 
 Lord Monkswell . 
 
 Robert Collier . 
 
 Judge 
 
 1897 
 
 Lord Ludlow . . 
 
 H. Lopes . •. . 
 
 Judge 
 
 I9IO 
 
 Lord Robson (Life 
 
 Peer) 
 Lord Mersey . . 
 
 William Robson . 
 
 Attorney General 
 
 I9IO 
 
 John Bigham . . 
 
 Judge 
 
 1909 
 
 Lord Gorell . . 
 
 John Barnes . . 
 
 Judge 
 
 188; 
 
 Lord Ashbourne . 
 
 Edward Gibson . 
 
 Ld. Chancellor, Ireland 
 
 189s 
 
 Lord Rathmore . 
 
 David Plunket . 
 
 Lawyer 
 
 I9II 
 
 Lord Haldane . . 
 
 Richard Haldane 
 
 Lawyer 
 
 1906 
 
 Lord Loreburn 
 
 Robert Reid . . 
 
 Lord Chancellor 
 
 1905 
 
 Lord Atkinson 
 
 John Atkinson . 
 
 Attorney General, Ire- 
 
 
 (Life Peer) 
 
 
 land 
 
 I9I2 
 
 Lord Moulton 
 
 John Fletcher 
 Moulton 
 
 Judge 
 
 1915 
 
 Lord Wrenbury . 
 
 Henry Buckley . 
 
 Judge 
 
 It is preposterous to inveigh against the principle of 
 aristocracy itself, or against the principle of hereditary 
 rulership, when the body of aristocrats in the country has 
 been constantly swelled by selections of this sort; and the 
 length of the lists could be doubled in the case of purely 
 business men who have become peers. 
 
 With wealth or political influence as the chief qualifica- 
 tions, what could be expected of the men who forced 
 
 410 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 themselves into the aristocratic ruling body? The only 
 essential conditions of the aristocrat which they possessed 
 were leisure and the best possible circumstances for rearing 
 and maintaining an excellent physique. But to suppose 
 that these conditions are sufficient is to misunderstand the 
 whole question. 
 
 Nor need it be supposed that the creations from the 
 ranks of capitalism after 1830 were, on the whole, any 
 more judicious or far-sighted, or that they were made with 
 a deeper understanding of true rulership than those made 
 before that time. ' 
 
 Speaking of the bulk of them, Lecky says : " Great 
 wealth, even though it be accompanied by no kind of real 
 distinction, especially if it be united with a steady vote 
 in the House of Commons, has been the strongest claim; 
 and, next to wealth, great connections. Probably a large 
 majority of those who have of late years risen to the 
 peerage are men whose names conveyed no idea of any 
 kind to the great body of the English people." ^ 
 
 In other words, the test of great material success has 
 been the most general test employed in the selection of 
 the peerage. But such a test would, in itself, have excluded 
 some of the greatest men the world has ever seen ! 
 
 How could any great institution survive such a process 
 of recruitment for any length of time.? 
 
 " The worst aspect of plutocracy," says Lecky, " is the 
 social and political influence of dishonestly acquired wealth. 
 While the worst fields of patronage and professional life 
 have been greatly purified during the present century 
 [nineteenth], the conditions of modern enterprise in the 
 chief European countries, and still more in the United 
 States, give much scope for kinds of speculation and 
 financing which no honest man would pursue, and by 
 which, in many conspicuous instances, colossal fortunes 
 have been acquired. It is an evil omen for the future of 
 a nation when men who hiave acquired such fortunes force 
 their way into great social positions, and become the 
 ^ Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 354. 
 411 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 objects of admiration, adulation and imitation. One of 
 the first duties, and one of the chief uses of courts and 
 aristocracies is to guard the higher walks of society from 
 this imptire contact ; and when courts and aristocracies 
 betray their trust, and themselves bow before the golden 
 idol, the period of their own downfall is not far distant." ^ 
 
 I would not suggest for one instant that the bulk of 
 the peerages connected with trade are of the nature alluded 
 to above; but that a few of them must be is unquestioned. 
 My particvilar point, however, is that success in trade, like 
 success at law, is absolutely no criterion of rtder quality 
 or of taste; on the contrary, it is more often the proof 
 of the reverse of these two possessions. An aristocracy 
 recruited from successful men of this sort alone would 
 require ages and ages of training and culture and careful 
 discipline to approach even approximately close to " the 
 best." 
 
 Take the following list of peers either connected with 
 trade or created either directly or indirectly through success 
 in trade — 
 
 The Duke of Leeds, the Earl of Craven, the Earl of 
 Radnor, the Earl of Feversham, Lord Ashburton, Lord 
 Carrington, Lord Overstone, Lord Wolverton, Lord 
 Belper, Lord Rendel, Lord Sanderson, Lord Tweedmouth, 
 Lord Winterstoke, Lord Pirrie, Lord Strathcona, Lord 
 Blyth, Lord Mountstephen, Lord Masham, Lord Arm- 
 strong, Lord Brassey, Lord Wimborne, Lord Dewar, 
 Lord Rothschild, Lord Avebury, Lord Revelstoke, Lord 
 Holdeh, Lord Wandsworth, Lord Burton, Lord Hindlip, 
 Lord Iveagh, Lord Ardilaun, Lord Pauncefote, Lord 
 Glantawe, Lord Cowdray, Lord Furness, Lord Michel- 
 ham, Lord Addington, Lord Aberconway, Lord Airedale, 
 Lord Aldenham, Lord AJlerton, Lord Ashton, Lord 
 Devonport, Lord HoUenden, Lord Inchcape, Lord Mer- 
 thyr, Lord Swaythling, Lord Whitburgh, Lord Biddulph, 
 Lord Faber, Lord Emmott, Lord HiUingdon, Lord Inver- 
 clyde. Lord Joicey, Lord Peckover, Lord Pontypridd, 
 ' Democracy and Lihdrty, Vol. I, p. 329. 
 412 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 Lord Rotherham, Lord Southwark, Lord Sumner and 
 Lord Armitstead. 
 
 Sixty in all, most of them quite recent creations, and 
 the list by no means complete! Of these sixty peers, 
 twenty-one are connected with the banking business, five 
 are connected with the wine and beer trades, four are con- 
 nected with railways, three are connected with shipping, 
 six are merchants, six are connected with iron, steel and 
 engineering works, one was a tobacco magnate, and the 
 remainder are either manufacturers, founders of big 
 industries, or company directors. 
 
 Writing in 1881, Mr. T. Fielding, as a friend of the 
 Upper Legislative Chamber, said f "I should say that 
 fully one-haJf of the peerage is directly interested in 
 trade." ^ Now only about half-a-dozen of the peerages 
 enumerated above were in existence in 188 1; so that 
 we can fairly assume that the proportion suggested by 
 Mr. T. Fielding still holds good. 
 
 To the reader who has followed the arguments in this 
 book at all closely no comment on the above facts will be 
 necessary. 
 
 Just as a participator in a law-suit cannot at the same 
 time be the judge or a member of the jury, so is it un- 
 reasonable to expect these men of action, these people 
 immersed in the activities of a particular department of 
 life, to take such an intelligent, broad and general view 
 of life as to enable them to rule a living concern like a 
 great nation with wisdom and with understanding. And 
 this objection to them is quite distinct from the funda- 
 mental objection arising out of my thesis, which consists 
 of a flat denial of the assumption that because they have 
 been successful in the struggle for existence in present 
 conditions, that they must necessarily be spokesmen of 
 the taste and judgment of flourishing life. 
 
 Thus even if, at the sta,rt — say in 1688 — the odd 150 
 peers had aU been true aristocrats, which they were not,'' 
 
 ^ See Tke House of Lords, p. 34. 
 
 ^ In The Rise of Great Families Burke makes an interesting comment 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 the mode of selecting recruits for the House of Lords 
 from that time to this has been so utterly devoid of true 
 insight that they would have struggled in vain against 
 the overwhelming numbers of their inferiors in the Upper 
 Chamber. 
 
 Nobody realises better than I do how great is the need 
 of refreshing aristocratic stock from tinie to time; but 
 while it is not necessary to do it nearly so often as it has 
 been done in England, it is also most essential that only 
 those members of the nation should be selected who show 
 at least some ruler quality — ^who show some affinity, that 
 is to say, to the aristocrat himself. 
 
 The ruling order in Rome, Venice, Bern and Niirnberg, 
 as Freeman points out,^ received new families within their 
 pale; but they did so by their own act. Not the struggle 
 for existence, but the patriarch Jacob, is the best judge 
 of what constitutes a man who knows. The struggle for 
 existence may force to the top a man who knows only 
 how to fill his own pocket; but not one who necessarily 
 knows things, knows how to discriminate good from bad, 
 healthy from unhealthy, good taste from bad taste. 
 
 It is suicidal for any true aristocracy to allow its ranks 
 to be fiUed by these forced plants, sprung from the artificial 
 manure of modern conditions; it is even suicidal for 
 them to allow their ranks to be filled at all at any time, 
 save by their own choice and the exercise of their own 
 discrimination.'' 
 
 on the constitution of at least a portion of the peerage after the Grand 
 Rebellion. He says (p. 42) : " The Civil War ruined many a Cavalier 
 and transferred his lands to a rich merchant or a successful lawyer, and 
 then the new proprietor was enabled to take a foremost place in his 
 county, possibly to obtain its representation and in due course to reach 
 the Upper House." 
 
 * Comparative Politics, p. 270. 
 
 ^ In fairness to the nobles in the House of Lords at the beginning of 
 the eighteenth century, it should be noted here that they did show a 
 strong dislike of the principle which made it possible for their ranks to 
 be swelled inordinately by means of the Crown's unrestricted right to 
 create peers, and in 1719 Stanhope and Sunderland accordingly recom- 
 
 414 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 Again, in this respect the aristocratic principle cannot 
 be blamed for the incompetence or crude egotism of the 
 English peerage. For what with the corruption of the 
 Georgian epoch, and the need of rewarding political friends 
 and assistants in the Victorian era, large contingents have 
 been drafted up to the Lords, without that body having 
 been allowed a word of choice in the matter, and without 
 their having even been asked for advice. 
 
 " When a patriciate has risen," says Freeman, " it seems 
 essential to its being that no new members can be admitted 
 to the body except by its own act." ^ 
 
 Certainly it is essential. But this is one of the essential 
 rules that has been broken again and again by our system 
 in England. 
 
 Aristocracy means essentially power of the best — power 
 of the best for good; because the true aristocrat can achieve 
 permanence for his order and his inferiors only by being a 
 power for good. 
 
 But power is not a possession which, once it is estab- 
 lished, can last for ever, without nurture or repair. On 
 the contrary, to endure it must be constantly vigilant, 
 constantly on the alert, continually seeking out its like in 
 the nation and drawing it into its own body. To give 
 aristocratic power even relative permanence, therefore, it 
 must be so organised as to be able to draw all the national 
 manifestations of its like into its own body. Wherever 
 men of profound ideas, men of thought, men of taste, men 
 of good quality in the matter of living and appearance are 
 to be found, there the vigilant eye of a powerful aristocracy 
 should seek them out, and recognise in them the spawn, 
 the reserve, the only refreshment of its strength. From 
 their whole number, but the very smallest proportion 
 
 mended to the King the surrender of that right. The King eagerly 
 accepted the proposal, but the Bills formed for the purpose of 
 making it law all had to be dropped, and the last one was rejected 
 by the Commons, under the leadership of Walpole, by a majority 
 of 92. 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 270. 
 
 415 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 might iiltimately be taken; at least, however, they would 
 constitute the best ^spirants for the position of the best 
 that could be found. The mere fact that so many essen- 
 tially great rulers, such as Pericles, Caesar, Charles I, 
 Napoleon, have shown fastidious taste in the very minutest 
 concerns of daily life, and that so many artists, such as 
 Diognetus, Lamachus, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, have 
 shown ruler qualities of no small order, ought to have 
 been sufficient to put mankind on the right scent here, 
 and to prevent mere material success from being the sole 
 criterion of excellence. 
 
 For in the end it is taste, it is proper ideas, it is healthy 
 standpoints that conquer and prevail. And if men of 
 taste, of proper ideas and of healthy standpoints are 
 constantly overlooked, the power that overlooks them 
 must decline, and must ultimately fall a victim to all 
 powerful hostile elements, however bad and tasteless 
 these may be. 
 
 As I said at the beginning of Chapter II of this book, 
 walk through Arundel Castle or Goodwood on any after- 
 noon in the summer; notice the pictures on the walls, 
 especially when they are modern pictures — ^for these alone 
 reveal the actual taste of their owner — ^notice the orna- 
 ments and the decorations, the books and the magazines, 
 and then ask yovirself whether the Duke of Norfolk or the 
 Duke of Richmond and Gordon has that vigilant and 
 discerning eye which can discover and appropriate aris- 
 tocratic quality wherever it is to be found down below in 
 the unennobled strata of the nation.^ 
 
 Of course, neither of them has it. Neither of them has 
 
 1 See The Decline of Aristocracy, by Arthur Ponsonby, p. 139 : "The 
 old aristocracy were sometimes regarded as patrons of literature, but this 
 is a function their successors have entirely abandoned. Theirs would 
 be the last opinion to be consulted on literary matters. Any one must 
 be struck in visiting an old country house to see on the library shelves a 
 full collection of eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature — 
 Clarendon, Robertson, Gibbon, Scott, Byron, Bewick, Thackeray ; but 
 on the table for the daily consumption of the present owners, magazines, 
 vulgar weekly periodicals, and a few lending library novels." 
 
 416 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 a notion of what taste actually means, and how unlimited 
 is the extent of its range. 
 
 And, being devoid of taste themselves, they are naturally 
 unable even to supply the lack of this quality in their 
 household by a careful selection made outside it. And 
 they are, therefore, powerless. 
 
 Apart from their property, they are powerless. Devoid 
 of taste^ judgment and ideas, they have no other weapon 
 than their wealth. But this weapon alone is naturally 
 utterly inadequate to-day; for all capitalists can wield it 
 with equal force, and perhaps with less scrupulosity than 
 these noble gentlemen. 
 
 It is for this reason that the Lords were so helpless 
 in 1911,^ and for this reason, too, will they continue to 
 be helpless. 
 
 For even if they were unable actually to enlist into 
 their own ranks whatever elements of aristocratic spirit 
 they might find in the nation, at least they ought to Jhave 
 got sUch elements into their service, exploited them or 
 used them in some way — at all events in order to 
 strengthen their position and to maintain it. 
 
 Wherever culture shows its head, wherever particular 
 ability manifests itself, wherever there is seen a marked 
 power to order, to select the right and reject the wrong, 
 there the agents of the aristocracy or they themselves 
 ought to be present to promote it, to help it, and thus to 
 maJce it theirs. 
 
 Knowing the power of proper ideas; knowing that all 
 that characterises our present condition is the creation of 
 a certain set of ideas which might have been stjfled, 
 uprooted, cast aside and extirpated at the moment of their 
 inception; and knowing that if another order is to be 
 created, that order will likewise be the outcome of a new 
 set of ideas, the vigilant eye of the aristocrat ought to be 
 
 ^ See The Decline of Aristocracy, p. 135: " Even in fighting the 
 battle to retain their ascendancy the nobility and aristocracy showed 
 themselves as a body with very few individual exceptions poorly 
 equipped intellectually, blind, and ill-informed." 
 EB 4J7 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 constandy watching not only for men of right ideas, but, 
 what is still more important, for men who by their physical 
 constitution cannot help having right ideas. 
 
 At least they ought to try to understand such men, to 
 comprehend them; for that is equivalent to comprising 
 or possessing them. In this, however, their very self- 
 preservative instinct has failed them. Not only have the 
 aristocrats omitted to select the best from the nation for 
 themselves, but they have also omitted to watch for it or 
 to understand it. 
 
