from it, it is but the first or second step out of primeval savagery. For
the more a ruling race becomes conscious of its own duty, and not merely
of its own power--the more it learns to regard its peculiar gifts as
entrusted to it for the good of men--so much the more earnestly will it
labour to raise the masses below to its own level, by imparting to them
its own light; and so will it continually tend to abolish itself, by
producing a general equality, moral and intellectual; and fulfil that law
of self-sacrifice which is the beginning and the end of all virtue.

A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble
as themselves--that is at least a fair ideal, tending toward, though it
has not reached, the highest ideal of all.

But suppose that the very opposite tendency--inherent in the heart of
every child of man--should conquer. Suppose the ruling caste no longer
the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, but their
equals. Suppose them--shameful, but not without example--actually sunk
to be their inferiors. And that such a fall did come--nay, that it must
have come--is matter of history. And its cause, like all social causes,
was not a political nor a physical, but a moral cause. The profligacy of
the French and Italian aristocracies, in the sixteenth century, avenged
itself on them by a curse (derived from the newly-discovered America)
from which they never recovered. The Spanish aristocracy suffered, I
doubt not very severely. The English and German, owing to the superior
homeliness and purity of ruling their lives, hardly at all. But the
continental caste, instead of recruiting their tainted blood by healthy
blood from below, did all, under pretence of keeping it pure, to keep it
tainted by continual intermarriage; and paid, in increasing weakness of
body and mind, the penalty of their exclusive pride. It is impossible
for anyone who reads the French memoirs of the sixteenth and seventeenth