Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which
the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his
good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most
curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable,
perhaps, than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of
society which hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family
counts for much with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it
counts for nothing at all in comparison with the face value at which it
is current in England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when
we are very much out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as
the commoners of England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is
nonsense. A very rich man with us is all the more ridiculous for his
more millions; he becomes a byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of
the paragrapher, the awful example of the preacher; his money is found
to smell of his methods. But in England, the greater a nobleman is,
the greater his honor. The American mother who imagines marrying her
daughter to an English duke, cannot even imagine an English
duke--say, like him of Devonshire, or him of Northumberland, or him
of Norfolk--with the social power and state which wait upon him in his
duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in degree down to the latest
and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet humbler men who have been
knighted for their merits and services in medicine, in literature, in
art. The greater and greatest nobles are established in a fear which is
very like what the fear of God used to be when the common people feared
Him; and, though they are potent political magnates, they mainly rule
as the King himself does, through the secular reverence of those beneath
them for their titles and the visible images of their state. They are
wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that, when one now and
then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their wealth alone
would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth does no
such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is much
desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor than
it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of families
first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless hold
upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes
the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for,
though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people
into or out of the administration, it is always--or so nearly always
that the exception proves the rule--family that rules, from the King
down to the least attaché of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many
of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their
mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking
it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had
never occurred to anybody before, “Yes, isn’t it strange that those few
families should keep it all among themselves!” It was a slender female
voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive surprise, as at a
curious usage of some realm of faery.