CHAPTER III
ARISTOCRACY ABOUT 1760:
THEORY AND PRACTICETo be bred in a place of estimation, to see nothing low and sordid from one’s in-
fancy; to be taught to respect oneself; to be habituated to the censorial inspection
of the public eye... ; to take a large view... in a large society; to have leisure to
read, to reflect, to converse... ; to be habituated in armies to command and to
obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be led to
a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an in-
structor of your fellow citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a rec-
onciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and
justice... ; to be a professor of high science... ; to be amongst rich traders, who
from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings...
these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristoc-
racy, without which there is no nation.
—EDMUND BURKE, 1791
The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a certain foppery in the human
character, which degrades it.... It talks about its fine blue ribbon life a girl, and
shows its new garter life a child. A certain writer, of some antiquity, says: “When I
was a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish
things.”
The punyism of a senseless word like Duke or Count or Earl has ceased to
please. Even those who possessed them have disowned the gibberish, and as they
outgrew the ricketts, have despised the rattle....
Through all the vocabulary of Adam there is not such an animal as a Duke or a
Count.