caste; and unless it supplements its own weakness by mingling again with
the common stock of humanity, it must sink under that weakness, as the
ancient noblesse sank by its own vice. Of course there were exceptions.
The French Revolution brought those exceptions out into strong light; and
like every day of judgment, divided between the good and the evil. But
it lies not in exceptions to save a caste, or an institution; and a few
Richelieus, Liancourts, Rochefoucaulds, Noailles, Lafayettes were but the
storks among the cranes involved in the wholesale doom due not to each
individual, but to a system and a class.

Profligacy, pride, idleness--these are the vices which we have to lay to
the charge of the Teutonic Nobility of the Ancien Regime in France
especially; and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the whole
continent of Europe. But below them, and perhaps the cause of them all,
lay another and deeper vice--godlessness--atheism.

I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal unbelief. I mean want
of belief in duty, in responsibility. Want of belief that there was a
living God governing the universe, who had set them their work, and would
judge them according to their work. And therefore, want of belief, yea,
utter unconsciousness, that they were set in their places to make the
masses below them better men; to impart to them their own civilisation,
to raise them to their own level. They would have shrunk from that which
I just now defined as the true duty of an aristocracy, just because it
would have seemed to them madness to abolish themselves. But the process
of abolition went on, nevertheless, only now from without instead of from
within. So it must always be, in such a case. If a ruling class will
not try to raise the masses to their own level, the masses will try to
drag them down to theirs. That sense of justice which allowed
privileges, when they were as strictly official privileges as the salary