Aristocracy: Theory and Practice 53
military talents and their authority is confined to strictly military affairs, if people
accept each other as generals, bank presidents, motorists, or shoppers, according to
circumstances of the moment, having otherwise about the same regard for all.
Europe in the eighteenth century, and Western Europe more than Eastern Eu-
rope, was already a complicated society, with elaborate mechanisms operating in
the fields of government, production, trade, finance, scientific research, church af-
fairs, and education. The allocation of personnel to these enterprises on the basis
of birth and social standing could not but hamper, and even pervert (one thinks of
the established churches, some of the universities, and many branches of govern-
ment), the achievement of the purposes for which such institutions were designed.
The old feudal days were over. It was no longer enough for a lord to look locally
after the needs of his people. The persistence and even the accentuation of an
aristocratic outlook derived from earlier and simpler conditions presented prob-
lems for European society itself, as well as for the individuals and classes that made
it up.
Nobility in the old sense had been corrupted, so to speak, or at least turned from
its early character, by two new developments which now reached their height: its
association with money and wealth, and its use by governments as an instrument
of rule. Wealthy men, whose grandfathers had been bourgeois, and who still owned
and managed their wealth in bourgeois manner, even when it was in land, now
belonged to the nobility in France and elsewhere. In England men of the same
kind, while they could rarely become peers because the peerage was so small, be-
longed in many cases to the higher levels of aristocracy. In Holland they were re-
gents; in Milan and elsewhere, patricians. To the advantages of money were thus
added the advantages of social rank, and the inheritance of property might carry
with it the inheritance of nobility or its equivalent. Wealth, thus ennobled, could
give preferential access to public office, a favored position in taxation, and mem-
bership in a select body, thought to be peculiarly necessary to the freedom of the
state. “Another reason operates,” Turgot once said, “to render privilege most unjust
and at the same time less worthy of respect. Where nobility can be acquired by a
payment of money, there is no rich man that does not speedily become a noble, so
that the body of the nobles includes the body of the rich, and the cause of the
privileged is no longer the cause of distinguished families against a common class,
but the cause of the rich against the poor.”^18
In many countries it seems that the rich were becoming richer in large measure
because of their rights of special access to government—because of their favored
position in an aristocratically oriented society, whether or not they enjoyed the ti-
tles of nobles. Thus even in America the families that could get on to the gover-
nors’ councils, and remain there from one generation to the next, made fortunes in
the eighteenth century by receiving grants of western land from the crown. In
England the landowners, because of their control of Parliament, were the more
able to enlarge their estates through statutory enclosures. In Bohemia the princely
families added to their properties while the lesser nobles lost. The patricians of
Bern made an income by governing their subject districts, and the regents of Am-
18 Quoted by D. Dakin, Turgot and the Ancient Regime (London, 1939), 274.