action now compensated
by signal services of a public kind. Turn even to that sphere which
aristocracies think specially their own, and where they have under other
circumstances been really effective,--the sphere of politics. When there
is need, as now, for any large forecast of the course of human affairs,
for an acquaintance with the ideas which in the end sway mankind, and
for an estimate of their power, aristocracies are out of their element,
and materialized aristocracies most of all. In the immense spiritual
movement of our day, the English aristocracy, as I have elsewhere said,
always reminds me of Pilate confronting the phenomenon of Christianity.
Nor can a materialized class have any serious and fruitful sense for the
power of beauty. They may imagine themselves to be in pursuit of beauty;
but how often, alas, does the pursuit come to little more than dabbling
a little in what they are pleased to call art, and making a great deal
of what they are pleased to call love!

Let us return to their merits. For the power of manners an aristocratic
class, whether materialized or not, will always, from its circumstances,
have a strong sense. And although for this power of social life and
manners, so important to civilization, our English race has no special
natural turn, in our aristocracy this power emerges and marks them. When
the day of general humanization comes, they will have fixed the standard
of manners. The English simplicity, too, makes the best of the English
aristocracy more frank and natural than the best of the like class
anywhere else, and even the worst of them it makes free from the
incredible fatuities and absurdities of the worst. Then the sense of
conduct they share with their countrymen at large. In no class has it
such trials to undergo; in none is it more often and more grievously
overborne. But really the right comment on this is the comment of
Pepys[484] upon the evil courses of Charles the Second and the Duke of
York and the court of that day: "At all which I am sorry; but it is the
effect of idleness, and having nothing else to employ their great
spirits upon."

Heaven forbid that I should speak in dispraise of that unique and most
English class which Mr. Charles Sumner extols--the large class of
gentlemen, not of the landed class or of the nobility, but cultivated
and refined. They are a seemly product of the energy and of the power to
rise in our race. Without, in general, rank and splendor