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the great of this hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls; they
are absent in the field: they are working, not triumphing. Fashion is
made up of their children; of those who through the value and virtue
of somebody, have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction,
means of cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical organization
a certain health and excellence which secures to them, if not the
highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class of power, the
working heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is
the festivity and permanent celebration of such as they; that fashion is
funded talent; is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin; that
the brilliant names of fashion run back to just such busy names as their
own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall
be the reapers, and their sons, in the ordinary course of things, must
yield the possession of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyes
and stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year
1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The
city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it
was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town
day before yesterday that is city and court today.

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These mutual
selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the least
favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the
excluding minority by the strong hand and kill them, at once a new class
finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk:
and if the people should destroy class after class, until two men only
were left, one of these would be the leader and would be involuntarily
served and copied by the other. You may keep this minority out of sight
and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life, and is one of the estates
of the realm. I am the more struck with this tenacity, when I see its
work. It respects the administration of such unimportant matters, that
we should not look for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet
men under some strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a
religious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man and
nature. We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and
fugitive, this of caste or fashion for example; yet come from year to
year and see how