 No power, however well established, could have lasted 
 under such circumstances. As Machiavelli says : "A 
 Prince ought to show himself a patron of ability, and 
 to honour the proficient in every art." ^ Why.? Not 
 because it is nice to do so; not' because it is benevolent, 
 or philanthropic, or generous to do so ! Machiavelli was 
 not a sentimentalist! But because it is good policy to 
 do so; because it is expedient, sound, essential, indispen- 
 sable to do so. Because men of ability and men proficient 
 in art possess some of the most essential qualities of the 
 aristocrat, and are the only kindred spirits to the aristocrats 
 in the whole of a nation. 
 
 All this in later times they have omitted to do; for, ever 
 since Samuel Johnson's terrible rebuke to one of their 
 order, things have grown, if anything, worse than they 
 were before. 
 
 It will be remembered that the Earl of Chesterfield 
 had undertaken to assist Samuel Johnson in the produc- 
 tion of his famous dictionary, and had appointed himself 
 Johnson's literary patron. For many years, however — 
 that is, while there still existed some element of doubt 
 concerning the success of the enterprise — ^Johnson appealed 
 to the nobleman in vain for assistance, and could not even 
 obtain an audience from him when he called. Finally, 
 however, when the dictionary appeared, the Earl of 
 Chesterfield had the impudence to pose not only as its 
 author's impresario, but also as his protector. 
 1 Tie Prince, Chapter VII, 
 418 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 The words of Johnson's fine ironical rebuke are worth 
 quoting, and I shall give them as a concrete example of 
 that growing breach between aristocracy and culture, 
 the first signs of which were visible in the eighteenth 
 century — 
 
 " Seven years, my Lord, have now passed, since I 
 waited in your outward" rooms, and was repulsed from 
 your door; during which time I have been pushing on 
 my work through difficvilties of which it is useless to 
 complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of 
 publication, without one act of assistance, one word of 
 encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment 
 I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before. . . . 
 
 " Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with uncon- 
 cern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when 
 he has reached the ground, encumbers him with help,'' 
 The notice which you have been pleased to take of my 
 labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been 
 delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I 
 am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known and 
 do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity, not 
 to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, 
 or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me 
 as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled 
 me to do for myself. 
 
 " Having carried on my work thus far with so little 
 obligation to any favour of learning, I shall not be dis- 
 appointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, 
 with less; for I have long awakened from that dream of 
 hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much 
 exaltation, my Lord, 
 
 " Your Lordship's most humble, 
 
 " most obedient servant, 
 
 " Samuel Johnson." * 
 
 This wonderful letter, written by a man of culture to 
 a man of the Earl of Chesterfield's stamp — ^for the Earl 
 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson (February 7, 1775). 
 419 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 of Chesterfield was not an upstart peer of Georgian 
 creation — shows how matters stood even as early as the 
 year 1775. And he who imagines that things have im- 
 proved rather than deteriorated since that time is a fan- 
 tastic dreamer. Even Disraeli was able to write in 1 845 : 
 "There is no longer in fact an aristocracy in England, 
 for the superiority of the animal man is an essential quality 
 of aristocracy. But that it once existed, any collection of 
 portraits from the sixteenth century will show." * 
 
 Now, to sum up this section of the chapter, I think 
 I have shown with sufficient detail that: (i) An Aris- 
 tocracy ought itself to select the new families it allows to 
 become part of its exalted body, and it ought to do so 
 with a very definite standard of what constitutes aristo- 
 cratic ability. To omit to dp this is to court disaster. 
 The very failure of the aristocracy of England ought to 
 be sufficient to prove that the kind of people that have 
 as a rule been elevated to the peerage have not possessed 
 the proper qualifications for the position. (2) An Aris- 
 tocracy ought to be vigilant and alert, and ought to be 
 able and eager to understand, to use and to possess all 
 those elements of ability and of exceptional proficiency 
 among the population in which taste, good judgment and 
 a certain instinctive knowledge of good and evil are 
 inherent. (3) An Aristocracy ought to be a patron of 
 culture and of idfcas — not only because there is charm in 
 these things, but also because upon a right notion of 
 culture alone, and upon right and proper ideas concerning 
 humanity and the world, can a good natural administration 
 be founded. 
 
 There remain now only two more points to be eluci- 
 dated : the question of education an4 that of marriage. 
 
 Dealing with the question of education first, it must 
 
 be obvious that if an aristocracy is aiming at permanence 
 
 and at the best for the nation, the national system of 
 
 education ought to be its most important weapon of 
 
 1 Sybil (Longmans, Green & Co., 1 899), p. i z. 
 
 420 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 selection. There is no better pretext for a national 
 organisation which is able to bring all the elements of 
 the nation under the vigilant eye of an aristocracy's agents 
 than the pretext of educatioh. 
 
 Under the plea of educating the people, you get the 
 raw material of the whole nation under your eye, and you 
 get them at a time when they are in the most malleable 
 condition, when they have not yet become perfectly 
 moulded to their inferior surroundings, and when, if you 
 see promise in them, exceptional members of the com- 
 munity can be withdrawn from their environment and 
 helped to better things. 
 
 This process of selection would naturally have to be 
 conducted by men, not necessarily of scholastic learning, 
 but by men fitted to judge men — and of these there should 
 always be a plentiful supply not only among the aristocrats 
 themselves, but among their immediate entourage and 
 agents — and they should select only according to a certain 
 standard. 
 
 The fact that the huge machinery of our Educational 
 Department of Government has not yet been used as a 
 selective system for the best purposes of State, shows how 
 utterly careless and ignorant the rulers of this country 
 have been of the true and most exalted uses of such a 
 system. 
 
 For in so far as a great nation is concerned, it is not 
 nearly so essential that everybody should reach the fifth 
 or sixth standard in school as that those who are really 
 able should be chosen out from among the rest. 
 
 The rest might be eliminated from the schools after 
 passing the second standard, and good rather than harm 
 would be the result. This was the system, of course, in 
 Egypt, and it still remains the system in China, where not 
 examinations alone, but the personal judgment of the 
 teacher is the first and chief instrument of selection, and 
 very often the fifst starting-point on a distinguished 
 official career. 
 
 For such a judgment to be sound, however, and reliable, 
 
 421 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 not only must the teacher be a knower of men, but his 
 tuition must be a personal affair, during which he can 
 come into contact daily with his pupil and even with his 
 pupil's relatives. This is precisely what happens in China. 
 There is no class teaching in Chinese schools, only personal 
 tuition; and according as to whether the teacher recognises 
 possibilities or not in his pupil, so is he able distinctly to 
 encourage or discourage any exalted ambition which the 
 pupil himself or his parents may cherish for the career of 
 the scholar. 
 
 Thus utterly hopeless cases are turned away at an early 
 age, freed, before they have wasted years of their life 
 in an occupation which could profit them nothing; while 
 more promising cases are encouraged to ascend step by 
 step to the highest position in the state — an accomplish- 
 ment often witnessed in China, just as it was witnessed in 
 ancient Egypt." ^ 
 
 By this means a huge educational organisation may serve 
 as a most perfect means of selection in a nation; and when 
 this selection is carried on under the guidance of a wise 
 aristocracy, and for its high purposes, it naturally contri- 
 butes very materially indeed, as it did in Egypt, and as 
 it does in China, to the permanence of the ruling body. 
 Incidentally it also serves as an economiser of national 
 energy. For there are thousands of boys who are happier 
 and more useful, learning their business, agricultural or 
 industrial, at an early age, than sitting, long after they are 
 able to profit from it, at a school table or desk, learning 
 things in which they are not interested and which they 
 forget as soon as they have left school. And a discerning 
 eye could detect such bbys and release them from their 
 insufferable and unprofitable drudgery. 
 
 So much for the view which the aristocrat should take 
 of national education. As to what he should do in the 
 matter of educating his own offspring, this should be a 
 matter chiefly of the training of the will, of disciplining 
 the body and the mind, in the first place to exercise self- 
 ^ See Dr. Schmid, Geschichte der Eruehung, p. 173. 
 422 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 control and subsequently to control others. Education 
 was conceived by the great Kant himself primarily as a 
 matter of discipline and will-development/ and indeed, 
 this should be its chief aim. The acquisition of know- 
 ledge, which is made the principal feature to-day, is purely 
 secondary and subordinate. A man of wiU can learn any- 
 thing he wishes to know. A man full of knowledge with- 
 out will, although a common occurrence to-day, is fit only 
 for the scrap heap, and the sooner he gets there the better. 
 
 The training of the young aristocrat, therefore, provided 
 he be of the right sort, and a chip of the old block, should 
 be extremely severe; much more severe than it is at present, 
 and much more in the hands of his father than it is at 
 present; for, how can a learned plebeian teach anything 
 worth knowing beyond mere facts to a young aristocrat .■• 
 
 The whole of the present system of trusting almost 
 entirely to strangers to guide and to rear the youth of the 
 ruling classes under the plea of "educating" them is 
 utterly misguided. A wise father is his son's best educator, 
 and the finest men I have ever met have been their father's 
 creations. Anything a wise father cannot teach a boy is 
 simply not worth knowing; but when his father has taught 
 him all he knows, and the boy has watched him and found 
 him worth watching, he wiU have acquired a valuable basis 
 upon which he himself can build. Happy the boys whose 
 fathers understood the child as the chela/ 
 
 Strangers can and do give you the raw material of know- 
 ledge, but your interpretation, co-ordination, arrangement 
 and use of it depend upon what you are, what your father 
 is, how much of his wisdom you have incorporated, and 
 how he has trained your will. In the superior classes of 
 society to-day, however, the relationship between child and 
 parent is becoming ever more and more superficial and less 
 and less intimate.^ 
 
 1 See Ue3er PSdagogik (edit. Professor Willmann), p. 69. 
 
 2 See Arthur Ponsonby, op. cit., p. 172 : " Rich parents are tempted 
 more and more to use their money to withdraw their children more 
 and more from their own supervision." 
 
 423 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 This matter of training the will to-day is not taken half 
 seriously enough, particularly in the very class in which 
 long tradition combined with rigorous discipline, and the 
 strong will both impart, are the most essential things of all. 
 
 As Kant says : " A common error committed in the 
 education of men of exalted station consists in the fact that, 
 because they are destined to rule, their will is scarcely ever 
 thwarted even in their youth." ^ And Kant was writing 
 in the eighteenth century when some of the best traditions 
 of aristocratic rule and custoih were still accepted as law. 
 What would he say to-day ? What would he think of the 
 laxity and freedom now allowed in children.? His Pdda- 
 gogik, which in many ways is quite the most interesting 
 and most sdund little book ever written on the subject 
 of education, shows clearly enough hoW Radically he would 
 have condemned the educational system of the present day, 
 even in its application to the lowef and middle classes; 
 how much more radical, then, would his objectiohs have 
 been against the system of education prevailing in the 
 governing caste ! 
 
 With regard to the matter of marriage; the solemnity 
 of thfe matrimonial state has been so much degraded and 
 perverted by the notion of the pursuit of happiness, that 
 i^:s duties and the seriousness with which one should enter 
 it have been forced to take an entirely subordinate position. 
 The question asked concerning a newly married couple, 
 nowadays, is not "Are they doing their duty properly to 
 each otherj to themselves, to their class and to the institu- 
 tion of matrimony ? " but " Are they happy ? " 
 
 The Hedonistic view of life, backed by the Puritan 
 deprecation of any enjoyment of the bodily lusts outside 
 the married state, throws all the bufden of " happiness " 
 upon the matrimonial tie, with the result that men feel 
 justified not only in seeking happiness alone in marriage 
 — which is of course a stupid illusion in ninety-nine cases 
 
 1 " Dieses ist em geWdknlkker Tehkr bet der Erzlehmg der Grossen, dass 
 man ihnen, mil sie zum Hensehen bestimmt sind^ auch in der Jugend nie 
 eigentlich mdersteht.^'-^Q-p. cit., p. 62. 
 
 424 
 
THE ARISTOCRAT IN PRACTICE 
 
 out of a hundred — but also in sacrificing real and solemn 
 duties to themselves, to their class and to their children if 
 the promise of happiness seems to be greater in the 
 direction of a breach of such duties, than in the direction 
 of their observance. 
 
 To the man who knows that the matrimonial state is 
 simply the most satisfactory solution of the problem of 
 human propagation within an orderly community, and that 
 it will not necessarily bring him any more joys than his 
 single life has done, but only add to his responsibilities, 
 there is something solemn and serious about this choosing 
 of a mate, and all the consequences it involves, which is 
 incompatible with the frivolous notion of " seeking hap- 
 piness." Such a man, therefore, sacrifices no duty, either 
 to his class, to himself or to his children, for what he knows 
 to be a mere romantic and stupid will-o'-the-wisp. And 
 although he does not actually court unhappiness when he 
 marries, but regards matrimony as the normal state for an 
 adult of a certain iage, and monogamy as the most satis- 
 factory kind of sex arrangement, because it is the only 
 kind in which character can be built up and preserved with 
 any certainty; he approaches the state with a feeling of 
 grave and solemn serenity which is quite foreign to the 
 modern feverish and purely romantic pursuit of "hap- 
 piness," which so often deservedly ends in total disaster. 
 
 There can be no doubt, however, that it is not the middle 
 and lower classes alone who have become infected with this 
 Puritanical and Romantic view of marriage, as indissolubly 
 associated with the pursuit of happiness; and one of the 
 saddest things to be observed among our governing classes 
 is the frivolity with which again and again they sacrifice 
 their duty to their class and their duty to their children by 
 choosing a wife from a lower sphere whom they imagine 
 will bring them " happiness." 
 
 Instead of choosing their like — which as I have already 
 shown is essential to the building up or the preservation of 
 character in a family — they very dften choose not only their 
 opposites, but actually their inferiors; and they have been 
 
 425 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 doing this for so long that we have ceased to wonder at it; 
 just as we have ceased to wonder at the ugliness of our 
 big cities, the vulgarity of their display and the sickness of 
 their inhabitants. 
 
 No aristocracy that is able to behave in this way and 
 that does behave in this way, can hope for anything better 
 than dissolution, decadence and extinction. For, as I have 
 pointed out before, and here repeat with the utmost em- 
 phasis : will-power, virtue and superior character in general, 
 are not sent down from the clouds; they are not accidental 
 or miraculous phenomena; they are creations of our own 
 deeds, of our own strivings, and of our own matings; and 
 it is not only romantic, it is not only stupid, it is positively 
 dangerous, foolhardy and madly intrepid, deliberately to 
 scout the means by which they are produced and preserved. 
 
 And now, glancing back upon what has been said, espe- 
 cially as regards its application to the discredited position 
 in which our aristocracy now finds itself, what is the con- 
 clusion we are compelled to draw from the various facts 
 adduced.? What is the conclusion at which in simple 
 fairness we must arrive, assuming that the principle of 
 Aristocracy itself has been all this while in the dock 
 before us.? 
 
 Is it not obvious, is it not perfectly plain, that if we 
 condemn and sentence in this case, we shall be subjecting 
 the prisoner in the dock to a most appalling miscarriage 
 of justice .'' For, what have the facts I have adduced, as 
 advocate for the defence, clearly shown ? That the down- 
 fall of aristocracies has not occurred in a struggle between 
 the pure principle of aristocracy and another principle, 
 superior and more perfect than the former; that it is not 
 the outcome of a single combat between, say, the aristo- 
 cratic principle and the democratic, or plutocratic, or 
 socialistic; but that it is the result of a bitter and cruel war 
 between the institution of Aristocracy itself, as conceived 
 and founded by the best of all nations, and the members 
 of that institution who have been totally unworthy of their 
 
 426 
 
THE ARlSTOCRAt IN PRACTICE 
 
 membership, and who, at least in England for the last two 
 centuries, have not even attempted to abide by the essential 
 rules governing their body. In a word, if the principle 
 of aristocracy, which is the principle of life, and the only 
 rational, healthy, practicable and profound solution of the 
 problem of government, seems to have suffered a momen- 
 tary defeat, a momentary reverse, this has not occurred in 
 a hand-to-hand fight with a superior solution of the 
 problem but in a duel which, for all ordinary purposes, may 
 well be entitled Aristocracy versus the Aristocrats. 
 
 427 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 WHAT IS CULTURE? 
 
