is likely to be good, so is the offspring of a good man, and still more of a good woman.  If the parents have any special ability, their children will probably inherit it, at least in part; and over and above, will have it developed in them by an education worthy of their parents and themselves.  If man were—­what he is not—­a healthy and normal species, a permanent hereditary caste might go on intermarrying, and so perpetuate itself.  But the same moral reason which would make such a caste dangerous—­indeed, fatal to the liberty and development of mankind, makes it happily impossible.  Crimes and follies are certain, after a few generations, to weaken the powers of any human caste; and unless it supplements its own weakness by mingling again with the common stock of humanity, it must sink under that weakness, as the ancient noblesse sank by its own vice.  Of course there were exceptions.  The French Revolution brought those exceptions out into strong light; and like every day of judgment, divided between the good and the evil.  But it lies not in exceptions to save a caste, or an institution; and a few Richelieus, Liancourts, Rochefoucaulds, Noailles, Lafayettes were but the storks among the cranes involved in the wholesale doom due not to each individual, but to a system and a class.

Profligacy, pride, idleness—­these are the vices which we have to lay to the charge of the Teutonic Nobility of the Ancien Regime in France especially; and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the whole continent of Europe.  But below them, and perhaps the cause of them all, lay another and deeper vice—­godlessness—­atheism.

I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal unbelief.  I mean want of belief in duty, in responsibility.  Want of belief that there was a living God governing the universe, who had set them their work, and would judge them according to their work.  And therefore, want of belief, yea, utter unconsciousness, that they were set in their places to make the masses below them better men; to impart to them their own civilisation, to raise them to their own level.  They would have shrunk from that which I just now defined as the true duty of an aristocracy, just because it would have seemed to them madness to abolish themselves.  But the process of abolition went on, nevertheless, only now from without instead of from within.  So it must always be, in such a case.  If a ruling class will not try to raise the masses to their own level, the masses will try to drag them down to theirs.  That sense of justice which allowed privileges, when they were as strictly official privileges as the salary of a judge, or the immunity of a member of the House of Commons; when they were earned, as in the Middle Age, by severe education, earnest labour, and life and death responsibility in peace and war, will demand the abolition of those privileges, when no work is done in return for them, with a voice which must be heard, for it is the voice of truth and justice.