his gillies can lead in them. The fact is, neither he nor his ancestors
have ever been really civilised. Barbarians in the midst of an
industrial community, they have lived their own life of slaying and
playing, untouched by the culture of the world below them. Knights in
the middle ages, squires in the eighteenth century, they have never
received a tincture of the civilising arts and crafts and industries;
they have fought and fished and hunted in uninterrupted succession since
the days when wild in woods the noble savage ran, to the days when they
pay extravagant rents for Scottish grouse moors. Their very titles are
barbaric and military--knight and earl and marquis and duke, early
crystallised names for leaders in war or protectors of the frontier.
Their crests and coats of arms are but the totems of their savage
predecessors, afterwards utilised by mediæval blacksmiths as
distinguishing marks for the summit of a helmet. They decorate their
halls with savage trophies of the chase, like the Zulu or the Red
Indian; they hang up captured arms and looted Chinese jars from the
Summer Palace in their semi-civilised drawing-rooms. They love to be
surrounded by grooms and gamekeepers and other barbaric retainers; they
pass their lives in the midst of serfs; their views about the position
and rights of women--especially the women of the "lower orders"--are
frankly African. They share the sentiments of Achilles as to the
individuality of Chryseis and Briseis.

Such is the actual aristocrat, as we now behold him. Thus, living his
own barbarous life in the midst of a civilised community of workers and
artists and thinkers and craftsmen, with whom he seldom mingles, and
with whom he has nothing in common, this chartered relic of worse days
preserves from first to last many painful traits of the low moral and
social ideas of his ancestors, from which he has never varied. He
represents most of all, in the modern world, the surviving savage. His