 " Now I understand why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors 
 so carefully behind us. It is that we may not remember our first and 
 most beautiful wooings. Were this not so, our world would be without 
 inhabitants in a hundred years." — Rudyard Kipling : The Finest Story in 
 the World. 
 
 Once to have met, if only for a short minute, some one 
 rare and exceptional, and to have seen him vanish irre- 
 vocably from our side while the sunshine of his presence 
 still glowed upon us — this is an experience Which, to a 
 person gifted with a fine taste and a good memory in these 
 things, must be the cause of lifelong regret. Such regret 
 may diminish with time; it may cease from being con- 
 stantly with us; it may tend to return at ever more distant 
 intervals; but on those occasions when it does return, when 
 the name of that rare person is recalled but for one instant 
 it never fails to revive that feeling of profound sadness 
 which was ours at the time of the original loss. 
 
 If this is so of one rare man we may have met in the 
 past, to how much greater an extent is it not so of oUr 
 own rare moments or moods ! 
 
 Last night suppose that you had a dream! a dream in 
 which a feeling so rare, so prodigiously unusual and ex- 
 ceptional, filled your being, that you woke breathless with 
 surprise, all your nerves still thrilled and titillating from 
 the unutterable beauty of your experience, and you your- 
 self scarcely believing that your inner life possessed any- 
 thing so exquisitely strange and so wondrously precious. 
 The whole of to-day you have thought and thought, and 
 racked and ransacked your brain, but not a glimmer of 
 
 428 
 
WHAT IS CULTURE? 
 
 that incomparable feeling comes back to you. You know 
 you have had it; you know, therefore, that you are capable 
 of it, and you long either to have it again or at least to be 
 able to enshrine it for good in the jewel-house of your 
 memory. And yet your brain is powerless to recall it, and 
 responds to your untiring efforts, only as the limb of the 
 paralytic responds to his will. It seems to lie very far 
 away, not in your life, perhaps, but in a life extremely 
 remote, buried in ages across which your voice and your 
 will can no longer be heard or felt. ,The life of one of 
 your ancestors, belike, experienced this joy, t^e mere 
 reverberation of which across countless generations almost 
 shattered you in your sleep. 
 
 Looking around you, looking before you into the 
 future, nothing seems to promise to regenerate that feeling 
 within you, and yet you repeat to yourself half in despair, 
 half in anger : "It was in me, therefore I was capable of 
 it." And, just as you may often have wished that the rare 
 man yqu once chanced to meet might be a more common 
 occurrence in the world about you, so you ask yourself 
 now what you must do, what must be done, what change 
 must come over your world in order that the rare moment 
 you had in your dream may at least enter your waking 
 life and become a more constant feeling either with you 
 or with your children. 
 
 And this inquiry pursued with earnestness and courage, 
 and with rapt attention to that inner voice of yours, which 
 is the voice of your ancestors and of their triumphs, will 
 lead you surely and inevitably to a thought upon Cult;xre 
 which, in its vividness, wiU obliterate with one flash all the 
 meandering gossip, all the irresponsible chatter, all the 
 nonsense and pompous pedantry that you have ever heard 
 pronounced and ever seen written upon that sacred word. 
 Gradually it will dawn upon you that Culture is precisely 
 the object of your once desperate search; you will know 
 that it is that creation of man and subtle contrivance of 
 his genius, whereby he tries not only to perpetuate, not 
 only to enshrine, and not only to multiply his rare and 
 
 429 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 exceptional fellow-men and moments; but that it is also 
 the means whereby he guarantees a crop of these rare 
 and exceptional men and moments to the future and to 
 posterity. 
 
 And you will also realise that this same Culture, if it is 
 to be valuable, fruitful and glorious, must be something 
 very di£Ferent and apart from that idealistic, cowardly and 
 one-sided cultivation of mild, tame, temperate and negative 
 virtues, which is the practice and aspiration of all modern 
 society and civilisation. You will know that an emotion, 
 or a sensation, has not only quantity, but also quality, and 
 that its greatest quality to us feeling natures, and that 
 which seduces us most to the love of it, is undoubtedly its 
 depth. Deep feeling alone can give you that thrill, that 
 titillation of all your nerves, of which the rare and excep- 
 tional moment in your dream allowed you to taste. But 
 depth is not to be found in the mild, tame, tolerant and 
 shifting passions or virtues of modern times; consequently 
 there is less joy abroad and a weaker love of life. Only on 
 deep passions and on deep virtues will you therefore wish 
 to base the Culture which is to enshrine your rare men and 
 moments. But you will not hesitate to see, of course, that 
 this love of depth, this enthusiastic rearing of fierce and 
 positive virtues and passions, involves the condonation 
 of much which is not always compatible with peace and 
 with a humdrum existence of back-parlour comfort and 
 propriety. You will know that deep positive virtues, if 
 thwarted, if checked, show the same violence in their 
 obverse manifestations as they do in their unthwarted and 
 unchecked progress. Nevertheless, you are no longer 
 idealistic, you, who have suffered from the irrevocable loss 
 of a rare and exceptional feeling, cannot afford to be 
 idealistic and romantic. You are prepared to face aU the 
 evil of your choice in manhood, provided you get what 
 you regard as the good. 
 
 Willy nilly you will have beauty back again; you will 
 have beauty a more constant quality in your external world 
 and in the world of your own emotions. And since you 
 
 430 
 
WHAT IS CULTURE? 
 
 want those rare moments again which depend upon posi- 
 tive virtues for their existence, your aim is to rear lofty 
 positive virtues. You see as plainly as if the fact were 
 written in unmistakable letters across your path, that all 
 one-sided breeding and rearing of squeamish ideals of what 
 a man and a woman should be, although it leads to smug 
 security and ease, is steadily eliminating all greatness and 
 all character from yoiir world of friends and companions. 
 Therefore you say, and with a full knowledge of the un- 
 doubted risks you run: "In Heaven's name let great 
 omnipotent desire and the great positive virtues it breeds, 
 be once again the aim and justification of Culture; for, 
 even if the recoil stroke of the pendulum bear some men 
 into a kind of perdition, the dire blackness of which even 
 the most adventurous and most intrepid of to-day could 
 not picture successfully, what matters it provided in its 
 upstroke the pendulum of life leads into ecstasies of which 
 no one, not even the best nowadays, can have a remote 
 inkling, save once, perhaps, in a rare and unrepeated dream, 
 which he is subsequently at an absolute loss to recall ? " 
 
 And, if you are in earnest about this matter; if you feel 
 that mankind, like yourself, will soon have no other alter- 
 native than to search with ever diminishing visual power, 
 hungrily, thirstingly, frantically, bravely, for the rich deep 
 beauties it once possessed, simply because, despite the fact 
 that they brought a profounder and cleaner sort of tragedy 
 in their train than present conditions do, they alone made 
 life possible and desirable; your next question will be: 
 What are the values, the particular moral code and table 
 of virtues and vices which are associated with these rich 
 and deep virtues.'' At what time in the history of man- 
 kind have they prevailed.'' How can they be made to 
 prevail again.? 
 
 And do not suppose that this is by any means either a 
 hopeless or a fantastic investigation. On the contrary, the 
 material for its accomplishment lies already to hand, all 
 ready garnered and stored safely away. It is even full of 
 the richest rewards for all those who are curious enough, 
 
 431 
 
A DEFENCE OF ARISTOCRACY 
 
 intrepid enough, desperate and sad enough, to undertake 
 it with energy and perseverance. But it demands two 
 qualities that are becoming and will continue to grow ever 
 more and more exceptional and rare as time goes on. I 
 refer to independence on the one hand, and to health on 
 the other : the independence of thought and of deed that 
 does not mind for a while at least incurring the suspicion 
 even of disreputability or dirt; and the health that knows 
 how — that cannot help knowing how — to digest or to 
 vomit up at the right time and in the nick of time. 
 
 Those who are young enough and brave enough will 
 understand what I mean. And it is to the young man that 
 I particularly address this treatise. Old men, or men of 
 middle age, already owe a debt of gratitude to their 
 opinions, however erroneous they may be; they already 
 feel that if they have travelled so far, it is to their opinions 
 and to their particular view of things that they owe the 
 successful accomplishment of the stages of the journey. 
 The young, however, have not yet any such bond of 
 gratitude fastening them to their particular views. If 
 these happen to be erroneous, therefore, they can abandon 
 them with more freedom aiid with less regret. That is 
 why it is to them that I make my appeal; and them in 
 conclusion whom I remind of Disraeli's fine and stirring 
 words : " We live in an age when to be young and to 
 be indifferent can no longer be synonymous. We must 
 prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future 
 are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of 
 the Nation are the trustees of Posterity." ^ 
 
 1 Sy6i/, p. 88. 
 
 433 
 
INDEX 
 
 Aaron : the founder of the here- 
 ditary priesthood of the Jews, 
 33?; his parentage, 339; the 
 child of incest, 342 
 
 Acquired Characteristics : 
 transmission of, discussed, 389- 
 401 
 
 Agriculture : taught by land- 
 owners in feudal times, 38 ; the 
 killing of, 44; the Grand Re- 
 bellion fight of, against capital- 
 ism, 50; the foundation of a 
 healthy people and a healthy 
 life, 58 ; provided the men who 
 won England's battles, 62 ; the 
 repeal of the Corn Laws the 
 defeat of, 63; the foundation 
 of a great Empire, 63; a 
 sweated industry in England, 
 64; killed by the Puritans, 
 226 ; swept away by trade and 
 industry, 230 
 
 Ale : old English, 207-223 ; as 
 drunk by the Egyptians, 207 ; 
 drunk by Queen Elizabeth, 
 210; and by children, 210; an 
 adequate supply of, insisted 
 upon in the qld days, 211 and 
 note; the true temperance 
 drink of the working classes, 
 211 ; set a bashful suitor wooing, 
 211; a spirit tonic, 212; its 
 superiority over all substitutes 
 introduced by the Puritans, 
 212; Puritans' tax on, 214; 
 adulterated with hops, 214-218 
 
 Alexander the Great : his fool- 
 ish encouragement of mixed 
 marriages, 306 
 
 Aliens : the evils resulting from 
 enormous alien population in 
 England, 91 and note 
 
 Altruism : imposition of taste 
 by voice of flourishing life, the 
 greatest act of, 247 ; a strong, 
 self-reliant man's consideration 
 for others the only valuable, 
 278 note 
 
 Amateurism : England the land 
 of, 87; Protestantism the re- 
 ligion of, 87; St. Paul the 
 Apostle of, 88; the English 
 doctrine of, corrupting the 
 whole world, 89 
 
 Animals : Society for the Pre- 
 vention of Cruelty to, founded 
 sixty years before the Society 
 for the Prevention of Cruelty 
 to Children, 53 note 
 
 Aquinas, St. Thomas : concedes 
 right of revolution to badly 
 ruled peoples, 14 
 
 Arabs : on the message of the 
 face and body, 12 note 
 
 Aristocracy : the principle of 
 life, 3, 5, 359; gives a meaning 
 to the work of the lower orders, 
 17 ; taste of the Venetian, 22, 
 367; Cobbett's behef in, 61; 
 true, extinct in England for 
 inany years past, ^5; super- 
 ficiality of democrat's attack on, 
 239; transvaluation of values 
 necessary for revival of, 261, 
 262 ; the people's assent to an, 
 that of a child to its mother, 
 264; the old aristocracy of 
 Europe hereditary, 330 note; 
 
 F F 
 
 433 
 
INDEX 
 
 still hope for aristocracy in 
 England, 353 ; true, not an aris- 
 tocracy of mere brains, 354; 
 present English, not that of the 
 best, 361 ; should not allow its 
 ranks to be filled indiscrimi- 
 nately, 414; should choose its 
 own new members, 415, 420; 
 should seek out its like, 415; 
 should seek out men of taste 
 and ability, 415, 420; should 
 be a patron of culture, 420; 
 education as a weapon of selec- 
 tion in the hands of an, 420, 
 421, 422 ; versus the Aristocrats, 
 427. Landed, see English 
 Aristocrats 
 Aristocrat : the true, a " lucky 
 stroke of Nature's dice," 5, 13, 
 24, 250; an ugly or repulsive, 
 a contradiction in terms, 13; 
 dependent on the industry of 
 the people, 18 ; undignified and 
 dangerous for him to act like 
 a mere plutocrat, 18; medita- 
 tion his duty, 18; can build a 
 permanent creation on a people 
 of good character, 23 ; the pro- 
 ducer by his rule, of Beauty, 
 Art, Will and Conscience, 27; 
 his sanctification of the menial 
 office, 29; the duty of the, to 
 guide and protect, 35; Cecil, 
 Strafford and Shaftesbury 
 types of the true, 240 ; the first 
 pre-requisite to a beneficent 
 aristocrat's rule the sympathe- 
 tic response of the people, 265 ; 
 produced by design, 295; the 
 nation destitute of aristocrats 
 perishes, 295 ; a work of human 
 art, 296; civilisation the work 
 of inborn aristocrats, 299; the 
 true, the highest bloom of a 
 nation's virtue, beauty and 
 will, 329; the beauty of the 
 true, 333; aristocrats should 
 
 discipline themselves, 363, 364, 
 369 ; should guard against Con- 
 tact with ill-gotten wealth, 412 ; 
 aristocrats should seek out 
 their like in a nation, 415 ; the 
 artist the nearest approach to 
 the, 416, 418; should be con- 
 stantly seeking men of right 
 ideas, 418; the education of 
 his offspring, 423 
 
 Art : Art of life necessary in a 
 community to ensure its per- 
 manence, 16; produced by 
 long tradition and dependent 
 on aristocratic rule, 27 ; Charles 
 I's love of, and the Puritans' 
 hatred of, 181, 182; closely 
 related to social order and per- 
 manence, 181 ; dependent on 
 aristocracy, 248 ; the aristocrat 
 a product of human, 296 
 
 Artist : a chip of flourishing life, 
 4; definition of, 4 note; their 
 rarity, 6; artist-legislator ac- 
 complishes the essential task 
 of general legislation, 17 j the 
 minor, dependent on artist- 
 legislator, 27, 28, 248; the 
 menial converted into a minion 
 only by the, 61; the nearest 
 approach to the aristocrat, 416, 
 418 
 
 Australia : English criminals 
 deported to, 54; their descen- 
 dants probably exceptionally 
 spirited people, 54 
 
 Beauty : dependent on the dic- 
 tates of flourishing life, 5; 
 essential to the superior man, 
 II, 12; of the first Incas of 
 Peru, II note; produced by 
 tradition, 12, 13; the creation 
 of order lasting over genera- 
 tions, 13; Herbert Spencer on, 
 13 ; democratic errors concern- 
 ing, 13 ; of spirit and beauty of 
 
 434 
 
INDEX 
 
 body inseparable, 13, 333, 334; 
 reared only by long tradition 
 and careful discipline and de- 
 pendent on aristocratic rule, 
 27; desires stability and per- 
 manence, 28; hostile to me- 
 chanical science and capitalistic 
 industry, 131 ; Charles I's love 
 of J ^33j of Charles I and 
 Strafford, 145 ; an impediment 
 to chastity, 165, 201; banned 
 by modern commerical con- 
 ditions, 173, 174, 176 (see also 
 Reynolds's Newspaper), Puri- 
 tanical hatred of, 181, 200, 201 ; 
 a stimulant to sex instinct, 201 ; 
 modem, merely a remnant of 
 the past, 252, ; decline of, 273 ; 
 definition of, 317; extinction 
 of under democracy, 320, 
 387; of the true aristocrat, 
 333 j preserved by "assertive 
 mating," 384; reared by tradi- 
 tion, 401 
 
 Beer : its inferiority to old 
 English ale, 209 note, 216, 217; 
 the " natural drynke for a 
 Dutch-Man," 215 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy : on the cant 
 of Uberty, 159; his exploded 
 illusion that majorities can 
 secure their own happiness, 
 
