CONCERNING ARISTOCRATS.

 In an article in the Westminster Gazette Mr. Grant Allen lets himself go "concerning aristocrats." "Aristocracies," he writes, as a rule all the world over, consist, and have always consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation and morals than the democracy they live among. Most English people in particular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures and wines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But history shows us the exact opposite. The noble families of modern and mediaeval Europe sprang, as a whole, from the Teutonic invasion of the Roman Empire. In Italy it was the Lombards and the Goths who formed the bulk of the great ruling families ; all the well-known aristocratic names of mediaeval Italy are without exception Teutonic. In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocratic element to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised and cultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere roturier. The great revolution, it has been well said, was, ethnically speaking, nothing more than the revolt of the civilised Celtic against the Teutonic faction; and, one might add also, the revolt of the Romanised serf against the barbaric seigneur. In Spain the hildalgo is just the hi d'al Go, the son of the Goth, the descendant of those rude Visigothic conquerors who broke down the old civilisation of Iberian and Romanised Hispania. And so on throughout. All over Europe, if you care to look close, you will find the aristocrat was the son of the intrusive barbarian ; the democrat was the son of the old civilised and educated autochthonous people.

Take Greece. Its most aristocratic state was undoubtedly Sparta, where a handful of essentially barbaric Dorians held in check a much larger and Helotised population of higher original civilisation. Take the East: the Persian was a wild mountain adventurer who imposed himself as an aristocrat upon the far more cultivated Babylonian, Assyrian, and Egyptian. The same sort of thing had happened earlier in time in Babylonia and Assyria themselves, where barbaric conquerors had similarly imposed themselves upon the first-known historical civilisations. Take India under the Moguls, once more; the aristocracy of the time consisted of the rude Mohammedan Tartar, who lorded it over the ancient enchorial culture of Rajpoot and Brahmin. Take China: the same thing over again; a Tartar horde imposing its savage rule over the most ancient civilised people of Asia. Take England ; its aristocracy at different times has consisted of the various barbaric invaders, first the Anglo-Saxon (if I must use that hateful and misleading word)— a pirate from Sleswick; then the Dane, another pirate from Denmark direct; then the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer of early French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himself after just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where you will it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to the Turk at Constantinople, or the Arab in North Africa, the aristocrat belongs invariably to a lower race than the civilised people whom he has conquered and subjugated.

"That may be true, perhaps," you object, "as to the remote historical origin of aristocracies ; but surely the aristocrat of later generations has acquired all the science, all the art, all the polish of the people he lives amongst. He is the flower of their civilisation." Don't you believe it! There isn't a word of truth in it. From first to last the aristocrat remains, what Matthew Arnold so justly called him, a barbarian. The "gentleman" is, above all things, a fighter, a hunter, and a fisher —he preserves the three simplest and commonest barbaric functions. He is not a practiser of any civilised and civilising art—a craftsman, a maker, a worker in metal, in stone, in textile fabrics, in pottery. His one task is to kill—either his kind or his quarry. The fact is, neither he nor his ancestors have ever been really civilised. Their very titles are barbaric and military. Their crests and coat-of-arms are but the totems of their savage predecessors, afterwards utilised by mediæval blacksmiths as distinguishing marks for the summit of a helmet. They decorate their halls with savage trophies of the chase, like the Zulu or the red Indian; they hang up captured arms and looted Chinese jars from the Summer Palace in their semi-civilised drawing-rooms. They love to be surrounded by grooms and gamekeepers and other barbaric retainers ; they pass their lives in the midst of serfs; their views about the position and rights of women—especially the women of the " lower orders"—are, frankly, African. They share the sentiments of Achilles as to the individuality of Chryseis and Briseis.

Express and Telegraph (Adelaide, 1893,)  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article208296642