ce of footmen. They point out how plenteously
footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have
declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from the
Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining tete-a-tete
with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty footmen in
attendance on the meal. That was a high figure--higher than in Rogers'
day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I refuse to
believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an
ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers
because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is
traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their
employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just
a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the
Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive)
remained for many hours in his study, lost in thought, and at length,
rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two
footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be
a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years later, he said to his
heir, 'Discharge two more.' Such enlightenment and adaptability were
not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the
great Tory houses the number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came
the Industrial Age, hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms
were now tended, and blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who
in their youth had done nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who
might have been doing just that if the Bastille had been less brittle.
Noblemen, becoming less and less sure of themselves under the impact
of successive Reform Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less
numerous gatherings of footmen. And at length, in the course of the
great War, any Nobleman not young enough to be away fighting was waited
on by an old butler and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not
fall.

Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have
taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets, whether
of good or of evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all. It may
be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian Revolution,
will have so worked on the minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to
have not one footman in their service. O