Indeed, many of the political changes were not the causes but the effects of the demoralisation of the noblesse.  Historians will tell you how, as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV. complained that the nobles were quitting their country districts; how succeeding kings and statesmen, notably Richelieu and Louis XIV., tempted the noblesse up to Paris, that they might become mere courtiers, instead of powerful country gentlemen; how those who remained behind were only the poor hobereaux, little hobby-hawks among the gentry, who considered it degradation to help in governing the parish, as their forefathers had governed it, and lived shabbily in their chateaux, grinding the last farthing out of their tenants, that they might spend it in town during the winter.  No wonder that with such an aristocracy, who had renounced that very duty of governing the country, for which alone they and their forefathers had existed, there arose government by intendants and sub-delegates, and all the other evils of administrative centralisation, which M. de Tocqueville anatomises and deplores.  But what was the cause of the curse?  Their moral degradation.  What drew them up to Paris save vanity and profligacy?  What kept them from intermarrying with the middle class save pride?  What made them give up the office of governors save idleness?  And if vanity, profligacy, pride, and idleness be not injustices and moral vices, what are?

The race of heroic knights and nobles who fought under the walls of Jerusalem—­who wrestled, and not in vain, for centuries with the equally heroic English, in defence of their native soil—­who had set to all Europe the example of all knightly virtues, had rotted down to this; their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says, being—­a perfect readiness to fight duels.

Every Intendant, chosen by the Comptroller-General out of the lower-born members of the Council of State; a needy young plebeian with his fortune to make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of his greed, ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a better man—­abler, more energetic, and often, to judge from the pages of De Tocqueville, with far more sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantry—­than was the count or marquis in the chateau above, who looked down on him as a roturier; and let him nevertheless become first his deputy, and then his master.

Understand me—­I am not speaking against the hereditary principle of the Ancien Regime, but against its caste principle—­two widely different elements, continually confounded nowadays.

The hereditary principle is good, because it is founded on fact and nature.  If men’s minds come into the world blank sheets of paper—­which I much doubt—­every other part and faculty of them comes in stamped with hereditary tendencies and peculiarities.  There are such things as transmitted capabilities for good and for evil; and as surely as the offspring of a good horse or dog