 359 
 Birmingham : noted for its iron- 
 works and its Puritanism, 183 
 Body : of the artist a digest of 
 flourishing life, 4 ; Jews' laws 
 concerning body of their priests, 
 12 note ; Arabs on the message 
 of the, 12 note; beauty of the 
 body and the spirit inseparable, 
 13, 333> 334; Puritan con- 
 tempt for, 95; neglect of the 
 bodies of the masses in Eng- 
 land, 94, 95; Christian under- 
 valuation of, 94, 95, 196-198; 
 belief of all great peoples in 
 
 the message of the, 145; 
 Charles I's belief in the message 
 of the, 147 ; of the Englishman 
 altered by the Puritans, 205; 
 strictness of Jewish law regard- 
 ing bodily fitness in their 
 priesthood, 344 
 BoLiNGBEOKE : on the joy of the 
 real patriot, i ; on the obliga- 
 tions of rank and talent, 7 ; on 
 Divine Right, 10 ; on the mis- 
 sion of the Few, 19 note, 26, 27 ; 
 on parliamentary slavery, 31 ; 
 on the Patriot King, 77; on 
 the prosperity of a nation de- 
 pending upon being united and 
 not divided, 82 ; on some great 
 catastrophe being necessary for 
 the salvation of a decadent 
 nation, 261 note. 
 Borgia, Csesar : the enemy of 
 tyranny, 106; fought greed and 
 opulence for the sake of the 
 people, 107 
 Brahmans : a hereditary caste, 
 330 ; their pride of caste, 334- 
 336 ; their laws concerning the 
 preservation of the aristocrat, 
 335 ; their marriage laws, 336 ; 
 their social laws, 337; their 
 rules regarding cross-breeding, 
 338 ; the severity of their laws, 
 366; their self-discipline, 366; 
 their belief in the value of tra- 
 dition, 398 
 Bright, John : his opposition to 
 factory legislation, 56; his 
 support of the extended fran- 
 chise, 56, 360 
 Brougham, Lord : took part in 
 abolishing negro slave trade 
 while opposed to factory legis- 
 lation, 56 
 Burden, the principle of respect 
 for the : 19 ; Englishmen's neg- 
 lect of, 20, 21 ; Chinese ad- 
 herence to, 20, 21 ; the English 
 
 435 
 
INDEX 
 
 aristocrat's forgetfulness of, 78 ; 
 adherence of Charles I and his 
 government to, 105 
 Byron : his speech in support of 
 the lower classes and against 
 machinery, 70; his alarm at 
 innovations, 263 
 
 Calvin : taught that dancing 
 was a crime equal to adultery, 
 175; a Puritan because he was 
 a miserable invalid, 173, 179; 
 his condemnation qf " Merrie 
 England," 178; his religion 
 infallibly associated with com- 
 merce and trade, 183; an ex- 
 ample of life at its worst, 245 
 
 Capital : bodiless abstract con- 
 ception of, 44; obedience on 
 part of labour implies protec- 
 tion on part of, 47 ; protection 
 on the part of, bloodless and 
 eharitgMe, 48 ; decline of sense of 
 responsibility on the part of, 48 
 
 Capitalism : its grinding down 
 of the 3Vorkers, 35; greed of 
 modem, 39; checlced under 
 the Tudors and Stuarts, 39; 
 cruelty of modem, began on 
 the land, 40; the English 
 aristocrat's failure to face the 
 question of, 45; commoners' 
 attempts to limit, usually an 
 attack on property, 46 ; its cry 
 of laissez-faire, 46; lack of 
 warm human relationships in 
 modern, 48; contrary to the 
 dictates of flourishing life, 48; 
 its evils due to lack of control, 
 49; introduction of, due to 
 deliberate act of taste, 49 ; ma- 
 chinery inseparably associated 
 with, 50 note, 133; hostility 
 of Tudors and Stuarts to, 134, 
 135; Puritanism the religion 
 of, 173; foolishness of attack 
 on capitalism in itself, 239 
 
 436 
 
 Capitalists : raised to the peer- 
 age, 37 ; Trades Unions formed 
 against exploitation of, 46; 
 Tudor and Stuart suspicion of, 
 48 note; enthusiasm of Man- 
 chester School for, 48 note ; re- 
 sponsible for evils arising from 
 enormous alien population in 
 England, 91 and note; Tudor 
 and Stuart attitude towards, 
 135 ; upstart, in the House of 
 Lords, 404 
 
 Carlyle : his stupid and vulgar 
 estimate of Charles I, 107 ; his 
 foolish concern about a defunct 
 aristocracy while British aris- 
 tocracy was most in need of 
 criticism, 108; as a eunuch 
 naturally on the side of the 
 Puritans, 108 
 
 Catholic Church : pagan ele- 
 ments in, 195; members of 
 the, some of the greatest 
 specimens of flourishing life 
 in the Middle Ages, 257 ; the 
 causes of its decline not to be 
 found in lack of tasteful men, 
 257 note; discipline of priest- 
 hood of, 366 
 
 Cavaliers : the martyrs of 
 taste, loi 
 
 Change : a sign of ugliness, 28 ; 
 the English aristocrat's failure 
 to weigh and judge changes, 
 45 ; fight of Tudors and Stuarts 
 against first signs of, 171 
 
 Character : importance . of the 
 people's, 24; Disraeli on the 
 importance of the national, 24, 
 97 ; of the English people neg- 
 lected by their rulers, 37, 67, 90, 
 97; inbred people have, 318; 
 destroyed by cross-breeding, 
 320,322, 325, 327; extinction 
 of, under democracy, 320; fixed 
 by inbreeding, 322; Lecky on 
 national, 372 note; built up 
 
INDEX 
 
 by assertive mating, 383, 384; 
 produced by inbreeding and 
 disintegrated by persistent 
 cross-breeding, 385, 386 
 
 Charity : no cure for social evils 
 but dictated by uneasy con- 
 sciences, 84; futility of, 92; 
 the conscience salve for modem 
 misery, 231 
 
 Charles I : on the people's 
 liberties, 8 note; preferred to 
 die rather than relinquish 
 Divine Right, 33; his benefi- 
 cent control of capital, 46; his 
 interference with trade for the 
 benefit of the consumer, 50, 
 136, 138 note ; the sentimental 
 view of, 103; the schoolboy 
 view of, 104; the champion of 
 the cause of flourishing life, 
 105, 138; his opponents, 105, 
 106; natural that he should 
 be reviled in the present age of 
 vulgarity, 107 ; unfortunate in 
 his predecessors and contem- 
 poraries, 108; no respecter of 
 persons, no; his popularity 
 with the non-commercial and 
 poorer classes, 112, 160, 161 
 note; his hatred of religious 
 controversy, 113; his imparti- 
 ality in quelling religious dis- 
 turbances, 114; his enforce- 
 ment of laws against Catholics, 
 114; his support of the Church 
 of England, 115, 116 note; 
 refused to fill Parliament with 
 his friends, 118; his strict ad- 
 ministration of justice, 119, 
 128, 129; his proclamation to 
 the gentry to remain on their 
 estates, 120; light taxation 
 under his personal rule, 120; 
 his taxation chiefly on the 
 trading and wealthy classes, 
 121 ; his readiness to spend his 
 private money in the public 
 
 service, 122; his reasons for 
 ruling without Parliament, 125, 
 126 ; his patriarchial policy, 127, 
 138; his restoration of Church 
 lands, 128, 138 ; his appointment 
 of Commissions to inquire into 
 various abuses, 129; his repeal 
 of the Puritanical Sunday ob- 
 servance laws, 129, 130, 201 ; 
 his opposition to besotting 
 machinery, 132, 133, 134; his 
 proclamation against the an- 
 noyance of smoke, 132; his 
 care for quality, 133, 136, 137; 
 his love of beauty, 133, 138; 
 prevents rise in price of corn 
 after a bad harvest, 135, 136; 
 his proclamation against the 
 avarice of victuallers, 136; his 
 admirable character, 139 note ; 
 his wise choice of advisers, 140 ; 
 his beauty, 145; his pleading 
 on behalf of Strafford, 153; his 
 willingness to die with Strafford, 
 154; benevolence of his per- 
 sonal rule, 156; the people on 
 his side in the Grand Rebellion, 
 160, 161 ; the martyr of the 
 people, 164; his love of art 
 and beauty, 181 ; his refusal to 
 establish Puritanism, 188; his 
 dislike of tobacco, 226 note; a 
 man of taste, 253 ; insignificant 
 amount of peculation under, 
 281 ; the social instinct strong- 
 est in, 312 ; a second son, 363, 
 376 ; the inferiority of his wife, 
 382; number of peers created 
 by, 403; his fastidious taste, 
 416 
 Chela : the child as the, 423 
 Child : its relationship to its 
 mother, 264; the child as the 
 chela, 423 
 Children : bearing of, sanctified 
 by the superiority of the riian, 
 29 ; in mines and factories, 52- 
 
 437 
 
INDEX 
 
 S7 ; Society for the Prevention 
 of Cruelty to, founded sixty 
 years after the Society for the 
 Prevention of Cruelty to 
 Animals, 53 note; harnessed 
 to trucks in mines, at a time 
 when harnessing of dogs to 
 carts was abolished, 53 note; 
 appalling condition of, in fac- 
 tories and mines, 54 note; 
 refusal of Irish to allow them 
 to be employed underground, 
 55 ; ale a drink for, 210; John 
 Locke on the best food and 
 drink for, 210 note; cruelty to, 
 235; used as bucklers by 
 Cromwell's soldiers, 235 note; 
 dogs of more account than, 272 
 note 
 
 China : Government in, always 
 by consent of the people, 14; 
 social grades in, dependent on 
 guidance of Manchu aristo- 
 cracy, 16, 17; respect for the 
 burden bearer in, 20, 21 ; exe- 
 cution of six Englishmen in, 
 20; EngUsh missionaries sent 
 to, 53 note, 95 ; its knowledge 
 of the laws of flourishing life, 
 53 note; care of the body in, 
 95 ; rules for qualities requisite 
 for wet nurse in, 95; perma- 
 nence of its culture, 254; its 
 aristocratic culture, 257 ; rever- 
 ence for ancestors in, 258; 
 consent of the people to their 
 ruler's rule in, 265; popular 
 rebellion in China merely a 
 change of rulers, 268; slow 
 change in, 269; the Chinese 
 mandarinate a repository of 
 taste, 269; the idea of the 
 gentleman a very definite thing 
 in, 274; dislike of the foreigner 
 in, 301 ; education in, 421, 
 422 
 
 Christianity: its contempt for 
 
 438 
 
 the body and glorification of 
 the soul, 94, 95 ; the decay of 
 Christian culture, 99; a nega- 
 tive creed, 195-198 
 
 Christmas : suppressed by the 
 Puritans, 192, 193 
 
 Church : its levelling tendency, 
 25; robbed from European 
 rulers the tutorship of govern- 
 ing, 25, 26; controlled by 
 Venetian aristocracy, 25; its 
 failure to see that fluid popula- 
 tion means lax morality, 72; 
 Cromwell a possessor of Church 
 lands, hi; Church lands, 
 robbed by Lords and land- 
 owners, restored under Charles 
 I, 128, 138; abuses against 
 Church property punished by 
 Laud, 141 ; Strafford's restora- 
 tion of Church lands, 148. See 
 also Catholic Church 
 
 COBBETT : his opposition to 
 machinery, 36 note ; his indict- 
 ment of the English country 
 gentleman and landowner, 61; 
 his belief in aristocracy, 61 ; on 
 the misery of the agricultural- 
 ist, 63; on factory slaves, 67 
 note ; his disapproval of people 
 traveUing,72 note ; on the stages 
 of national degradation, 103; 
 his loathing of the Quakers, 
 136; on the cowardice of 
 Strafford's friends, 152 note; 
 his hostility to tea and coffee, 
 224; his dislike of the middle- 
 man, 228, 229 ; his lamentation 
 over the death of spirit in 
 England, 231; on wealth and 
 property, 239; his alarm a,t 
 innovations, 263 
 
 Cockney : sterile in three genera- 
 tions, 65 
 
 Coffee : one of the deleterious 
 substitutes for old English ale, 
 219-226 ; " Coffee and Com- 
 
INDEX 
 
 monwealth came in together," 
 219 note; popular petition 
 against, 223; Women's Peti- 
 tion against, 225; forbidden 
 in the Koran, 256 note 
 
 Colbert: the people's ingrati- 
 tude for his championship, 106; 
 fought greed and opulence for 
 the sake of the people, 107 
 
 Commerce : instability of a state 
 founded upon, 23 
 
 Commercialism : 41, 45 ; the 
 advisability of, not questioned 
 by English rulers, 46 
 
 Competition, unrestricted : its 
 grinding down of the workers, 
 35; Trades Unions formed 
 against influence of, 46 ; defini- 
 tion of, 83 ; reduces everything 
 to a struggle for existence, 280 ; 
 introduces elements of inter- 
 herd morality into the herd, 
 288 
 
 Confucianism : the way of the 
 superior man, 5 note, 6 
 
 Confucius : on caring for the 
 heart of the people, 16; on 
 respect for the burden, 20; a 
 representative of flourishing 
 life, 20; his doctrine of the 
 superior man, 76; a man of 
 taste, 257; his idea of the 
 gentleman, 274 
 
 Consanguinity in marriage. See 
 Marriage and Inbreeding 
 
 Conscience : the voice of a 
 man's ancestors, 11, 28, 277; 
 reared only by long tradition 
 and careful discipline and de- 
 pendent on aristocratic rule, 
 27 ; the sick, of the upper 
 classes, 83 ; charity, the flower 
 of an uneasy, 84; charity a 
 conscience salve, 231; defini- 
 tion of, 276, 277 
 
 Constantine the Great : mixed 
 marriages proscribed by, 307, 
 
 319; knew that all crossing is 
 not bad, 326 
 
 Corn : the repeal of the Corn 
 Laws defeat of agriculture, 63 ; 
 Charles I's prevention of rise 
 in price of, 135, 136 
 
 Cousins : marriage of, regarded 
 as the patural thing in modem 
 Egypt, 332 note. See also Dar- 
 win, George, on cousin marri- 
 ages 
 
 Craft of governing. 5ce Govern- 
 ing 
 
 Criminals : produced by vile 
 conditions of labour, 54; their 
 descendants in Australia pro- 
 bably people of spirit, 54 
 
 Cromwell : his cruelty, 54 ; the 
 leader of a race of unscrupulous 
 capitalistic oppressors, loi ; his 
 Puritanism a conscientious 
 justification for being in pos- 
 session of Church lands, in; 
 accused Laud of " flat Popery," 
 116; acknowledged that Eng- 
 land could be properly governed 
 only by a single ruler, 127, 128 
 note; his hypocrisy, 171; his 
 ugliness, 176, 334; a brewer, 
 184; the diet provided by his 
 wife, 226, 227; his unseemly 
 behaviour when signing Charles 
 I's death-warrant, 232 ; a man 
 utterly devoid of taste, 233; 
 responsible for enslaving his 
 fellow-countrymen, 233 ; his 
 atrocities against the Irish, 
 
 234, 235 
 Cross-breeding : destructive of 
 instinct, 298, 299, 302, 304, 347 ; 
 destructive of race, 302, 320- 
 323; Theognis on the danger 
 of, 304, 305, 306 ; fall of Greece 
 and Rome due to, 308 ; breaks 
 the will, 310, 318, 320 ; produc- 
 tive of degeneration, 319; de- 
 structive of virtue, 319, 320, 
 
 439 
 
INDEX 
 
 347> 349 j productive of fer- 
 tility, 321 ; undermines charac- 
 ter, 322, 325, 327; occasional 
 necessity for judicious, 323-326 ; 
 fatality of tasteless and indis- 
 criminate, 326 ; with allied races 
 productive of good results, 326 ; 
 under democracy never salu- 
 tary, 349 ; causes disintegration 
 of will and character, 385 ; le^ds 
 to reversion to a low type, 388 
 Culture : the building up of, 
 one of the duties of ruling, 98 ; 
 makes a people, 98; the char- 
 acter of modem, 98, 99 ; decay 
 of Christian, 99; present day, 
 one of doubt, 99; intellectual, 
 denied to the parvefiu, 100; 
 dependent on aristocracy, 248 ; 
 produced by inbreeding, 299; 
 rapid culture of certain en- 
 dogamic peoples, 347; tralis- 
 inission of acquired character- 
 istics important to, 395, 397; 
 based on traditional occtipa- 
 tions, 399 ; definition of, 429 
 
 Darwin, Charles : his doctrine 
 of the survival of the fittest, 
 once a conscience salve, refuted, 
 83; on the incapacity of the 
 Fuegians for civilisation, 297; 
 a fourth child, 376 ; on primo- 
 geniture being opposed to se- 
 lection, 377 note J his experi- 
 ments on pigeons, 388; his 
 belief in the transmission of 
 acquired characteristics, 392, 
 
 397 
 
 Dakwin, George : on cousin 
 marriages not being fraught 
 with evil results, 385 and note 
 
 Decadence : due to the dictates 
 of mediocrity, 6, 7 ; a state in 
 which the precepts of flourish- 
 ing life have been forgotten and 
 the true aristocrat dethroned. 
 
