II.

_IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY._


Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always
consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to
the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation
and morals than the democracy they live among.

I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of people
at large (and especially of that particular European people which
"dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies and
democracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a common
though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the
aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners,
than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a
boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profound
superiority by birth to the world around him--a superiority as of fine
porcelain to common clay--that the world around him has at last actually
begun to accept him at his own valuation. Most English people in
particular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures and
wines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But history
shows us the exact opposite. It is a plain historical fact, provable by
simple enumeration, that almost all the aristocracies the world has ever
known have taken their rise in the conquest of civilised and cultivated
races by barbaric invaders; and that the barbaric invaders have seldom