ieve that those people who constantly figure in the
papers are cleverer, abler, or at any rate, somehow higher, than other
people. "I wrote books," we heard of a man saying, "for twenty years,
and I was nobody; I got into Parliament, and before I had taken my seat
I had become somebody." English politicians are the men who fill the
thoughts of the English public: they are the actors on the scene, and
it is hard for the admiring spectators not to believe that the admired
actor is greater than themselves. In this present age and country it
would be very dangerous to give the slightest addition to a force
already perilously great. If the highest social rank was to be
scrambled for in the House of Commons, the number of social adventurers
there would be incalculably more numerous, and indefinitely more eager.

A very peculiar combination of causes has made this characteristic one
of the most prominent in English society. The middle ages left all
Europe with a social system headed by Courts. The Government was made
the head of all society, all intercourse, and all life; everything paid
allegiance to the sovereign, and everything ranged itself round the
sovereign--what was next to be greatest, and what was farthest least.
The idea that the head of the Government is the head of society is so
fixed in the ideas of mankind that only a few philosophers regard it as
historical and accidental, though when the matter is examined, that
conclusion is certain and even obvious.

In the first place, society as society does not naturally need a head
at all. Its constitution, if left to itself, is not monarchical, but
aristocratical. Society, in the sense we are now talking of, is the
union of people for amusement and conversation. The making of marriages
goes on in it, as it were, incidentally, but its common and main
concern is talking and pleasure. There is nothing in this which needs a
single supreme head; it is a pursuit in which a single person does not
of necessity dominate. By nature it creates an "upper ten thousand"; a
certain number of persons and families possessed of equal culture, and
equal faculties, and equal spirit, get to be on a level--and that level
a high level. By boldness, by cultivation, by "social science" they
raise themselves above others; they become the "first families," and
all the rest come to be below them. But they tend to be much about a
level among one another; no one is recognised by all or by many other