of gold. Then, at a price of sixty shillings, this discount descends
upon each sovereign to the amount of one half-crown, or one-eighth. But
at a reduced price of thirty shillings, this discount of three
half-crowns amounts to one-fourth. And, at a price of twelve shillings,
it amounts to five-eighths. So that, as the gross profits descend, the
_nett_ profits descend in a still heavier proportion.

_VII. DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEERAGE._

It is by a continued _secretion_ (so to speak) of all which forces
itself to the surface of national importance in the way of patriotic
services that the English peerage keeps itself alive. Stop the laurelled
trophies of the noble sailor or soldier pouring out his heart's blood
for his country, stop the intellectual movement of the lawyer or the
senatorial counsellor, and immediately the sources are suffocated
through which _our_ peerage is self-restorative. The simple truth is,
how humiliating soever it may prove I care not, that whether positively
by cutting off the honourable sources of addition, or negatively by
cutting off the ordinary source of subtraction, the other peerages of
Europe are peerages of _Faineans_. Pretend not to crucify for ignominy
the sensual and torpid princes of the Franks; in the same boat row all
the peerages that _can_ have preserved their regular hereditary descent
amongst civil feuds which _ought_ to have wrecked them. The Spanish, the
Scotch, the Walloon nobility are all of them nobilities from which their
several countries would do well to cut themselves loose, so far as
_that_ is possible. How came _you_, my lord, we justly say to this and
that man, proud of his ancient descent, to have brought down your
wretched carcase to this generation, except by having shrunk from all
your bloody duties, and from all the chances that beset a gallant
participation in the dreadful enmities of your country? Would you make
it a reproach to the Roman Fabii that 299 of that house perished in
fighting for their dear motherland? And that, if a solitary Fabius
survived for the rekindling of the house, it was because the restorer of
his house had been an infant at the aera of his household catastrophe.
And if, through such burning examples of patriotism, far remote
collateral descendants entered upon the succession, was this a reproach?
Was this held to vitiate or to impair the heraldic honours? A
disturbance, a convulsion, that shook the house back into its primit