2. In The Matter Of Aristocracy

Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always
consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to
the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation
and morals than the democracy they live among.

I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of people
at large (and especially of that particular European people which
"dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies and
democracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a common
though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the
aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners,
than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a
boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profound
superiority by birth to the world around him--a superiority as of fine
porcelain to common clay--that the world around him has at last actually
begun to accept him at his own valuation. Most English people in
particular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures and
wines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But history
shows us the exact opposite. It is a plain historical fact, provable by
simple enumeration, that almost all the aristocracies the world has ever
known have taken their rise in the conquest of civilised and cultivated
races by barbaric invaders; and that the barbaric invaders have seldom
or never learned the practical arts and handicrafts which are the
civilising element in the life of the conquered people around them.

To begin with the aristocracies best known to most of us, the noble
families of modern and mediæval Europe sprang, as a whole, from the
Teutonic invasion of the Roman Empire. In Italy, it was the Lombards and
the Goths who formed the bulk of the great ruling families; all the
well-known aristocratic names of mediæval Italy are without exception
Teutonic. In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocratic
element to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised and
cultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere
_roturier_. The great revolution, it has been well said, was, ethnically
speaking, nothing more than the revolt of the Celtic against the
Teutonic fraction; and, one might add also, the revolt of the civilised
Romanised serf against the barbaric _seigneur_. In Spain, the hidalgo is
just the _hi d'al Go_, the son of the Goth, the descendant of those rude
Visigothic conquerors who broke down the old civilisation of Iberian and
Romanised Hispania. And so on throughout. All over Europe, if you care
to look close, you will find the aristocrat was the son of the intrusive
barbarian; the democrat