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 culture, jealous of their alliances and their breeding—­the natural and actual leaders in thought and action.  England suffered badly enough as the result of war, with the persecutions of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, and the Black Death, included for full measure.  France suffered also, but Germany fared worst of all.  By the end of the Thirty Years’ War the older feudal nobility had largely disappeared, while the class of “gentlemen” had been almost exterminated.  In France, until the fall of Napoleon III, and in Germany and Great Britain up to the present moment, the recruiting of the formal aristocracy has gone on steadily, but on a different basis and from a different class from anything known before.  Demonstrated personal ability to gain and maintain leadership; distinguished service to the nation in war or statecraft; courage, honour, fealty—­these, in general, had been the ground for admission to the ranks of the aristocracy.  In general, also, advancement to the ranks of the higher nobility was from the class of “gentlemen,” though the Church, the universities, and chivalry gave, during the Middle Ages, wide opportunity for personal merit to achieve the highest honours.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical.  As the upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil slaughter, and assassination, the pressure on the great mass of men (peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called “lower classes”) was increasingly relaxed, and very soon the thin film of aristocracy, further weakened by dilution, broke, and through the crumbling shell burst to the surface those who had behind them no tradition but that of servility, no comprehension of the ideals of chivalry and honour of the gentleman, no stored-up results of education and culture, but only an age-long rage against the age-long dominating class, together with the instincts of craftiness, parsimony, and almost savage self-interest.