The Press.
London, England, 1857-11-21 00:00:00

THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 21,1857.

ject, which we shall entitle Credit, and which
we propose giving in our issue of Saturday
next.

THE TWO ARISTOCRACIES.

VANITY is, perhaps, after all, the most power-
ful lever in affecting the majority of mankind.
And he who aspires to lead or to influence his
fellow creatures, except by a very circuitous
route, must have this engine in continual
requisition. Nevertheless, there are certain
limits to its efficacious operation. Flattery by
a skilful artist will not be brought into
direct collision with facts. No indications of
private malignity will be permitted to appear
in his language. When these rules are
violated, adulation is wont to recoil upon its
author. Nothing excites in the human breast
such intense disgust as to find we have been
made a cat's paw ; and we cannot help thinking
that some such discovery will sooner or later
dawn upon the minds of that " middle class "
to whom the leading journal has lately been
addressing so many clumsy and maladroit
compliments.
The middle classes, we are told, have super-
seded the aristocracy in the exercise of all
those qualities which were once the peculiar
attributes of the latter. Our late victories in
India, of course, form the text of these dis-
courses ; and HAVELOCK and NEILL, we are in-
formed, prove with perfect clearness that the
NEVILLES, the DE BURGHS, and the DE VERES
have forfeited the virtue of their ancestors.

The Times, however, is perfectly well aware
that two names alone are not sufficient to
establish so sweeping an assertion as this. So
they take us back to the days of HASTINGS and
CLIVE, and inform us that these, too, did not
belong to the English aristocracy. We must
inquire, then, what that aristocracy is to which
they did not belong, and whether it is one
which has ever affected to generate high per-
sonal qualities.
The word " aristocracy " is used in this
country in a double sense. There is an aris-
tocracy of rank and an aristocracy of race. The
first denotes simply the governing classes of
the country—" the upper ten thousand "—and
from them we admit very willingly that HAST-
INGS and CLIVE were divorced. The latter
denotes, on the other hand, that widely-spread
but greatly diversified body who can still trace
their descent to the Norman conquerors of
England. Now, when we attribute special
personal qualities to an aristocracy—we don't
mean qualities acquired by culture, such as
taste or refinement, but certain inherent moral
qualities which fit them for governing their
fellows—it is clearly in the latter of these two
senses that the word* aristocracy is used.
Nobody attributes any virtue to a DE BURGH
or a NEVILLE because he has a seat in the
House of Lords, or because he has 40,0001. a
year ; but because he has the same blood in his
veins as the bold barons of the Plantagenets.
He is not great because he is a lord ; but he is
a lord because he is great. The theory may
be true or false, but it is the only one on
which he can claim any personal superiority.
We are not now expressing any opinion of our
own as to the validity of what is called the
" theory of blood." We only mean to say that
the test adopted by the Times for disproving its
validity is an entirely fallacious one. The writer
opposes two classes to each other which are not
two, but one. To the aristocracy of race
HASTINGS and CLIVE most certainly did belong,
as truly as a NEVILLE or DE BURGH, and are