 23; due to prevalence of bad 
 taste, 24; democratic revolt 
 and C5Tiical hedonism the fruits 
 of J 73 > soon too late to arrest, 
 in Europe, 96; its prevalence 
 in modern times 384, 385 ; con- 
 sanguineous marriages as a 
 cause of, only a modem idea, 
 
 385 
 Decline : of nations not a 
 necessity, 254; of British Em- 
 pire preventable, 255; of 
 nations due to disobedience to 
 the voice of flourishing life, 
 258 
 Degeneracy. See Decadence 
 Democracy : dangerous errors 
 under, concerning the import- 
 ance of the body, 13 ; unfruit- 
 fulness of democratic revolt, 
 73; political amateurism, 88; 
 demands the existence of the 
 amateur in politics, 89 ; misery 
 the chief propelling power of, 
 in England, 237, 358; the 
 meaning of, 248-253'; mttst 
 mean death, 249-253 ; political 
 corruption under, 249 note; 
 discards Taste, 250, 251; calls 
 upon the people to weigh 
 principles and policies, 264; in 
 an absolute, the people really 
 govern, 265; calls upon the 
 people to judge on matters of 
 taste, 266 ; salutary revolution 
 impossible under, 267 ; neglect 
 of loftier interests of art and 
 science under, 273 note; of un- 
 controlled trade unfavourable 
 to the production of the gentle- 
 man, 282 ; foreign affairs under, 
 282; imposes the practice of 
 two moralities on the private 
 citizen, 288; therefore demo- 
 cracy immoral, 288; difficulty 
 of foreign pblicy under, 291 
 note ; the materialistic doctrine 
 
 44S> 
 
INDEX 
 
 of majority omnipotent under, 
 292, 293; destructive of will 
 and character and productive 
 of ugliness, 320, 387 ; increase 
 of vanity under, 320 note ; in- 
 judicious cross-breeding charac- 
 teristic of, 325; prejudice of, 
 against close consanguineous 
 marriages, 331 ; cross-breeding 
 under, simply chaos, 349; un- 
 dermines conscientious labour, 
 353 J mere wealth as a stand- 
 ard leads to,^ 365 ; hostile to 
 heredity, 378; opposed to as- 
 sortive mating, 384, 387; pre- 
 judice against one's like under, 
 386; dead level established by, 
 
 387 
 
 Democrat : a rank blasphemer, 
 5; Nemesis threatens all 
 societies victimised by the, 
 49; his mistaken estimate of 
 the people, 74; English Lords 
 democrats at heart, 97; his 
 attack on aristocracy super- 
 ficial, 239; attitude of various 
 types of, towards private and 
 public morality, 289-291 ; pre- 
 fers to ascribe superiority to 
 accident, 379; his dislike of 
 marrying his like the self- 
 preservative instinct of the 
 sick man, 386, 389 
 
 Depopulation of country dis- 
 tricts : 42 ; grave consequences 
 of, 58; F. E. Green's warning 
 against the results of, 64; 
 Charles I opposed to, 119J 
 commission appointed by 
 Charles I to inquire into, 129 
 
 Deportation. See Transpor- 
 tation 
 
 Determinism: 314-315; from 
 within, 314; from without, 
 
 315 
 Discipline : necessary for pro- 
 ducing example of flourishing 
 
 44 
 
 life, 362 ; English aristocracy's 
 lack of internal, 362, 363, 364, 
 368; among the Brahmans, 
 366'; in the Catholic Church, 
 366 ; among . the Venetian 
 aristocracy, 367; among the 
 Egyptian priesthood, 368 
 
 Disease : its prevalence in 
 modem' times, 3, 47, 385 ; ' 
 modem acquiescence in, 96; 
 spread by modem commercial 
 culture, 98; a breeder of 
 Puritanism, 178, 181 ; re- 
 garded as unclean in the Old 
 Testament, 199, 337; and by 
 the Brahmans, 337; when 
 present multiplied by inbreed- 
 ings 38s 
 
 Disraeli : on revolutions not 
 being due to economic causes, 
 10 note; on national chariac- 
 ter, 24 ; on the decline of pub- 
 lic virtue being due to class 
 hostility, 82 note ; on the true 
 greatness of man, 90; on the 
 degeneration of the subject 
 into a serf, 102; on the duty 
 of power to secure the social 
 welfare of the people, 102; 
 on the modem Utopia of 
 Wealth and Toil^ 355 note; 
 his appeal to the Youth of the 
 Nation, 432 
 
 Dissenters : their hatred of 
 life, 55; their impudent ef- 
 frontery, 112; their impudent 
 assumption of oihniscience, 
 142; the Scriptural warrant 
 for their negative creed, 195; 
 their brutality, 234 
 
 Divine Right : to rule when 
 the craft and tutorship of 
 governing are both fulfilled 
 by the raler, 10; to govern 
 ill an absurdity, 10, 14; dis- 
 belief of English peerage in 
 their own, 33 
 
INDEX 
 
 Dogs : harnessing of, to carts 
 abolished at a time when 
 children were harnessed to 
 trucks in mines, 53 notej of 
 more account than children, 
 272 note 
 
 Domestic Servants : the last 
 to revolt, 81; their hostility 
 to the Insurance Act, 81 
 
 Drink : Puritan attack on, 206 ; 
 ale the national drink of 
 England in the Middle Ages, 
 207; ale, the true temperance 
 drink of the working classes, 
 211 ; the laws of the Puritans 
 concerning, 213 
 
 Economists : bloodless and in- 
 human concepts of modern, 
 44; their lack of taste, 47; 
 laissez-faire economists re- 
 sponsible for cruel exploitation 
 of women and children, 52; 
 their materialistic solution of 
 social problems, 66; their 
 failure to " place " the machine, 
 67 
 
 Education : caring for the heart 
 of the people the highest, 16; 
 in England and its inadequacy, 
 92-94 ; true education in China, 
 95 ; true, begins with the care 
 of the suckling's body, 95; a 
 powerful weapon of selection 
 in the hands of an aristocracy, 
 420-422; in China, 422; the 
 young aristocrat's, 422, 423; 
 Kant on, 423, 424 
 
 Egoism : obedience to taste the 
 soundest form of, 248. See also 
 Selfishness 
 
 Egyptians : pious fraud prac- 
 tised on the, by their priest- 
 hood, 170; their ale, 207, 208, 
 210; their view of wealth, 
 238 note; the permanence of 
 their culture, 254; their 
 
 aristocratic culture, 257 ; their 
 priesthood the repository of 
 Taste, 269; their contempt 
 for the foreigner, 300, 301; a 
 chosen people, 300; their doc- 
 trine of Eternal Recurrence, 
 317; their understanding of 
 the psychology of doubt, 318 
 note; their inbreeding, 322; 
 under the Shepherd Kings, 
 325; their occasional use of 
 judicious cross-breeding, 325; 
 their priesthood hereditary, 
 330 ; their close consanguineous 
 marriages, 331, 332 ; occasional 
 inter-caste marriages among 
 the, 333; the self-discipline of 
 their aristocracy, 368; their 
 belief in the value of tradition, 
 398; their system of educa- 
 tion, 422 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen : her benefi- 
 cent control of capital, 46; 
 her prohibition of time and 
 labour-saving engines, 50 ; the 
 growth of the problem of 
 poverty in her reign, 109 ; her 
 hatred of the Puritans, 113; 
 her opposition to machinery, 
 131; her drinking of ale, 210; 
 number of peers under, 403 
 
 Empire, British : its value, 254 ; 
 possibility of saving it from 
 decline, 255 
 
 England : her belief in experi- 
 ence, 36 ; her boast of humani- 
 tarian principles, 55; the 
 leader in the commercial, in- 
 dustrial and mechanical world, 
 55 ; transformed from an agri- 
 cultural into an industrial 
 nation, 57; the land of 
 amateurism, 87; her doctrine 
 of amateurism corrupting the 
 whole world, 89; her posses- 
 sion of a caste who might have 
 proved good rulers, 89, 100; 
 
 442 
 
INDEX 
 
 modern England's idea of great- 
 ness — trade returns, 167-1695 
 but little spirit left in, 231; 
 cruelties in, 235; her posses- 
 sion of men of taste, 255, 256 ; 
 her fall inevitable with the 
 passing of the gentleman, 281; 
 lunacy increasing in, 385 
 
 " England, Merrie " : transfor- 
 mation of, into a slum, 49; 
 Calvin's condemnation of, 178; 
 doom of, compassed by the 
 Puritans, 183, 204 j festivals 
 of, 210 
 
 English Aristocrats : their 
 neglect of the principle " re- 
 spect the burden," 20, 37, 78; 
 deprived of power by the 
 Parliament Act, 33 ; could not 
 have felt that they ruled by 
 Divine Right, 33; their neglect 
 of the character and spirit 
 of the nation, 37, 97 ; behaved 
 like mere plutocrats, 37 ; their 
 failure to check capitalism, 
 39; deterioration of the, 40; 
 direct crimes on the part of, 
 not discussed, 40; their sins, 
 not essential to aristocratic 
 regime, 45; their failure to 
 weigh and judge changes before 
 they were introduced, 45 ; their 
 failure to face the question of 
 capitalism and industrialism, 
 45, 46 ; their failure to protect 
 the masses, 46; their lack of 
 taste, 47, 49, 416, 417; their 
 failure to examine the desira- 
 bility of new occupations, 51; 
 their failure to ask what effect 
 the working of women and 
 children in mines and factories 
 would have, 52; their lazy 
 indifference to cruel exploita- 
 tion of women and children, 
 52; their failure to calculate 
 desirability of new urban type. 
 
 57; their greed, 59; their 
 responsibility for the evils of 
 to-day, 60 ; their failure to re- 
 establish agriculture, 64; their 
 failure to "place" the machine, 
 65, 66; their failure to foresee 
 that a fluid population means 
 lax morality, 71, 72; their 
 consideration of their own 
 interests only, 74; their failure 
 in the tutorship of governing, 
 77 onwards; their opportuni- 
 ties for being good rulers, 89; 
 their failure to preserve the 
 people's character, 90; their 
 failure to mitigate the evils of 
 the factory system, 90, 91; 
 their failure to look after the 
 moral welfare of the masses, 
 91 ; the inadequacy of their 
 education of the masses, 92- 
 94; their neglect of the bodies 
 of the people, 94; their failure 
 to give anything in return for 
 their privileges, 97; possessed 
 all the essentials for providing 
 the rule of the best, 100; 
 should have disciplined them- 
 selves and refreshed their stock 
 with care, 100; majority of, 
 joined Charles reluctantly 
 merely from desire of self- 
 preservation, 158 ; the practical 
 rulers of England since 1688, 
 356; therefore responsible for 
 the evils of bad government, 
 357; their foolish reliance on 
 chance, 362; a class selected 
 at random, 362, 370; their 
 lack of internal discipline, 362, 
 363^. 364,. 368, 369; their 
 growing disbelief in heredity, 
 402 note; misrule of, not due 
 to evil results of inbreeding, 
 
 403 
 Englishmen : their bad treat- 
 ment of the burden bearer. 
 
 443 
 
INDEX 
 
 20; in Chinaj 20; hands of, 
 red with the blood of the 
 burden bearer, 21 j their 
 natural unconcern, 52; their 
 belief in trade figures as a 
 sign of national prosperity, 
 166-169; depressed and made 
 ugly by the Puritans, 188; 
 and made miserable by them, 
 189; their bodies altered by 
 the Puritans, 205; essentials 
 of real rulership misunderstood 
 by average, 267 
 
 Eternal Recurrence : Egjrp- 
 tian belief in, 317; a feeUef 
 held by those positive to this 
 world, 317 
 
 Eugenics : 86, 198, 331, 337, 345 
 
 European Aristocracies : 
 
 causes of their downfall, 21, 
 25; the badness of, 239; their 
 reliance on chattel, 362 
 
 Europe : decadence of, due to 
 neglect of precepts of flourish- 
 ing life, 23 
 
 Excises : the invention of the 
 Puritans, 229 note 
 
 Experience : English behef in, 
 36 J muddle and confusion 
 sanctified by the doctrine of, 
 68; mere travelling reigarded 
 as good from the standpoint 
 of, 72 ; bad for the man with- 
 out backbone, 72 
 
 Factories : rise of, 43 ; women 
 and children in, 53, 54, 55, 
 90; evils of, in India, ^J; iU- 
 treatment of children in, 56; 
 the first Factory Act, 56'; John 
 Bright, Gladstone, Cobden, 
 Lord BoUgham and Sir James 
 Graham opposed to factory 
 legislation, 56; Cobbett on 
 factory slaves, 67 note ; failure 
 of £ngHsh aristocrats to miti- 
 gate the evils of the factory 
 
 system, 90, 91 ; evil effects on 
 the physique of the girls em- 
 ployed in, 95 ; their difficult 
 confinements, 95 ; health, 
 beauty and high spirits un- 
 necessary to factory life, 174; 
 cruelty in, 235 
 Fair : the old, its value, 229 ; 
 abolished by the shop, 229, 
 
 ,230 
 Families : large, recommended, 
 
 374-377 
 
 Farming Classes. See Agri- 
 culture 
 
 Fittest; survival of the : not 
 the survival of the inost de- 
 sirable, 83, 84 
 
 Flourishing Life, 3 ; thfe repre- 
 sentatives of, 4, 6, 11; the 
 voice of, necessary for the 
 maintenance of health and 
 beauty, 5; the aristocrat a 
 digest of, 13; not bred by 
 struggle, 17; Napoleon and 
 Confucius represefltatiVes of, 
 20; respect of the burden a 
 law of, 20; character of the 
 people approxiinated to t)^e 
 dictated by, 23; the divine 
 missionaries of, 27; necessary 
 for stability and permanence, 
 28; measured by economists 
 in terms of pecuniary profit, 
 44; modem capitalism con- 
 trary to the dictates of, 48; 
 knowledge of the laws of, in 
 China, 53 note; the cockney 
 not produced by the dictates 
 of, 65 ; voice of, no more alive 
 among the masses than among 
 the leistired classes, 73; silent 
 in England for the last 150 
 years, 79; Charles I a cham- 
 pion of the cause of, 105 ; but 
 few the representatives of, 
 244; some representatives of, 
 245; Taste the voice of, 246- 
 
 444 
 
INDEX 
 
 256 ; the Brahmans, Jews and 
 Mahommedans reared on the 
 dictates of, 256, 257 ; members 
 of the CathoUc Church some 
 of the greatest specimens of, 
 in the Middle Ages, 257; fall 
 of ancient nations due to dis- 
 obedience to the voice of, 258 ; 
 claims of, asserted by its 
 representatives themselves, 
 259; sympathetic atmosphere 
 and transvaluation of values 
 necessary for its advent, 260, 
 261; specimens of, attract 
 their like, 260 ; not necessary 
 for the people to understand 
 or judge examples of, 264; 
 the test of the absolute in all 
 doctrine, 292 note; definition 
 of, 295; examples of, always 
 placed at the top of the social 
 ladder by tasteful peoples, 
 328; discipline and leisure 
 necessary for producing ex- 
 amples of, 362; produced by 
 inbreeding, 385 
 
