For a nation of this temper, the movement towards democracy is fraught
with peculiar dangers. Profoundly aristocratic in his sympathies, the
Englishman has always seen in the patrician class not merely a social,
but a moral, superiority; the man of blue blood was to him a living
representative of those potencies and virtues which made his ideal of the
worthy life. Very significant is the cordial alliance from old time
between nobles and people; free, proud homage on one side answering to
gallant championship on the other; both classes working together in the
cause of liberty. However great the sacrifices of the common folk for
the maintenance of aristocratic power and splendour, they were gladly
made; this was the Englishman's religion, his inborn _pietas_; in the
depths of the dullest soul moved a perception of the ethic meaning
attached to lordship. Your Lord was the privileged being endowed by
descent with generous instincts, and possessed of means to show them
forth in act. A poor noble was a contradiction in terms; if such a
person existed, he could only be spoken of with wondering sadness, as
though he were the victim of some freak of nature. The Lord was
Honourable, Right Honourable; his acts, his words virtually constituted
the code of honour whereby the nation lived.
In a new world, beyond the ocean, there grew up a new race, a scion of
England, which shaped its life without regard to the principle of
hereditary lordship; and in course of time this triumphant Republic began
to shake the ideals of the Motherland. Its civilization, spite of
superficial resemblances, is not English; let him who will think it
superior; all one cares to say is that it has already shown in a broad
picture the natural tendencies of English blood when emancipated from the
old cult. Easy to understand that some there are who see nothing but
evil in the influence of that vast commonwealth. If it has done us good,
assuredly the fact is not yet demonstrable. In old England, democracy is
a thing so alien to our traditions and rooted sentiment that the line of
its progress seems hitherto a mere track of ruin. In the very word is
something from which we shrink; it seems to signify nothing less than a
national apostasy, a denial of the faith in which we won our glory. The
democratic Englishman is, by the laws of his own nature, in parlous case;
he has lost the ideal by which he guided his rude, prodigal, domineering
instincts; in place of the Right Honourable, born to noble things, he has
set up the mere Plebs, born, more likely than not, for all manner of
baseness. And, amid all his show of loud self-confidence, the man is
haunted with misgiving.
The task before us is no light one. Can we, whilst losing the class,
retain the idea it embodied? Can we English, ever so subject to the
material, liberate ourselves from that old association, yet guard its
meaning in the sphere of spiritual life? Can we, with eyes which have
ceased to look reverently on worn-out symbols, learn to select from among
the grey-coated multitude, and place in reverence even higher him who
"holds his patent of nobility straight from Almighty God"? Upon that
depends the future of England. In days gone by, our very Snob bore
testimony after his fashion to our scorn of meanness; he at all events
imagined himself to be imitating those who were incapable of a sordid
transaction, of a plebeian compliance. But the Snob, one notes, is in
the way of degeneracy; he has new exemplars; he speaks a ruder language.
Him, be sure, in one form or another, we shall have always with us, and
to observe his habits is to note the tenor of the time. If he have at
the back of his dim mind no living ideal which lends his foolishness a
generous significance, then indeed--_videant consules_.