tain limits, true personal right; or, by industry,
accumulate other property, or by choice devote themselves to
intellectual pursuits, and, though poor, obtain an acknowledged
superiority of position, shown by benefits conferred in discovery, or
in teaching, or in gifts of art. This is all in the simple course of
the law of nature; and the proper offices of the upper classes, thus
distinguished from the rest, become, therefore, in the main
threefold:--

138. (A) Those who are strongest of arm have for their proper
function the restraint and punishment of vice, and the general
maintenance of law and order; releasing only from its original
subjection to their power that which truly deserves to be emancipated.

(B) Those who are superior by forethought and industry, have for their
function to be the providences of the foolish, the weak, and the idle;
and to establish such systems of trade and distribution of goods as
shall preserve the lower orders from perishing by famine, or any other
consequence of their carelessness or folly, and to bring them all,
according to each man's capacity, at last into some harmonious
industry.

(C) The third class, of scholars and artists, of course, have for
function the teaching and delighting of the inferior multitude.

The office of the upper classes, then, as a body, is to keep order
among their inferiors, and raise them always to the nearest level with
themselves of which those inferiors are capable. So far as they are
thus occupied, they are invariably loved and reverenced intensely by
all beneath them, and reach, themselves, the highest types of human
power and beauty.

139. This, then, being the natural ordinance and function of
aristocracy, its corruption, like that of all other beautiful things
under the Devil's touch, is a very fearful one. Its corruption is,
that those who ought to be the rulers and guides of the people,
forsake their task of painful honorableness; seek their own pleasure
and pre-eminence only; and use their power, subtlety, conceded
influence, prestige of ancestry, and mechanical instrumentality of
martial power, to make the lower orders toil for them, and feed and
clothe them for nothing, and become in various ways their living
property, goods, and chattels, even to the point of utter
regardlessness of whatever misery these serfs may suffer through such
insolent domination, or they themselves, their masters, commit of
crime to enforce it.

140. And thi