The nobles had many irksome privileges; they possessed many onerous rights:  but they maintained public order, they administered justice, they caused the law to be executed, they came to the relief of the weak, they conducted the business of the community.  In proportion as they ceased to do these things, the burden of their privileges appeared more oppressive, and their existence became an anomaly in proportion as they ceased to do these things.”  And the Ancien Regime may be defined as the period in which they ceased to do these things—­in which they began to play the idlers, and expected to take their old wages without doing their old work.

But in any case, government by a ruling caste, whether of the patriarchal or of the feudal kind, is no ideal or permanent state of society.  So far from it, it is but the first or second step out of primeval savagery.  For the more a ruling race becomes conscious of its own duty, and not merely of its own power—­the more it learns to regard its peculiar gifts as entrusted to it for the good of men—­so much the more earnestly will it labour to raise the masses below to its own level, by imparting to them its own light; and so will it continually tend to abolish itself, by producing a general equality, moral and intellectual; and fulfil that law of self-sacrifice which is the beginning and the end of all virtue.

A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble as themselves—­that is at least a fair ideal, tending toward, though it has not reached, the highest ideal of all.

But suppose that the very opposite tendency—­inherent in the heart of every child of man—­should conquer.  Suppose the ruling caste no longer the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, but their equals.  Suppose them—­shameful, but not without example—­actually sunk to be their inferiors.  And that such a fall did come—­nay, that it must have come—­is matter of history.  And its cause, like all social causes, was not a political nor a physical, but a moral cause.  The profligacy of the French and Italian aristocracies, in the sixteenth century, avenged itself on them by a curse (derived from the newly-discovered America) from which they never recovered.  The Spanish aristocracy suffered, I doubt not very severely.  The English and German, owing to the superior homeliness and purity of ruling their lives, hardly at all.  But the continental caste, instead of recruiting their tainted blood by healthy blood from below, did all, under pretence of keeping it pure, to keep it tainted by continual intermarriage; and paid, in increasing weakness of body and mind, the penalty of their exclusive pride.  It is impossible for anyone who reads the French memoirs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to perceive, if he be wise, that the aristocracy therein depicted was ripe for ruin—­yea, already ruined—­under any form of government whatsoever, independent of all political changes.