aristocratic system first winded Republicans at Valmy, and showed at
Jena fourteen years after how much it had learnt from that encounter.

Now our main argument lies in this: that the great mass of a generation
of children born into a country, all those children who have no more
than average intelligence and average moral qualities, will accept the
ostensible institutions of that country at their face value, and will
be almost entirely shaped and determined by that acceptance. Only a
sustained undertone of revolutionary protest can prevent that
happening. They will believe that precedences represent real
superiority, and they will honour what they see honoured, and ignore
what they see treated as of no account. Pious sentiment about Equality
and Freedom will enter into the reality of their minds as little as a
drop of water into a greasy plate. They will act as little in general
intercourse upon the proposition that "the man's the gowd for a' that,"
as they will upon the proposition that "man is a spirit" when it comes
to the alternative of jumping over a cliff or going down by a ladder.

If, however, your children are not average children, if you are so
happy as to have begotten children of exceptional intelligence, it does
not follow that this fact will save them from conclusions quite
parallel to those of the common child. Suppose they do penetrate the
pretence that there is no intrinsic difference between the Royal Family
and the members of the peerage on the one hand, and the average person
in any other class on the other; suppose they discover that the whole
scale of precedence and honour in their land is a stupendous sham;--
what then? Suppose they see quite clearly that all these pretensions of
an inviolate superiority of birth and breeding vanish at the touch of a
Whitaker Wright, soften to a glowing cordiality before the sunny
promises of a Hooley. Suppose they perceive that neither King nor lords