actually
the reversal of conditions had been all the more tremendous.

By the production and accumulation of capital and of personal
property, in contrast to real estate, in the hands of the
middle class, the nobility had dwindled into complete
insignificance--even into actual dependence upon the enriched middle
class. If the nobles wished to maintain their place beside the middle
class, they must renounce all class traditions and begin to adopt the
same methods of industrial acquisition to which the middle class owed
their wealth and in consequence their _de facto_ power. The comedies
of Moliere, who lived at the time of Louis XIV., show us, as an
extremely interesting phenomenon, the nobles of the times despising
the rich middle class and at the same time playing the parasite at its
tables. Louis XIV. himself, this proudest of monarchs, takes off his
hat in his palace at Versailles and humbles himself before the Jew,
Samuel Bernard, the Rothschild of the times, in order to influence him
in favor of a loan.

When Law, the famous Scotch financier, at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, formed in France his trading companies--a stock
corporation which was formed for the exploitation of the Mississippi
region, the East Indies, etc., the Regent of France himself was on its
directorate--a member of a merchant company! The Regent found himself
in fact compelled in August, 1717, to issue edicts in virtue of which
the nobles might, without loss of dignity, enter into the naval and
military service of these trading companies! To that point, then, the
warlike and proud feudal aristocracy of France had fallen--to be the
armed employees of the industrial and commercial enterprises of the
middle class, whose relations extended through all continents.

Corresponding to this radical change, there had already developed a
materialism and an eager, grasping struggle for money and property
which could overcome all moral ideas and (what I regret to say was
generally still more significant for the privileged classes) even all
privileges of rank. Under this same Regent of France, Count Horn, one
of the highest of the aristocracy and connected with the first
families of France, even with the Regent himself, was broken on the
wheel as a common robber and murderer; and the Duchess of Orleans, a
German princess, writes in a letter of November 29, 1719, that six
ladies of the highest rank waylaid in the court of a building the
above-men