Aristocracy: Theory and Practice 59
the assimilated rank of major- general. In Germany in the eighteenth century
many middle- class people were finding careers in officialdom, and facing the prob-
lem of associating with social superiors who were only their equals, or less, in offi-
cial employment. The Prussian King ruled that his administrative boards should
pay no attention to differences of class origin among their own members, all of
whom, as civil servants, came to enjoy certain noble privileges. But the trend in
other German states was the other way. In Hanover a ruling in force from 1670 to
1832 held that noble councillors should take precedence over non- noble members
of the same councils; and a similar rule existed in the archbishopric of Cologne.^29
As to effect on professional competence of socially exclusive methods of recruit-
ment, very little seems to be systematically known. Egret’s recent work on the
Parlement of Grenoble is illuminating. He makes it clear that, because the par-
lement insisted on recruiting itself from its own sons (or from the fourth genera-
tion of nobility), its standards inevitably and lamentably declined. A royal ordi-
nance required a minimum age of twenty- five years for an ordinary councillor, and
of forty for a president or presiding judge; but the pressure to establish young men
of the right families was too strong to withstand; and in 1756 half the councillors
and all the presidents had come to their positions with “dispensations” for age.
Other ordinances forbade fathers, sons, and brothers to belong simultaneously to
the parlement, but were automatically disregarded. Members were required to have
a degree in law, but the universities gave the degree with absurd facility, even tell-
ing candidates the answers to examinations in advance. Men who had no interest
in law and no vocation for it as a profession, or who led scandalous personal lives
most unseemly in judges, or who rarely attended the sessions but simply lived idly
on their country estates, nevertheless belonged to the Parlement of Grenoble; it
was their “family occupation,” an investment of capital, a badge of rank; such men
could of course always turn up for a political meeting, to defend the privileges of
their bench. It must be added in fairness that in serious cases, as when it unani-
mously condemned one of its own members to be executed for murder, the par-
lement tried to do what was right; but it is not the rectitude of individuals, but the
effect of the system, that is in question.^30
It is hard not to believe that other oligarchies did not suffer from the same in-
ternal problems and produce similar disadvantages for the public. The British
House of Commons, though far more broadly based than the Parlement of Dau-
phiny, is at least to be examined with this thought in mind. It has been argued,
with a great assemblage of detailed evidence, that the system of controlled bor-
oughs, however strange it may seem to modern eyes, did have the advantage of
bringing the commercial as well as the landed interests into the House. It appears
from statistical study, however, that most commercial men in the House were not
the nominees of patrons but sat for the small number of open boroughs in which
they were elected by actual voters. It is also argued, in favor of the eighteenth-
century House of Commons, that the system allowed able young men to enter
29 F. Valjavec, Entstehung der politischen Stromungen in Deutschland, 1770–1815 (Munich, 1951),
79; H. Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience (Cambridge, Mass.,
1958), 137–74.
30 Egret, Parlement de Dauphinée, I, 19–27.