So it was in later centuries.One cannot read fairly the history of the Middle Ages without seeing that the robber knight of Germany or of France, who figures so much in modern novels, must have been the exception, and not the rule: that an aristocracy which lived by the saddle would have as little chance of perpetuating itself, as a priesthood composed of hypocrites and profligates; that the mediaeval Nobility has been as much slandered as the mediaeval Church; and the exceptions taken--as more salient and exciting--for the average: that side by side with ruffians like Gaston de Foix hundreds of honest gentlemen were trying to do their duty to the best of their light, and were raising, and not depressing, the masses below them--one very important item in that duty being, the doing the whole fighting of the country at their own expense, instead of leaving it to a standing army of mercenaries, at the beck and call of a despot; and that, as M.de Tocqueville says: "In feudal times, the Nobility were regarded pretty much as the government is regarded in our own; the burdens they imposed were endured in consequence of the security they afforded.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.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.