ord; not whether
he is honorably laborious in his manhood, but whether he belongs to the
Bar, or the Army, or the Church. This spirit is evil in its influence,
because it substitutes external limitations for the realities of the
intellect and the soul, and makes those realities themselves of no
account wherever its traditions prevail. This spirit cares nothing for
culture, nothing for excellence, nothing for the superiorities that make
men truly great; all it cares for is to have reserved seats in the great
assemblage of the world. Whatever you do, in fairness and honesty,
against this evil and inhuman spirit of aristocracy, the best minds of
this age approve; but there is another spirit of aristocracy which does
not always receive the fairest treatment at your hands, and which ought
to be resolutely defended against you.

There is really, in nature, such a thing as high life. There is really,
in nature, a difference between the life of a gentleman who has culture,
and fine bodily health, and independence, and the life of a Sheffield
dry-grinder who cannot have any one of these three things. It is a good
and not a bad sign of the state of popular intelligence when the people
does not wilfully shut its eyes to the differences of condition amongst
men, and when those who have the opportunity of leading what is truly
the high life accept its discipline joyfully and have a just pride in
keeping themselves up to their ideal. A life of health, of sound
morality, of disinterested intellectual activity, of freedom from petty
cares, _is_ higher than a life of disease, and vice, and stupidity, and
sordid anxiety. I maintain that it is right and wise in a nation to set
before itself the highest attainable ideal of human life as the
existence of the complete gentleman, and that an envious democracy,
instead of rendering a service to itself, does exactly the contrary when
it cannot endure and will not tolerate the presence of high-spirited
gentlemen in the State. There are things in this world that it is right
to hate, that we are the better for hating with all our hearts; and one
of the things that I hate most, and with most reason, is the narrow
class-spirit when it sets itself against the great interests of mankind.
It is odious in the narrow-minded, pompous, selfish, pitiless aristocrat
who thinks that the sons of the people were made by Almighty God to be
his lackeys and their daughters to be his mistresses; it is odious also,