Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1886-09-24
THE FOUNTAIN OF HONOR.
How the Waters of English Aristocrscy
Are Muddied-"Divine Right"

Are Muddied-"Divine Right"
The queen is the fountain of honor.
She can, it is said, make every man in
England peer. She can not only give
to any man any title that he asks, but
can confer the arms as well, which, if
there is anything in heraldry, should be
exclusive property. The vile wretch
may become noble at stroke; man
kneels down commoner and rises a
knight; we all know this; but that she
should bestow a second time the veneer
able titles that have acquired historic re-
nown is damaging to the very principle
of aristocracy; that the family name
should be torn from barons of the mid
die ages, the names which they rem
dered illustrious, of which they were so
proud, and given to some modern place
hunter, is to a democrat inconceivable.
Even the arms they fought for, the crest
they devised, the bearings on their
shields that indicated their deeds or their
character or history, must be shared by
some pretender or ueirper Of to-day.
One of the most pretentious mobiles in
Scotland of this generation, of largest
possessions and exalted rank, bears a
name that all the world knows; that was
famous thousand years ago, renowned
alike in history and romance. But two
OF the earls who live near him, and meet
him on an apparent equality, who are
themselves of the stock of Robert Bruce,
have assured me that their neighbor is
descended from a peddler who carried
his pack in the last century. Jenny
made his way in the world, became first
rich and then political. His son served
the premier in some opportune war
and received peerage as his reward. He
selected great title and assumed great
pedigree, which Burke sets down in his
"Peerage."
But Burke the English themselves
laugh at. He sends to every nobleman
the proofs of the pretty stories he prints,
and the new-made peers correct the mis-
takes and invent the pedigrees. They
tell their own history, which is to pass
afterward as authority. l know what /
say; | have been present when the proof
came in. You should hear the aristoc-
racy discuss each others claims to de-
scent if you would appreciate the reality
of their nobility.
All of which. it may be, is useful for
Americans to consider. We who believe
that the rank is but the guinea stamp,
and that the son of a great man is no
greater than another until he proves
himself so, why should we care for these
antics and assumptions of the aristoc-
racy! Because pretence is vulgar and
falsehood ignoble, and these patricians
who strut under borrowed plumes, who
wear names that are not theirs, and steal
coronets from the cotfins of men who
earned them in other times-to place
them on their own foreheads- those who
call themselves Percy and Essex and
Warwick and Holland-should be un-
masked. If a man has an ancient line
age and is proud of the deeds of his an
cestors rather than his own, let him be
proud; but he should at least have the
ancestry that he claims. Yet the queen
wears the crown that if there is any
thing in divine right, belongs to another
family, and the proudest of her nobility
to-day are those whose descent is as ir-
regular az her own.-Adam Badeaus
Letter.