instance the result was the great law-givers, philosophers, prophets,
religious leaders, and artists of every sort; in the second, the great
conquerors. Something quite different was now demanded--men who
possessed some of the qualities needed for the development of
imperialism, but who were unhampered by the restrictive influences of
those who had sought perfection. To organize and administer the new
industrial-financial-commercial régime, the leaders must be shrewd,
ingenious, quick-witted, thick-skinned, unscrupulous, hard-headed, and
avaricious; yet daring, dominating, and gifted with keen prevision and
vivid imagination. These qualities had not been bred under any of the
Mediterranean civilizations, or that of Central Europe in the Middle
Ages, which had inherited so much therefrom. The pursuit of perfection
always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort
as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art. This
aristocracy was an accepted and indispensable part of society, and it
was always more or less the same in principle, and always the centre and
source of leadership, without which society cannot endure. It is true
that at the hands of Christianity it acquired a new quality, that of
service as contingent on privilege--one might almost say of privilege as
contingent on service--and the ideals of honour, chivalry, compassion
were established as its object and method of operation even though these
were not always achieved, but the result was not a new creation; it was
an institution as old as society, regenerated and transformed and
playing a greater and a nobler part than ever before.

Between the years 1455 and 1795 this old aristocracy was largely
exterminated. The Wars of the Roses, the massacres of the Reformation,
and the Civil Wars in England; the Thirty Years' War in Germany; the
Hundred Years' War, the Wars of Religion, and the Revolution in France
had decimated the families old in honour, preserving the tradition of