 Food : adulteration of, 220 ; 
 staleness of, through employ- 
 ment of middlemen and shop- 
 keepers, 228 
 
 Foreign Affairs : deleterious 
 effect of meddling in, on the 
 masses in a democracy, 282; 
 different methods required in 
 the handling of, if the United 
 Kingdom is to recover her 
 influence in the world, 291 note 
 
 Fornication, so-called : the 
 Laws of the Puritans con- 
 cerning, 204 
 
 Frederick the Great : his 
 opposition to Machiavelli, 283, 
 2,84 
 
 Garnier : on the misery of the 
 peasant, 62 ; on the fine spirit 
 of the peasant, 62 
 
 Genius: production of, not to 
 be ascribed to chance, 361; 
 Lombroso's The Man of Genius, 
 a masterpiece of democratic 
 insolence, 379 note 
 
 Gentleman : the English, cap- 
 able of rearing only menials 
 and not minions, 61 ; Cob- 
 bett's indictment of the English 
 country gentleman, 61; F. E. 
 Green's indictment of the 
 English gentleman, 64, 65; 
 the passing of the, 273, 280, 
 281; his value, 274, 275; the 
 gentleman in China and the 
 ancient world, 274; reared 
 by tradition, 276; his most 
 typical virtues, 277, 278; the 
 environment necessary for the 
 production of the, 278; the 
 deterioration of the title, 280 
 note; not produced under 
 democracy of uncontrolled 
 trade, 282 ; sometimes capable 
 of practising^ two moralities, 
 287; Japanese gentleman cap- 
 able of doing so, 287 note 
 
 George, Lloyd : his bitterness 
 and eloquence would have 
 been unavailing in a country 
 governed by good rulers, 34; 
 hostility of domestic servants 
 to his Insurance Act, 81 
 
 George III : large sums spent 
 in corruption by, 118; creation 
 of peers under, 403 note 
 
 Girls. See Women 
 
 GOBiNEAU : on the inequality 
 of the human race, 297, 298; 
 on the decline of great nations 
 being due to their mixing their 
 blood, 308, 309 note; on the 
 V stability of the pure race, 320 
 note; on the value of con- 
 sanguineous marriages among 
 the ancients, 331 note ; wrong 
 in thinking that all cross- 
 
 445 
 
INDEX 
 
 breeding leads to degeneratiqn, 
 348 
 
 God of Love: His attitude to 
 the ugly, the sick and the 
 botched, 345 
 
 Governing : the craft of, 6, 15, 
 21, 22; and Divine Right, 
 10; taken for granted, 18, 
 26, 37; neglected by the Eng- 
 lish aristocracy, 37, 77, 78; 
 the tutorship of, 6, 15, 21, 
 22; and Divine Right, 10; 
 never taken for granted, 18 j 
 robbed by the Church from 
 European rulers, 25; responsi- 
 bility of, scouted by English 
 aristocracy, 37, 77 onwards; 
 involves the building up of 
 Culture, 98 
 
 Governing Classes, English. 
 See English Aristocrats 
 
 Government: always by con- 
 sent of the people, 14, 263-265 
 
 Greeks : their love of race and 
 nationality, 26; in their best 
 period hostile to the foreigner, 
 302, 303, 310 J their decline 
 due to cross-breeding, 308 
 
 Green, F. E. : his indictment of 
 the landowner, 64; his proof 
 that agriculture is a sweated 
 industry in England, 64; on 
 the danger of England losing 
 her peasantry, 64; hb indict- 
 ment of the English gentle- 
 man, 64, 65; gives instances 
 of Puritanical attitude towards 
 " immorality," 203 note ; on 
 making dogs of more account 
 than children, 272 note 
 
 Guilds : the confiscation of their 
 lands and funds, 109 
 
 Happiness : higher taste in, of 
 the ruler-aristocrat, 19; Bent- 
 ham's exploded illusion that 
 majorities can secure their 
 
 446 
 
 own, 359; modern idea of 
 marriage as a road to, 424, 
 
 42s 
 
 Hedonism : the refuge of the 
 prosperous, 72; unfruitfulness 
 of plutocracy's, 73; the ob- 
 verse of the medal of demo- 
 cratic revolt, 73 ; uncontrolled, 
 due to prevalence of voice of 
 impoverished life, 79; para- 
 mount to-day, 104 ; hedonistic 
 view of marriage, 424 
 
 Henry IV of France : influence 
 of his bad marriage, 381, 382 
 
 Henry VIII : his creation of 
 upstart landowners, 59 note, 
 108, 161 note; growth of in- 
 digence and consequent thiev- 
 ing in his reign, 109 ; his dislike 
 of hops, 215; number of peers 
 under, 403 
 
 Hereditary Rulers, English. 
 See English Aristocrats 
 
 Heredity : the hereditary 
 principle an essential condition 
 of aristocracy, i; supposed 
 failures of the hereditary 
 principle, i ; all ancient aristo- 
 cracies hereditary, 330; dis- 
 cussion of, 370 onwards ; large 
 famUies necessary for adequate 
 working of, 374, 375. 376, 377; 
 Thomson on the importance 
 of, 378; democratic dislike of, 
 378, 379; the importance of 
 choosing a proper mate, 380J 
 381, 382, 383 ; transmission of 
 acquired, characteristics, 389- 
 401; value of tradition in, 
 397; in the House of Lords, 
 401 
 
 HoBBES : on the " disease of the 
 commonwealth," 7 ; on obedi- 
 ence, 9; on disobedience, 9 
 note; on government being 
 dependent on the power of 
 rulers to protect, 10 note; on 
 
INDEX 
 
 the possible longevity of well- 
 ordered states, 1 6 note; on 
 thraldom dependmg on benefits 
 received, 25 
 
 Hops : the deleteriousness of, 
 214-218; petition against, 
 215; a soporific and an an- 
 aphrodisiac, 217; retard diges- 
 tion, 218; an ingredient intro- 
 duced in ale to make it keep 
 for sake of shopkeepers, 228 
 note 
 
 Huguenots : their reasons for 
 opposing Machiavelli, 283 
 
 Ill-health. See Disease 
 Inbreeding : productive of cul- 
 ture, 299; ancient wisdom in 
 regard to, 301; productive of 
 character, 318; and sterility, 
 321; can last a long while 
 without evil results, 322 ; fixes 
 character, 322 ; in Egypt, 322 ; 
 in Sparta, 323; preserves vir- 
 tue, 329; the Jews and, 342; 
 Jewish checks against ill efEects 
 of, 346; productive of char- 
 acter and flourishing life, 385 ; 
 multiplies disease and also 
 multiplies healthy and good 
 qualities, 385, 386 note ; not in 
 itself a cause of degeneracy, 
 386; failure of the House of 
 Lords not due to, 403, 405, 
 406 
 Incas of Peru : their bloodless 
 victories owing to superiority, 
 8; their refusal to rule a 
 bestial people, 9 ; their beauty, 
 II note, 333; permanence of 
 their culture, 254; their aristo- 
 cratic culture, 257 ; cause of the 
 downfall of their culture, 259; 
 a hereditary caste, 330 ; brother 
 and sister marriages among, 
 331; their behef in the value 
 of tradition, 398 
 
 Incest : modem prejudice 
 against, 331 ; Moses and Aaron 
 the children of, 342 
 
 Industrialism : never guided 
 by the English ruler, 36; rise 
 of, 41, 42, 45; advisability of, 
 not questioned by English 
 rulers, 46 
 
 Instinct : definition of, 296 ; in 
 the production of civilisation, 
 297 ; destroyed by cross-breed- 
 ing, 298, 299, 302, 304, 347; 
 race a matter of, 302; store 
 set by great nations of antiquity 
 on, 309 ; its importance in the 
 life of a nation, 309, 310; the 
 relation of will to, 311-315; 
 relation of virtues to, 315; 
 preserved by assortive mating, 
 384; destroyed by democracy, 
 
 387 
 Irish : their humanity, 55 ; 
 Strafford's good rule of the, 
 148, 149 ; Puritan brutality to, 
 232; sent into slavery by 
 Cromwell, 233, 235; Crom- 
 well's atrocities against the, 
 234 
 
 Jacob : the father of Levi, 338 ; 
 his interference with the law 
 of primogeniture, 340 note, 
 364; his own priest, 341; his 
 taste in men, 377; the patri- 
 arch Jacob the best judge of 
 what constitutes the man who 
 knows, 414 
 
 James I : his regard for quality, 
 50 ; his opposition to the inter- 
 ference of Tom, Dick and Harry 
 in State affairs, 88 note; his 
 Book of Sports, 130 ; his opposi- 
 tion to machinery, 132; his 
 proclamation against the 
 clothiers, 135; his dislike of 
 tobacco, 225 note; number of 
 peers created by, 403 
 
 447 
 
INDEX 
 
 Japan : Japanese gentleman cap- 
 able of practising two morali- 
 ties, 287 note; aristocracy in, 
 365. 366 
 
 Jesuits : their reasons for oppos- 
 ing Machiavelli, 283, 289 
 
 Jews : on beauty of body in their 
 priesthood, 12 note; a chosen 
 people, 300, 301; their con- 
 tempt for the alien, 301, 302, 
 310; the hereditary character 
 of their priesthood, 330, 339; 
 the rise of their aristocracy 
 traced to a single family, 338; 
 their self-appointed aristo- 
 cracy, 340; their doctrine of 
 the firstborn, 341, 342, 346; 
 the institution of the Levites 
 as an aristocracy, 339, 342; 
 their aristocracy a select in- 
 breeding caste, 342, 343 ; strict 
 laws regarding the bodily fitness 
 of their priests, 344 ; occasional 
 interrtribe marriages allowed for 
 Levites, 343, 345, 346 
 
 Johnson, Sariiuel : his rebuke of 
 Lprd Chesterfield, 418, 419 
 
 Kant: conceived of education 
 as a matter of discipline and 
 will development, 423, 424 
 
 Koran : forbids coffee to the 
 faithful, 256 note 
 
 Labour : bodiless abstract con- 
 cept of, 44; obedience on the 
 part of, implies protection on 
 the part of capital, 47 ; obedi- 
 ence on the part of, sullen and 
 forced, 48; decline of sense of 
 responsibility on the part of, 
 48 ; indirect tax on, first intro- 
 duced by the Puritans, 214 
 
 Laissez-f^re : the cruel and 
 lazy principle of, tolerated, 44 ; 
 capitalistic cry of, 46; laissez- 
 faire economists responsible fpr 
 
 the cruel exploitation of women 
 and children, 52 ; definition of, 
 83; behest of, obeyed by the 
 Tories, 102 ; defeat of Charles I 
 an important step in the direc- 
 tion of, 163; labouring pro- 
 letariat mercilessly exploited 
 under the system of, 175; 
 Puritanism the feligion re- 
 quired by the economic school 
 of, 188; introduced by the 
 Puritans, 216, 227 note; wealth 
 and property uncontrolled by. 
 
 Landowners : their obligations, 
 38; their duties in feudal 
 times, 38 ; their rights qualified 
 in feudal times, 39; the irre- 
 sponsibility of urban land- 
 owners, 39; Kett's demands 
 concerning, 42 note ; lust of ap- 
 propriation on the part of, 43 ; 
 British landowners responsible 
 for depopulation of country 
 districts, 58; Cobbett's indict- 
 ment of, 61 ; F. E. Green's in- 
 dictment of, 64; ifpstart land- 
 owners introduced by Henry 
 VIII, 59 note, 108 
 
 Laud : no respecter of persons, 
 no, 141, 143; his impartiality 
 in quelling religious disturb- 
 ances, 114; accused of Papist 
 leanings by the Puritans, 116; 
 his readiness to spend his 
 private money in the public 
 service, 122; his uprightness, 
 141 ; his punishment of abuses 
 against Church property, 141 ; 
 his struggle against anarchy in 
 religion, 142 ; his fairness, 143 ; 
 brutal treatment by the Puri- 
 tans, 144; his will, 144 
 
 Lawyers : F. E. Green on their 
 cringing cowardice, 64, 65; 
 Strafford foresaw that the rule 
 of Parliament meant rule of 
 
 448 
 
INDEX 
 
 the landowner and lawyer at 
 expense of the poor, 117 j in 
 Parliament, 355; not fit to 
 govern, 408; Strafford's sus- 
 picion of, 408; list of some, 
 in the House of Lords, 409, 
 410 
 
 Levi, the tribe of : their origin, 
 3385 339; the self-appointed 
 aristocracy of the Jews, 339, 
 340; inbreeding practised by, 
 343; strict laws regarding 
 bodily fitness of, 344 
 
 Liberals : even they believe in 
 government by the few, 14; 
 essentially a capitalistic party 
 opposed to the true interests 
 of the people, loi 
 
 Liberty : the King's prerogative 
 to defend the people's liberties, 
 8 note; the so-called English 
 love of, not responsible for the 
 evils of the present day, 60; 
 the cry of capitaUstic and un- 
 scrupulous oppressors, loi ; the 
 specious cry of, raised by 
 Charles I's opponents, 105, 
 106, 112, 138, 156; the Puri- 
 tans thirsted for " hberty " to 
 oppress the people, 127 j defini- 
 tion of the true liberty of the 
 working man, 159; appalling 
 misery so-called liberty con- 
 ferred on the masses, 159; 
 Jeremy Bentham on the cant 
 of, 159 ; cry of, mere cant, 160 ; 
 the masses lured over to the 
 Puritans by cries of, 267 note ; 
 equality opposed to true, 355 
 
 Life : summed up in the two 
 words select' and reject, 240 
 
 Locke, John : on the best food 
 and drink for children, 210 
 note 
 
 Lords, House of : deprived of 
 much power, 31, 32 ; deserved 
 their fate in 191 1, 102; major- 
 
 ity of the, joined Charles I re- 
 luctantly, 158; contains many 
 elements of sound aristocratic 
 power, 354; criticism of, 354- 
 420 passim; its lack of self -dis- 
 cipline, 362, 363, 364, 369 ; the 
 hereditary principle in,40i ; not 
 really a hereditary chamber, 
 403 ; Pitt's creations disastrous 
 to the character of the, 404; 
 inbreeding not the cause of 
 the failure of, 403, 405, 406; 
 selective principle more active 
 than the hereditary principle 
 in the, 466, 407, 408; ignoble 
 character of the, 407; list of 
 lawyers in the, 409, 410; list 
 of business men in the, 412, 
 413; not self-selective, 414, 
 
 Luddites : their movement dis- 
 cussed in relation to machinery, 
 69; execution of sixteen, for 
 machine breaking, 70; their 
 hostility to machinery, 131 
 note 
 
 Lunacy : increasing in England, 
 
 38s 
 Luther : his doctrine of the 
 omnipotence of the individual 
 conscience, 88; his ugliness, 
 334; his son a proof of heredity, 
 375 note 
 
 Macaulay : his stupid estimate 
 of Strafford, 123; his idea of 
 a gentleman, 280 note; his 
 muddle-headedness, 284 
 
 MACHiAVELti ; on the liberty of 
 the Church, 25; on conspi- 
 racies being' of little account 
 under a good ruler, 34 notej 
 on the Prince bemg the in- 
 spirer of good counsels, 139, 
 140; on political and private 
 morality being different, 282; 
 on the necessity for a Prince to 
 
 GG 
 
 449 
 
INDEX 
 
 appear to have good qualities, 
 282 note; his opponents, 
 among others the Jesuits, the 
 Huguenots, Frederick the Great 
 and Mettemich, 283; his sup- 
 porters, among others Charles 
 V, Henry HI and Henry IV 
 of France, Bacon, Richelieu 
 and Napoleon, 285; advises 
 princes to patronise ability 
 and those proficient in art, 
 418 
 
