aristocracy (out of which the monarchy is but a slight excrescence) belongs to the strongest, most brave, most frank men as theirs of right. Pomp and ceremony are but badges of a distinction which has its foundation in nature. They win perhaps meretriciously some additional respect and awe from the folly of mankind, but respect and awe sufficient would be paid to those aristocrats had they nothing but the chastened pomp of a sword in their right hand, and a shield on their left arm. As order and civilisation increase, their pomp is retained and increased while it loses its political significance, and those who display themselves in it become less and less worthy of any distinction. At last when plutocracy arises, who is he that stalks beneath the gilded robe, that bears a coronet upon his head, and calls himself an aristocrat? A common man, just one of those who are moving all about him; in no way distinguished by culture, by strength, by character, or anything but an accident of birth, from the plutocrat whose father swept the shop. He has shrivelled downward toward the ordinary level of citizens; the plutocrat has risen a little above it. They meet upon a common table-land. Both love pomp and glitter, because they can afford it, and it is all that shows them to be other than common citizens. There is but one thing wanting: let the aristocrat lay aside his title, as he did at Sienna; or let the plutocrat buy or work for a title, as he did at Genoa and Venice; or let the two call themselves nobles, and all who are poorer commoners, and then the fusion is accomplished.

There are upon the whole three different modes in which this fusion takes place the difference being simply caused by the degree of perfection of the national development. In a nation of brief and rapid development, the intervening stages are passed through almost imperceptibly; the aristocracy becomes en masse a plutocracy: of that I have given instances in this chapter. In a more slow development the plutocracy grows up-distinct from

and hostile to the old patricians, who maintain their own; that was the case in Athens, in Rome, in France, and twenty other places; and has ended always in the annihilation of the aristocracy as an independent body, and the absorption of the individual relics of it into the court plutocracy. Last comes the slowest development, when the plutocracy, as it forms itself, is individually drawn into the ancient aristocracy, and in a second generation is not to be distinguished from it. As in the other fusions aristocracy is absorbed, in this, on the other hand, plutocracy is, for a time at least, absorbed into aristocracy. Of this I purpose to speak in the next chapter.

CHAP. XVII.

PLUTOCRACY IN ENGLISH LIFE.

"Every free constitution goes like ourselves through life towards death; whatever moderates its consuming rapidity, whatever produces obstacles which require time to overcome, prolongs its existence. But a state has this advantage over an individual, that by constantly raising in an ever-increasing circle more persons to its highest freedom, it can carry back its life, and more than once, to youth, and live through it again with fresh energy."-NIEBUHR.

"Length of days be in her right hand, and in her left riches and honour: may her ways be the ways of pleasantness and all her paths be peace."

COMPROMISE is the principle of the British constitution, and it is so because fusion is the characteristic of British life. Everywhere else each social order is comparatively clear and easy to be distinguished and defined. In England all classes, orders, ranks, and distinctions run into and blend with each other in a manner which excites the admiration of those who contemplate, and the despair of those who would describe it. For the one know that this complexity, this universal interlacing, and the consequent anomalies, are the surest guarantee against absolutism of every description, and the others feel their hearts sink within them when they would pourtray every thread in such a tangled web.*

This fusion and balance of all the social elements is a mark of the national acme, and I have endeavoured to indicate it by crossing the lines which, in the scheme in page 96, indicate the social forces. In England, where the acme is more fully developed than in any other country, this characteristic is the more conspicuous.

But a distinction should here be made between complexity of social life and complexity of government. When the former exists the latter generally follows, but often a very complicated governmental machine—as in Sparta, in Venice, in France under the restored Bourbons, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the United States of America-is devised to provide, ineffectually enough, those checks against absolutism, whether democratic, despotic, or of whatever other kind, which the simplicity of the social life fails to give. In England all the constitutional potentates are representatives of real interests in the country, and the complications of our constitution arise from and reflect the complications of our social order.

Plutocracy has not been in England a distinct and hereditary order; it has not grown up among us by any of the simple methods enumerated in the last Chapter, it has neither entirely grown out of enriched citizens, as in Athens, nor entirely by means of trading nobility, as in some towns of Italy; but so far as there is a plutocracy in England it has resulted from a union of the two-the younger branches of the noble houses meeting on equal terms with the more successful citizens, and forming no hereditary order of plutocrats, but supplying new families to the old aristocracy of the country.

Let us suppose that in England the aristocracy had for these four or five centuries gone on, like the old aristocracies of the continent, producing children, every one of whom was noble and above all professional or gainful occupa tions except those of war and haply of the church. Let us suppose the consequent division or encumbrance of the estates of the aristocracy, the proportional diminution of individual means with the increase of the titled individuals, the consequent dependence of the greater portion of the class upon public functions, and the consequent subserviency to the Crown and the Minister. Let us suppose that the old merchants of England, the Childs, the

Greshams, and even to come down to our age, the Thellusons, the Beckfords*, the Jones Loyds, the Heathcotes, the Peels, the Strutts, had in their turn transmitted to their descendants immense and increasing wealth, and an hereditary antipathy to the old aristocracy. Let us imagine the natural consequences that in every struggle between the aristocratic and democratic elements these wealthy families would have sided against their hereditary foes, and produced the unequal contest of an over-numerous and impoverished aristocracy matched against wealthy and educated families well fitted for government, a turbulent democracy, and possibly an ambitious sovereign. Let us put this case, imaginary only when placed upon English ground, but a true representation of the stern reality in France, in Rome, in Athens, in Florence, and in some measure in Spain and Germany, and then ask why this disastrous contest and its necessary catastrophe has not been witnessed in England, and the natural solution will be furnished by the peculiar construction of the English aristocracy. The principle of primogeniture has saved us from a caste of aristocrats, and by thus modifying the peculiar frame of our social existence has modified the constitution which is the effect and the manifestation of our social existence.

The simple history of the aristocracies on the continent of Europe has been that of a caste, at first powerful by their domains, which their swords had won, holding themselves aloof from trade, and despising it as the occupation of Jews and runaway serfs. As these haughty families increased their estates became less able to support them. Two alternatives were then open: the first was to resort to public functions, not for the dignity or glory of holding them, but for the salary, whence arise a multi

*The family of the slopseller Beckford, after producing the illustrious author of "Vathek," who showed the gorgeous tastes of a plutocrat at Fonthill, was ultimately absorbed into the noble race of Hamilton.