Scott's genius reproduced so faithfully. Let us look a little higher
and examine humanity as it appears in history. All the noble families
of the eleventh century, most of them (except the royal race of Capet)
extinct to-day, will be found to have contributed to the birth of the
Rohans, Montmorencys, Beauffremonts, and Mortemarts of our time,--in
fact they will all be found in the blood of the last gentleman who is
indeed a gentleman. In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a
bourgeois, and every noble is cousin to a noble. A splendid page of
biblical genealogy shows that in one thousand years three families,
Shem, Ham, and Japhet, peopled the globe. One family may become a
nation; unfortunately, a nation may become one family. To prove this
we need only search back through our ancestors and see their
accumulation, which time increases into a retrograde geometric
progression, which multiplies of itself; reminding us of the
calculation of the wise man who, being told to choose a reward from
the king of Persia for inventing chess, asked for one ear of wheat for
the first move on the board, the reward to be doubled for each
succeeding move; when it was found that the kingdom was not large
enough to pay it. The net-work of the nobility, hemmed in by the
net-work of the bourgeoisie,--the antagonism of two protected races,
one protected by fixed institutions, the other by the active patience
of labor and the shrewdness of commerce,--produced the revolution of
1789. The two races almost reunited are to-day face to face with
collaterals without a heritage. What are they to do? Our political
future is big with the answer.

The family of the man who under Louis XV. was simply called Minoret
was so numerous that one of the five children (the Minoret whose
entrance into the parish church caused such interest) went to Paris to
seek his fortune, and seldom returned to his native town, until he