 Machinery: its degrading effects 
 foreseen by few in England, 
 36; capital punishment for 
 destruction of, 44, 69; intro- 
 duced without hesitation, 45; 
 its evils due to lack of control, 
 49; its introduction a definite 
 act of taste, 49; inseparable 
 from capitalism, 50 note, 133; 
 never "placed" by the English 
 aristocrat, 65, 67 ; viewed with 
 suspicion by the Tudors and 
 Stuarts, 68 note ; Samuel Butler 
 on machinery as a slave- 
 driver, 69 note; rebellion of 
 the workmen against, 69 ; exe- 
 cution of sixteen Luddites for 
 breaking, 70; poor quality of 
 work done by, 70; Lord 
 Byron's speech against, 70; 
 Charles I's suspicion of, 132, 
 ^33) ^3^') where to draw the 
 line in the evolution of, 134 
 
 Maeterlinck : a Puritan owing 
 to lack of culture, 180 
 
 Mahommed : a specimen of 
 flourishing life, 257 
 
 Manchu aristocracy : their rule 
 in China, 16, 17 
 
 Marriage: Theognis on mixed 
 marriages as a source of 
 degeneracy, 306 ; Alexander 
 the Great's foolish encourage- 
 ment of mixed, 306; mixed 
 marriages proscribed by early 
 
 Romans, 307; and by Con- 
 stantine the Great, 307, 319; 
 misalliances condemned by 
 Manu, 319; consanguineous 
 marriages multiply chances of 
 handing on both good and evil 
 qualities, 331; Henry IV of 
 France, his bad, 381, 382; 
 consanguineous marriages a 
 cause of degeneracy, only a 
 modem idea, 385; modem 
 view of, as a road to happiness, 
 424, 425. See Inbreeding and 
 Cross-breeding. — ^Marriage of 
 cousins. See Cousins and 
 Darwin, George 
 Masses, the : too deeply engaged 
 in the struggle for existence 
 to rule, 38; forced to defend 
 themselves against exploitation, 
 47; their innate incapacity to 
 rule well, 73, 74, 75; not im- 
 pressed by plutocratic solutions 
 of social evils, 85; failure of 
 English aristocracy to see that 
 their literature was good, 91; 
 neglect of their bodies in 
 England, 94, 95; the duty of 
 power to secure the welfare of 
 the people, 102 ; Charles I's rule 
 considered primarily the wel- 
 fare of, 1 19 note; the true atti- 
 tude of, towards Strafford, 154 
 note; on the side of Charles I, 
 159, 161 note; misery of, 
 owing to so-called Uberty, 159; 
 dehxmianised by besotting 
 labours, 235; not necessary 
 for the, to understand and 
 judge their mlers, 264; the 
 sjrmpathetic response of the 
 people the pre-requisite of 
 aristocratic rule, 265; lured 
 over to the Puritans by cries of 
 " Liberty," 267 note ;deleterious 
 effects of meddling in foreign 
 affairs on the, in a democracy, 
 
 45P 
 
INDEX 
 
 282-5 demand patrons rather 
 than representatives, 294 note ; 
 natural convervatisrti of, 358 
 
 Mate : importance of the choice 
 of a, for great men, 380, 381, 
 382, 383 ; like should mate with 
 like, 383, 384; not best when a 
 complement, 386, 387, 388 
 
 Mencius : on the beauty of the 
 superior man, 12; concedes 
 right of revolution to badly 
 governed people, 14 
 
 Menial : menial office sanctified 
 by the aristocrat, 29 ; takes an 
 artist to convert a, into a 
 minion, 61 ; English gentle- 
 man's incapacity to do this, 61 ; 
 does not recoil even from pain 
 if a nobler life gives it a higher 
 purpose, 80 ; patriarchal spirits 
 know how to make minions of 
 meiiials, 80; menial office of 
 to-day robbed of all human 
 sanction, 80; mehial office a 
 dirty job, 81 ; menial offices 
 must always be performed, 81 
 
 Mill, J.' S. : his contention that 
 popular government can be as 
 oppressive as any other, 75; 
 on the importance of imagina- 
 tion, 90 note J on the need of 
 superior guidance for ordinary 
 mankind, 372, 373 
 
 Miners : no protection for, before 
 1842, St note 
 
 Mines : children in, 52 ; children 
 harnassed to trucks in, at a 
 time when harnessing of dogs 
 to carts had been abolished, 53 
 note ; cruelty in, 235 
 
 Minion. See Menial 
 
 Misery : df modern times blacker 
 djid more hopeless than any 
 other, 79; unglorified by any 
 grand purpose or grarid caste, 
 86 ; blacker than any other be- 
 cause of the separation between 
 
 master and man, 82; of the 
 upper classes due to giiilty 
 conscience, 83; not a check 
 on population, 83; spread by 
 modern commercial culture, 
 98; caused by the dissolution 
 of the monasteries, 108 note; 
 appalling misery conferred on 
 the masses by so-called liberty, 
 159 ; the chief propeJlitig power 
 of democracy in England, 237, 
 
 358 
 
 Missionaries : sent to China 
 while unparalleled abuses ex- 
 isted in England, 53 note, 95 
 
 Monasteries : the misery caused 
 by the dissolution of the, to8 
 note, 109 
 
 Morality : lax in a fluid popula- 
 tion, 71, 72; much the same 
 in all ranks, according to 
 Herbert Spencer, 76 ; the first 
 principle of, 99; triumph of 
 the Puritans meant the intro- 
 duction of a new, 161, 162; 
 pre-requisites for a healthy 
 sexual, 203; relation of public 
 to' private, 282-286; intet- 
 herd and intra-herd, 286-291 
 
 Moses : a specimen of flourishing 
 life, 257 ; parentage of, 339 ; the 
 child of incest, 342 ; his beauty, 
 342 ; a second son, 363 note 
 
 Motors : success of, a sign of the 
 vulgarity of the powerful and 
 wealthy, 72; the impudence 
 of the owners of, 271 ; advent 
 of, only tolerated by a spfiritless 
 and wholly subject people, 272 ; 
 inconsiderateness of motor 
 olvnersi 272 
 
 Mutilation : an absurd test of 
 the law of heredity, 392, 393 
 
 Napoleon : his melancholy, 19 
 note; on respecting the burden, 
 19, 20, 21 note, 22; a repre- 
 
 GG2 
 
 451 
 
INDEX 
 
 sentativc of flourishing life, 20 ; 
 able warriors attracted to, 260 ; 
 his support of Machiavelli, 285 ; 
 the social instinct strongest in, 
 312 ; his beauty, 333 ; a third 
 son, 363 note, 376; would have 
 been comparatively unimport- 
 ant in ancient Egypt, 372 ; his 
 unworthy son, 375 ; his fastidi- 
 ous taste, 416 
 
 Negro slave trade : abolished 
 while English industrial slaves 
 were cruelly oppressed, 53; 
 Lord Eroughajn, the opponent 
 of factory legislation, , helped 
 to abolish, 56 note 
 
 Nietzsche : th,e superficial Nietz- 
 schean, 99; the Ante-Chx\st, 
 334; his transvaluation of 
 values, 262 note; on aristo- 
 cracy, 399 ; on reproduction as 
 a sign of a certain impotence 
 of will, 322 note; a first son, 
 
 377 
 Nonconformists, See Dissen- 
 ters 
 
 Obedience : the only way of 
 using superiority, 8; implies 
 protection, 47 ; to taste the 
 soundest form of egoism, 248 
 
 Parliament : the Parliament 
 Act, 31-33, 85, a belated ex- 
 pression of revolt, 39 ; became 
 practised, in hostile tactics 
 against the Crown under James 
 I, no; rule of, meant rule of 
 landowiier and lawyer at the 
 expense of the poor, 117 ; taxes 
 on food first introduced by a 
 free, 121; opposed to the 
 liberty of the people, 355 
 
 Patriarchal : patriarchal family 
 the true image of a free people, 
 77; patriarchal spirits know 
 how to inspire devotion in their 
 
 subordinates and make minions 
 of menials, 80; patriarchal 
 spirit in dealing with domestic 
 servants, 81; the Insurance 
 Act, anti-patriarchal, 82 ; patri- 
 archal relationship destroyed 
 by sixteenth-century innova- 
 tions, 109 ; Charles I's patri- 
 archal concern for the welfare 
 of the people, 127 ; Charles I's 
 patriarchal policy, 127 ; Charles 
 I's patriarchal government, 138, 
 1,58,; ;patriardial govemmeint 
 necessary, to preserve health 
 and beauty in a nation, 175 ; 
 Charles I the most patriarchal 
 of English monarchs, 232 
 
 Patriots, so-called. See Puri- 
 tans 
 
 Paul, Saint : the Apostle of 
 anarchy and amateurism, 88 
 
 Pauper : characterless nature of 
 the modem, 35 ; and the cause 
 ^hereof, 66; increase in the 
 number of able-bodied paupers, 
 66 
 
 Peasantry : their discontent in 
 the Middle Ages, 42, 43 ; agra- 
 rian oppression always the cause 
 of their rising, 59 ; Gamier on 
 the misery of the, 62; on the 
 fine spirit of the, 62 ; danger of 
 England losing her, 64 
 
 Peers, English : themselves re- 
 sponsible for being stripped of 
 power, 31 ; the recent creation 
 of the majority of, 37; re- 
 cruited from capitalists, 38 ; at 
 heart democrats and plebeians, 
 97 ; number created ty various 
 monarchs, 403, 404; list of 
 some quite recent creations, 
 406-407; list of some, con- 
 nected with law, 409, 410 ; list 
 of some, connected with trade, 
 412, 413; their lack of taste, 
 416-41^ 
 
 45a 
 
INDEX 
 
 People : government always by 
 consent of the, 14; their- in- 
 dustry the reward of the ruler, 
 23; the importance of their 
 character, 23 ; their taste should 
 be founded on a higher au- 
 thority, 24; discontent and 
 sickness among the, in Eng- 
 lajid, 35 ; can never be benefi- 
 cent rulers, 74, 75, 76 ; on the 
 side of Charles I, 159, 161 
 note ; Charles I the martyr of 
 the, 164; Parliament opposed 
 to the liberty of the, 355. See 
 Masses 
 
 Personality : specious import- 
 ance of, in modem times, 370, 
 
 371,372 
 
 Petrarch: on the ruler being the 
 father of his subjects, 20 note 
 
 Pious Fraud : in founding re- 
 ligions, 169^171 ; the Puritans 
 past masters of, 172 
 
 Plutocrats : difference between 
 ruler-aristocrats and, 18 j their 
 irresponsibility, 38; supported 
 by half-besotted slaves, 49 
 
 Poor, English : starvation of the, 
 44; their misery, 54 note; 
 feigned indictments brought 
 against, 595 poor relief in the 
 British Isles, 66 ; the idle poor, 
 article on, 66 note; difficulties 
 of Edward VI and Elizabeth 
 with, 109; Commission ap- 
 pointed by Charles I to inquire 
 into laws for the relief of the 
 poor, 129 
 
 Popery : Puritans' specious cry 
 of " No Popery," 112 
 
 Population : fluidity of modern, 
 71,72 
 
 Power : responsibility incumbent 
 upon, 38; derived ultimately 
 from the nation, 38 ; the duty 
 of, to secure the welfare of the 
 people, 102 
 
 Primogeniture : Jacob's inter- 
 ference with the law of, 340 
 note, 364; Jewish doctrine of, 
 341, 342j 346 ; in England, 363 ; 
 the law of, should be elastic, 
 364 ; and heredity, 374; many 
 illustrious men first sons, 377 ; 
 slight natural bias in favour of, 
 377 ; Darwin on, 377 note 
 
 Progress : mere change falsely 
 welcomed as, 68; speed re- 
 garded as, 71, 72; futility of 
 charitable efforts to mitigate 
 evils of, 92 ; deceptive title for 
 undesirable innovations, 92 ; 
 the unscrupulous and irre- 
 sponsible civilisation of, 105; 
 mechanical innovations re- 
 garded as, 132 ; modern worship 
 of so-called, 263 
 
 Proletariat. See Masses 
 
 Property : has its duties as well 
 as its rights, 58; may be a 
 divine and beneficent power, 
 237 ; divine dignity of, violated 
 in England, 238 ; Socialist case 
 against abuses of, 238 ; Cobbett 
 on, 239 
 
 Prostitution : unknown under 
 certain conditions, 202, 203; 
 the horrors of, under Puritanical 
 conditions, 204 
 
 Protection : must be the reward 
 of allegiance, 10 note; not 
 afforded by English rulers, 47 
 
 Protestantism : the religion of 
 amateurism and anarchy, 87, 
 88 note. 
 
 Prvnne : his hatred of beauty, 
 165,200,201; his fulminations 
 against alcohoHc beverages, 206 
 
 Puritans : modem ugliness due 
 to, 51; their deportation of 
 English slaves, 54; their doc- 
 trine that things of the body 
 ddJ|Dt matter, 57 ; theiiiltred 
 of sex, 91,, 183, 201, 202, 203; 
 
 453 
 
INDEX 
 
 their contempt of the body, 95, 
 199, 200 ; their specious cry of 
 " Liberty " and '' No Popery," 
 los, 106, 112; their intiipate 
 connection with trade, in; 
 Queen Elizabeth's hatred of 
 them, 113; their brutality, 
 113, 231, 23s; their insistence 
 on the enforcement' of laws 
 against Catholics, 114, 115; 
 their thirst for liberty to op- 
 press the people, 127; their 
 Sabbatarianism, 129, 189-193; 
 their impudent assumption of 
 omniscience, 142 ; trade on the 
 side of the Puritans in the 
 Grand Rebellion, 160, 161; 
 their triumph meant the intro- 
 duction of a new morality, 161, 
 162 ; past masters of the pious 
 fraud, 172; their invention of 
 the religion of capitalistic in- 
 dustry, 173 onwards; defini- 
 tion of, 177-180; the two kinds 
 of, 178^-180; their hatred of 
 beauty and art, 181, 182, 200 ; 
 names and trades of some of the 
 Puritan leaders, 184-186; their 
 object to make the English- 
 man miserable, 189; their 
 suppression of festivities, tga, 
 193; their attempt to establish 
 a credo, 194 ; their association 
 of high spirits with the Devil, 
 194, 195; the Puiritans and 
 prostitution, 204; their laws 
 against so-called fornication, 
 204; their alteration of the 
 Englishman's body, 205; their 
 introduction of depressing foods 
 and drinks, 205-.-227; first to 
 introduce indirect taxation of 
 labour, 214; their apprecia- 
 tion of tobacco smoking, 226 
 M||e; their slave trade, 233; 
 ;^W*ttskJl£Xaste, 243; «#mp- 
 tion under the, 282 
 
 PuTOU AYO : rubber atrocities,^ 56 
 Pyorrhoea : 220 
 
 Quakers : drew piFofit in times 
 of scarcity by having kept back 
 large quantities of corn, 136; 
 Cobbett's loathing of, 136 
 
 Quality: The Grand Rebellion 
 a fight between quantity and, 
 50; Tudor and Stuart regard 
 for, 50, 131, 133, 135 ; Charles 
 I's fight for, 105; James I's 
 and Charles I's regard for, 133; 
 Charles I's regard for, 137, 138 
 
 Quassia Chips : as a hc^ sub- 
 stitute, 2i8 note. 
 
