24 Chapter II
such orders: merchants and landowners, cobblers and lawyers, peers and gentry,
canons and priests, professors and civil servants. They grouped themselves at vari-
ous levels, local, municipal, provincial, national. For purposes of public representa-
tion they might come together, in some countries, into estates of the realm, in
France as clergy, nobility, and Third Estate.
The constituted bodies did in fact often call themselves “orders” or “estates.”
Most of them had in fact originated in the Middle Ages. Persons did have rights
as members of groups, not abstractly as “citizens,” and all persons had some legal
rights, which, however, approached the vanishing point for serfs in Eastern Eu-
rope and slaves in America. But whatever may have been true in the Middle Ages,
a survey of the constituted bodies of the eighteenth century forces some emenda-
tion of Lousse’s picture. It is true that something like a corporate society existed,
but the most noticeable similarities in the constituted bodies are to be found in
two other features. First, the concept of “order,” as applied in practice in the eigh-
teenth century, frequently meant that there were some orders of men whose func-
tion was to fill positions of governance, in state or church, as distinguished from
other orders whose functions were different. Secondly, there was a strong ten-
dency, about a century old in the 1760’s, toward inheritance of position in this
governing elite, either by law or in fact, a tendency for influence to accumulate in
a few families, or, in more abstract terms, for the institution of the family to diffuse
itself through the institutions of government, not to mention those of religion. The
tendency in the constituted bodies was more toward the Geburtsstand than toward
free association.
In short, the world had become more aristocratic. Aristocracy in the eighteenth
century may even be thought of as a new and recent development, if it be distin-
guished from the older institution of nobility. In one way it was more exclusive
than mere nobility. A king could create nobles, but, as the saying went, it took four
generations to make a gentleman. In another way aristocracy was broader than
nobility. Countries that had no nobles, like Switzerland or British America, or
countries that had few nobles of importance, like the Dutch provinces, might have
aristocracies that even nobles recognized as such. There were only two hundred
actual nobles in England, but all Englishmen rich enough to travel seemed milords
anglais on the Continent. Dutch regents, scorned as mere burghers at the Peace of
Westphalia, were accepted as gentlemen a hundred years later. The grandfather of
Albert Gallatin was a citizen of republican Geneva who owned land across the
French frontier, and who sat with the French nobility in the Estates General of
- Gouverneur Morris, the New York patrician, found the drawing rooms of
England and the Continent open to him without condescension.
Aristocracy was nobility civilized, polished by that “refinement of manners” of
which people talked, enjoying not only superiority of birth but a superior mode of
life. It was a way of life as pleasing as any that mankind has ever developed, and
which the middle classes were to imitate as much and as long as they could, a way
of life characterized by dignified homes and by gardens and well- kept lawns, by
private tutors and grand tours and sojourns at watering places, by annual migration
between town and country and an abundance of respectful and unobtrusive ser-
vants. Indeed the date 1760 seems to mark a period even in the history of domestic