For only just look how the facts combine themselves.  I have said little as yet about our aristocratic class, except that it is splendid.  Yet these, “our often very unhappy brethren,” as Burke calls them, are by no means matter for nothing but ecstasy.  Our charity ought certainly, Burke says, to “extend a due and anxious sensation of pity to the distresses of the miserable great.”  Burke’s extremely strong language about their miseries and defects I will not quote.  For my part, I am always disposed to marvel that human beings, in a position so false, should be so good as these are.  Their reason for existing was to serve as a number of centres in a world disintegrated after the ruin of the Roman Empire, and slowly re-constituting itself.  Numerous centres of material force were needed, and these a feudal aristocracy supplied.  Their large and hereditary estates served this public end.  The owners had a positive function, for which their estates were essential.  In our modern world the function is gone; and the great estates, with an infinitely multiplied power of ministering to mere pleasure and indulgence, remain.  The energy and honesty of our race does not leave itself without witness in this class, and nowhere are there more conspicuous examples of individuals raised by happy gifts of nature far above their fellows and their circumstances.  For distinction of all kinds this class has an esteem.  Everything which succeeds they tend to welcome, to win over, to put on their side; genius may generally make, if it will, not bad terms for itself with them.  But the total result of the class, its effect on society at large and on national progress, are what we must regard.  And on the whole, with no necessary function to fulfil, never conversant with life as it really is, tempted, flattered, and spoiled from childhood to old age, our aristocratic class is inevitably materialized, and the more so the more the development of industry and ingenuity augments the means of luxury.  Every one can see how bad is the action of such an aristocracy upon the class of newly enriched people, whose great danger is a materialistic ideal, just because it is the ideal they can easiest comprehend.  Nor is the mischief of this action now compensated by signal services of a public kind.  Turn even to that sphere which aristocracies think specially their own, and where they have under other circumstances been really effective,—­the sphere of politics.  When there is need, as now, for any large forecast of the course of human affairs, for an acquaintance with the ideas which in the end sway mankind, and for an estimate of their power, aristocracies are out of their element, and materialized aristocracies most of all.  In the immense spiritual movement of our day, the English aristocracy, as I have elsewhere said, always reminds me of Pilate confronting the phenomenon of Christianity.  Nor can a materialized class have any serious and fruitful sense for the power of beauty.  They may imagine themselves to be in pursuit of beauty; but how often, alas, does the pursuit come to little more than dabbling a little in what they are pleased to call art, and making a great deal of what they are pleased to call love!