the monasteries, and whose son was founder of the Royal
Exchange. The Earl of Eldon owes his existence to that runaway exploit
which linked the lives of John Scott, the Newcastle tradesman's son, and
Miss Surtees, the banker's daughter.

If George III. during his lengthy reign only raised one business man to
the Peerage, later years have provided a very liberal crop of coroneted
men of commerce. To mention but a few of them, banking has been
honoured--and the Peerage also--by the baronies granted to Lords
Aldenham and Avebury; Lords Hindlip, Burton, Iveagh, and Ardilaun owe
their wealth and rank to successful brewing; Baron Overtoun was
proprietor of large chemical works; Lord Allerton's riches have been
drawn from his tan-pits; Lord Armstrong's millions come from the
far-famed Elswick engine-works at Newcastle; and Lord Masham's from his
mills at Manningham. The Viscounty of Hambleden has sprung from a modest
news-shop in the Strand; the Barony of Burnham was cradled in a
newspaper office; and Lords Mount-Stephen and Strathcona were shepherd
boys seventy years or more ago, before they found their way through
commerce to the Roll of Peers.

Although these lowly origins are as firmly established as Holy Writ, and
are in most cases as well known to the noble families who trace rank and
riches from them as to the expert in genealogy, they are often as
carefully excluded from the family tree as the poor and undesirable
relation from the doors of their palaces. Not content with a lineage
extending over long centuries, and with a score of strains of undoubted
blue blood, many of our greatest nobles and oldest gentle families
strain after an ancestry which is not theirs, and throw overboard some
obscure forefather to find room for a mythical Norman marauder, who in
many cases exists nowhere but in the place of honour on their own
pedigrees.

"What are pedigrees worth?" asks Professor Freeman. "I turn over a
'Peerage' or other book of genealogy, and I find that, when a pedigree
professes to be traced back to the times of which I know most in detail,
it is all but invariably false. As a rule it is not only false, but
impossible. The historical circumstances, when any are introduced, are
for the most part not merely fictions, but exactly that kind of fiction
which is, in its beginning, deliberate and interested falsehood."

This scathing criticism refers to pedigrees which profess to be based on
existing records; what shall w