of a Virginia ordinary, calls herself the daughter of a baronet, ’undone in the late rebellion,’—­her father having in truth been a tailor,—­and three of the Council, assuming to themselves an equal splendor of origin, are shown to have been, one ‘a broken exciseman who came over a poor servant,’ another a tinker transported for theft, and the third ’a common pickpocket often flogged at the cart’s tail.’  The ancestry of South Carolina will as little pass muster at the Herald’s Visitation, though I hold them to have been more reputable, inasmuch as many of them were honest tradesmen and artisans, in some measure exiles for conscience’ sake, who would have smiled at the high-flying nonsense of their descendants.  Some of the more respectable were Jews.  The absurdity of supposing a population of eight millions all sprung from gentle loins in the course of a century and a half is too manifest for confutation.  But of what use to discuss the matter?  An expert genealogist will provide any solvent man with a genus et pro avos to order.  My Lord Burleigh used to say, with Aristotle and the Emperor Frederick II. to back him, that ‘nobility was ancient riches,’ whence also the Spanish were wont to call their nobles ricos hombres, and the aristocracy of America are the descendants of those who first became wealthy, by whatever means.  Petroleum will in this wise be the source of much good blood among our posterity.  The aristocracy of the South, such as it is, has the shallowest of all foundations, for it is only skin-deep,—­the most odious of all, for, while affecting to despise trade, it traces its origin to a successful traffick in men, women, and children, and still draws its chief revenues thence.  And though, as Doctor Chamberlayne consolingly says in his ‘Present State of England,’ ’to become a Merchant of Foreign Commerce, without serving any Apprentisage, hath been allowed no disparagement to a Gentleman born, especially to a younger Brother,’ yet I conceive that he would hardly have made a like exception in favour of the particular trade in question.  Oddly enough this trade reverses the ordinary standards of social respectability no less than of morals, for the retail and domestick is as creditable as the wholesale and foreign is degrading to him who follows it.  Are our morals, then, no better than mores after all?  I do not believe that such aristocracy as exists at the South (for I hold with Marius, fortissimum quemque generosissimum) will be found an element of anything like persistent strength in war,—­thinking the saying of Lord Bacon (whom one quaintly called inductionis dominus et Verulamii) as true as it is pithy, that ’the more gentlemen, ever the lower books of subsidies.’  It is odd enough as an historical precedent, that, while the fathers of New England were laying deep in religion, education, and freedom the basis of a polity which has substantially outlasted any then existing, the first work of the