 Race : a matter of instinct, 302 ; 
 Theognis on wealth mixing 
 races, 304; Grobineau on the 
 stability of a pure, 320 note; 
 necessary for producing an 
 example of flourishing life, 362 
 
 Rank : the obligations of/ 7 ; 
 should depend on intensity of 
 race-beauty, will and instinct 
 in the individual, 327 
 
 Reynolds's Newspapers con- 
 demnation of beauty in, X7,6 
 
 Rebellion, the Grand : a struggle 
 between good and bad taste, 
 50, 51, 1S7 ; its aim the intro- 
 duction of a new morality, 162, 
 183 
 
 Revolution : rarely economical, 
 10 note ; justifiaUe in the case 
 of badly ruled peoples, 14, 266; 
 Parliament Act a, 31; demo- 
 cratic revolt never fruitful, 73; 
 inconceivable under a good 
 ruling caste, 90; salutary, im^ 
 possible under a democracy, 267 
 
 Romans : in their best period 
 hostile to foreigners, 307, 310 ; 
 mixed marriages proscribed by 
 the early, 307; their decline 
 due to cross-breeding, 308, 323 
 
 454 
 
INDEX 
 
 RUL£R : essentially the pro- 
 tector, 8 J good judgment one 
 of the qMflliities of the true, n ; 
 the true, always beautiful, ii, 
 12; difference between the 
 ruler-aristocrat and the pluto- 
 crat, i8; not happy in the 
 ordinary sense, 18 ; his respect 
 for the- burden-bearer, 19 ; the 
 true, the father of bis subjects, 
 20 note; the true, immune 
 from class envy, 34; the real, 
 extinct in England, 46; lack 
 of taste among modfrn here- 
 ditary rulers, 47 ; charity never 
 chosen as a solution of social 
 problems by the true, 84; de- 
 mand for, to solve problems of 
 State, 87 ; Charles I a true, 253 
 
 RussELLi, Lord John : the friend 
 of factory legislation, 51 
 
 Sabbath. See Sunday 
 
 Salvation Army : a sign of 
 misery, 35; a preposterous 
 piece of sul^ect meddlesome- 
 ness under good rulers, 90 
 
 Science : followers of, not repce- 
 sentatives of flourishing life, 
 3 ; its confirmation of the fact 
 that tradition rears heao/ty, 12 ; 
 no ruler mind' at the back of 
 medepi, 67; meehanical, its 
 rise in the sixteenth century, 
 131 ; begjns to confirm the 
 wisdom of the ancients, 300; 
 proves that there is very httle 
 accident in the production of 
 great men^ 361; the modern 
 unwieldy substitute for good 
 taste, 383; forgetful of the 
 spirit, 392 
 
 Selfishness : necessary to the 
 weak, 278 note 
 
 Sex: low sexuality necessary 
 for modem commercial life, 
 172; high spirits, energy and 
 
 vigour intimately connected 
 with sex-instinct, 175, 183; 
 healthy sexuality an c^stacle 
 to business life, 176; Puritan 
 hatred of, 91, 183, 201, 202, 
 203; modern confusion over 
 the management of, 198; sex 
 instinct stimulated by beauty, 
 201; low sexuality of modern 
 man and woman owing to 
 Puritanism, 202 ; sex morality 
 in small communities, 203, 203 ; 
 preirequjsites for healthy sexual 
 morality, 203; the object of 
 the Puritans to atrophy sex, 
 203; stimulus to, provided by 
 good old English ale, 211,. 212, 
 213; sexual potency impaired 
 by coffee, 224, 225; depressed 
 by tobacco, 225 note; modern 
 confusion in rektion of sex to 
 sex, 252 ; enfeebled by long 
 inbreeding, 392 ' 
 
 Shaftesbury, Lord : his protec- 
 tion of the people, 51 ; factory 
 reforms introduced by, 56; an 
 exception among bis fellows, 
 79, 97; his opposition to the 
 Reform Bills, 359; "demo- 
 cracy " a term of reproach to, 
 360 
 
 Ship Money; never a burden- 
 soime tax, 120; contributed to 
 the naval victories under Crom- 
 well, 121 
 
 Shopkeepers : Nemesis over- 
 comes all societies victimised 
 by, 49 ; the power of thwarted, 
 50; their cry for a two to one 
 standard in ships of war, 62 ; 
 the enemies of Charles I, 107 ; 
 their invasion of' the rural 
 districts in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, III ; Charles I's taxation 
 of, i2r ; their hatred of Charles 
 I, 138; umdesirability of in- 
 crease of that cl^,^ 227, 228; 
 
 45:5 
 
INDEX 
 
 the English a nation of> 230; 
 Brahmans forbidden to associ- 
 ate withj 337 
 
 Slavery : parliamentary, 31 ; 
 plutocrats standing on a foun- 
 dation of half-besotted slaves, 
 49 ; in England after the aboli- 
 
 , tion of the negro slave trade, 
 53 ; of the English peasant, 59 ; 
 the modem factory slave, 67 
 note, 175; the machine slave, 
 69 note ; ugliness, ill-health 
 and lack of vitality of the 
 modem slave, 175, 176; neces- 
 sary for the modern slave's day 
 of rest to be gloomy, 189 ; for 
 countenancing so-called forni- 
 cation, 204; for drunkenness, 
 213; the slaves of industrialism 
 reared by the Puritans, 231; 
 under the Puritans, 233, 234; 
 Irish sent into, by Cromwell, 233 
 
 Socialism : rampant owing to 
 ignorant plutocratic solution 
 of social evils, 85; its case 
 against abuses of property, 238 ; 
 its attack on wealth superficial, 
 
 239 
 
 SooL : pernicious doctrine of the 
 salvation of the, 95 ; the danger 
 of glorifying the, 199, 200; the 
 reasons the ugly and botched 
 have for glorifying the, 333; 
 pernicious doctrine of the 
 beauty of the, 337, 345 
 
 Spencer, Herbert : on Beauty, 
 13 j on popular government 
 being as oppressive as any 
 other, 76; his belief that 
 things can be safely left to 
 themselves, 84 
 
 Spiritual Strength : reared by 
 long tradition, 27; dependent 
 on long ancestry, 28 
 
 Sports: Puritan suppression of, 
 129, 130, 189, 201 ; James I's 
 Book of Sports, P30 
 
 456 
 
 Stage Plays : forbidden by th( 
 Puritsuis, 193 
 
 Strafford : his fate, zo6 ; fought 
 greed and' opulence for ^i 
 sake of the people, 107 ; nc 
 respecter of persons, no, 141 
 foresaw that Parliamentary 
 rule would mean oppression oi 
 the poor, 117; his speech be 
 fore the Council of the North, 
 118 ; his readiness to spend his 
 private money in the public 
 service, 122, 123; his ufH-ight- 
 ness,i4i; his championship oj 
 the people, 145; his beauty, 
 145; reasons for his so-called 
 apostasy, 146$ an extremel) 
 able ruler, 147; his ancient 
 lineage, 147; hostility amon^ 
 the powerful against, 148; hi: 
 restoration of Church lands, 148 
 his good administration ol 
 Ireland, 148, 149 ; his impeach- 
 ment " the vengeance of his 
 enemies," 150; Bill of Attain- 
 der against, 151, 152 note 
 Cobbett on the cowardice oi 
 his friends, 152 note; Charlef 
 I's pleading on his behalf, 153 
 the mob incited against lum b) 
 the Puritans, 153; his lettei 
 to Charles I asking him to sigr 
 his death-warrant, 154, 155 
 regarded the assent of thi 
 people as a warrant of gooc 
 rule, 265 note; his mistrust o: 
 Parliament, 355 ; his suspiciot 
 of lawyers, 408 
 
 Sobject : subject movement; 
 mere patchwork, 85 ; no supe 
 rior purpose behind subject 
 movements, 86; natural in- 
 competence for ruling of th« 
 subject mind, 86; hopeless 
 muddle the result of subject 
 meddling with ruling, 87 ; the 
 Salvation Army a preposterous 
 
INDEX 
 
 piece of subject meddlesome- 
 ness under good rulers, 90; 
 Temperance movement a stupid 
 subject movement, 91 ; charity 
 a subject solution, 92; in- 
 adequate education supplied in 
 England by subject efforts, 94; 
 degeneration of the subject 
 into a serf, 102; never op- 
 pressed by Charles I, 120 
 
 Sunday : strict Sunday observ- 
 ance laws of the Puritans, 129] 
 repealed by Charles 1, 129, 130 ; 
 Sunday amusements granted to 
 the people by James I, 130J 
 gloomy, insisted upon by the 
 Puritans, 189-192 
 
 Superior Man : his taste the 
 taste of flourishing life, 6; 
 requires people to be ready to 
 recognise him, 7j more likely 
 to appear in ages of order and 
 long tradition> 11, 12, 13; al- 
 ways beautiful, 11; his creation 
 of culture, 98; minor artists 
 dependent on the, 248 
 
 Suttee : 167, 168 note 
 
 Talent: the obligations of, 7, 
 27 ; the production of the man 
 of, not to be ascribed to chance, 
 361 ; 
 
 Taste : of science too slow and 
 indefinite, 3; the artist the 
 man of, 4; the man of, 5; 
 the rarity of the man of, 7; 
 the man of, sets the tone of 
 his people, 16 ; of the Venetian 
 aristocracy, 22; bad, leads to 
 decadence, 23; of the people 
 should be founded on higher 
 authority, 24; the possession 
 of the true aristocrat, 24; 
 English aristocrat's lack of, 47, 
 416, 417; ought to incline 
 those above to cultivate genuine 
 superiority, 80; the power of 
 
 wealth over, 106 j the treasure of 
 a bygone age, 166 ; of Charles I 
 in art and literature, i8i, 182 ; 
 the greatest power in life, 241 ; 
 the importance of, 241-256; 
 conflict of good and bad, in the 
 seventeenth century, 244 ; Who 
 possesses the touchstone of? 
 244; the specimen of flourish- 
 ing life possesses it, 246; im- 
 position of, by the voice of 
 flourishing life the highest 
 altruism, 247; men of, assert 
 their supremacy themselves, 
 259; necessity for the continual 
 exercise of, 269; leading to 
 hatred of the foreigner among 
 the ancients, 302, 309 
 
 Tea : one of the deleterious sub- 
 stitutes for old English ale, 
 219-226; popular . petition 
 against, 223 
 
 Tobacco : an anaphrodisiac, 225 
 note; dislike of, on the part 
 of James I and Charles I, 225 
 note ; Puritans' appreciation of, 
 226 note. 
 
 Tories: their stupid theory of 
 class hatred, 34; their missed 
 opportunity, 102; might have 
 taken the place of the Crown 
 as patriarchal rulers, 102 ; but 
 obeyed the behest of laissez- 
 faire') 102 
 
 Towns : growth of, 42, 43; good 
 enough for sharpers and weak- 
 lings, 60 ; rise of powerful 
 middle class in the,. 109 
 
 Trade : the Grand Rebellion 
 fight of, against tradition, 50; 
 intimate connection of Puri- 
 tanism with, III, 174; Charles 
 I's constant interference with, 
 50, 1-36, !i38. note; invention 
 by the Puritans of the religion 
 of, 173; success in, no criterion 
 of the possession of . ruler- 
 
 457 
 
INDEX 
 
 qualities, 412; list of some 
 peers connected with, 412, 413 
 
 Tradesmkn. See Shopkeefkks 
 
 Trades Unions-: transportation 
 for forming, 44; created by 
 the people in self-defence, 46 j 
 foriited owing to bad rulers, 
 60 
 
 Tradition : favourable to the 
 appearance of the superior 
 man, il, 12 j productive' of 
 bfeauty, 12; necessary for the 
 rearing of Beauty, Art, Will, 
 Conscience and Spiritual 
 Strength, 27 ; requires stability 
 for its establishment, 28; the 
 Grand Rebellion the struggle 
 of, against trade, 50; rears 
 character, 348; necessary for 
 the production of talent and 
 genius, 361; necessary for 
 producing an example of flour- 
 ishing life, 362; large families 
 necessary for carrying on a 
 great, 376; believers, and dis- 
 believers in the transmission 
 of acquired characteristics 
 united in the word tradition, 
 397j 3^; belief of ancient 
 aristocriacies in the importance 
 of,' 398; value of traditional 
 occupations for both aristo- 
 cracy and people, 399, 400, 401 
 
 Transportation : for poaching 
 and forming Trades Unions, 44 ; 
 to Australia, 54; of English 
 slaves by Puritans, 54; for so- 
 called fornication, 204 
 
 TransvalitatioIj of Values : 
 necessary for the revival of 
 aristocracy, 260, -261 ; accom- 
 plished by the Puritans, 262, 
 263 
 
 Travelling : bad for the man 
 without backbone, 72 
 
 Ugliness : its prevalence in 
 
 modem times, 3, 47, 49, 168; 
 never an attribute of the true 
 aristocrat, 13 ; demands change, 
 28; due to Puritans and Non- 
 conformists, 51 J prevalence of) 
 owing to guidance of voice of 
 impoverished life, '79 
 Unionist Peerage ; indignation 
 of some of them over the I^lia- 
 ment Act, 33 
 
 Vanity : its increase under demo- 
 cracy) 320 note. 
 
 Venice : the suristocracy of, very 
 nearly the ideal rule of the best, 
 22 ; her control of the Church, 
 25; her tasteful aristocracy, 
 367; her Watch Committee, 
 367 note 
 
 Virtue : decline of public, due to 
 class hostility, 82 note ; the rear- 
 ing of, 275 ; Aristotle's concept 
 of, 275, 276; the virtues of the 
 gentleman, 277, 278; the vir- 
 tues, sub-divisions of the in- 
 stincts, 311, 315, 316; possi- 
 bility of cultivating, 316, 317 ; 
 destroyed by cross-breeding, 
 319, 320, 347 J caste virtue, 
 328 ; preserved by inbreed- 
 ing, 329 ; killed by mixed mar- 
 riages, 349; killed by modem 
 conditions, 353 ; preserved 
 by slssortive mating, 384 ; de- 
 stroyed by democracy, 387; 
 dissipated by besotting labour, 
 399 ; the outcome of tradition, 
 400, 401 
 
 Wages : measures to establish 
 
 maximum, 43; poor rates in 
 
 aid of, 44 
 Watch Committee : J. S. Mill 
 
 on necessity for, 14 ; in Venice, 
 
 367 note. 
 Weak : exploitation of the, only 
 
 justifiable for the sake of tme 
 
INDEX 
 
 supenors, loo 
 
 selfishness 
 
 necessary for the, 278 note 
 Wealth : true, beauty and char- 
 acter, 24 note; the responsi- 
 bility incumbent upon, 38; 
 derived ultimately from the 
 nation, 38; cruel and lifeless 
 notion of the Wealth of Nations, 
 44 ; present capitalistic system 
 the natural outcome of the 
 Wealth of Nations, 66 ; may be 
 a divine and beneficent power, 
 237 J Egyptian view of, 238 
 note; divine dignity of, vio- 
 lated, in England, 238; Socialist 
 case against abuses of, 238; 
 Cobbett on, 239 ; superficiality 
 of Socialist attack on, 239; 
 material, regarded as the 
 highest good by modem man, 
 271, 272; no consideration to- 
 day of how wealth is acquired, 
 279; Theognis on wealth mix- 
 ing races, 304; Disraeli on a 
 Utopia of Wealth and Toil, 
 355 note; mere wealth as a 
 standard leads to democracy 
 and ochlocracy, 365 ; a modem 
 test for promotion to the peer- 
 age, 411 ; the bane of the social 
 and political influence of, dis- 
 honestly acquired, 411 
 Wentworth : Sir Thomas. See 
 
 Stratford 
 Will : reared only by long tradi- 
 tion and careful discipline and 
 dependent on aristocratic rule, 
 27; dependent on sound in- 
 stincts getting the mastery, 28 ; 
 
 the manifestation of instinct, 
 309 ; its importance in the life 
 of a nation, 310 ; the relation of 
 instinct to, 311-315 ; Free Will 
 and Determinism, only the 
 weak man has Free Will, 314, 
 315 ; broken by cross-breeding, 
 310, 318, 320; decline of, under 
 democracy, 320; rich repro- 
 ductive powers associated with 
 low order of will power, 322; 
 built up by assortive mating, 
 384; disintegrated by persis- 
 tent cross-breeding, 385; de- 
 stroyed by democracy, 387; 
 modification effected through 
 tlic, 395; reared by tradition, 
 401; should be trained by 
 education, 423, 424 
 Women : the Suffrage Movement 
 a sign of misery, 34, 35 ; their 
 entry into the ranks of in- 
 dustry and commerce, 42; 
 in factories, 52, 57; appalling 
 condition of, in factories, 54 
 note; refusal of Irish to Jillow 
 women to be employed under- 
 ground, 55; effects of female 
 labour on homes of workmen 
 still to be investigated, 57 ; the 
 decline of domestic arts among, 
 57; difficult confinements of, 
 employed in factories, 95; de- 
 leterious effects of tea upon, 
 223 note; Women's Petition 
 against Coffee, 225 ; discontent 
 among, 235 ; laisser-aUer in the 
 treatment of, by men and vice 
 versA, 270 
 
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