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.
Pages:
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217