221 U.S. 191, 192.

[38] 221 U.S. 69.

[39] To Spencer Roane, Sept. 6, 1819, Ford, 10, 141.

CHAPTER IV

THE SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM

I assume it as self-evident that those who, at any given moment, are the
strongest in any civilization, will be those who are at once the ruling
class, those who own most property, and those who have most influence on
legislation. The weaker will fare hardly in proportion to their
weakness. Such is the order of nature. But, since those are the
strongest through whom nature finds it, for the time being, easiest to
vent her energy, and as the whole universe is in ceaseless change, it
follows that the composition of ruling classes is never constant, but
shifts to correspond with the shifting environment. When this movement
is so rapid that men cannot adapt themselves to it, we call the
phenomenon a revolution, and it is with revolutions that I now have to
do.

Nothing is more certain than that the intellectual adaptability of the
individual man is very limited. A ruling class is seldom conscious of
its own decay, and most of the worst catastrophes of history have been
caused by an obstinate resistance to change when resistance was no
longer possible. Thus while an incessant alteration in social
equilibrium is inevitable, a revolution is a problem in dynamics, on the
correct solution of which the fortunes of a declining class depend.

For example, the modern English landlords replaced the military feudal
aristocracy during the sixteenth century, because the landlords had more
economic capacity and less credulity. The men who supplanted the
mediaeval soldiers in Great Britain had no scruple about robbing the
clergy of their land, and because of this quality they prospered
greatly. Ultimately the landlords reached high fortune by controlling
the boroughs which had, in the Middle Ages, acquired the right to return
members to the House of Commons. Their domination lasted long;
nevertheless, about 1760, the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution
brought forward another type of mind. Flushed by success in the
Napoleonic wars the Tories failed to appreciate that the social
equilibrium, by the year 1830, had shifted, and that they no longer
commanded enough physical force to maintain their parliamentary
ascendancy. They thought they had only to be arrogant to prevail, and so
they put forward the Duke of Wellington as their champion. They could
hardly have made a poorer choice. As Disra