WHO ARE THE ARISTOCRACY? [From the Times, April 22.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 329, 23 September 1848, Page 3

WHO ARE THE ARISTOCRACY? [From the Times, April 22.]

" Know thyself '"is a lesson which should be inculcated on states no less than on individuals. It is very possible for tf nation to live to a very good old age — some eight or ten centuries — and yet to be profoundly ignorant of its own talents, its failings, its weakness, or its virtues. Nay, recent experience has shown that a great country may go on like M. Jourdain, talking a political language of which it knows neither the name nor the symbols.' England is in that predicament. For the last ]00 years at least she has been duping herself into the belief that she enjoys a mixed form of government, and that its elements are the Crown, the Lords, and the Commons. This turns out to be a mere phantasy ; and at a late day in our national existence those well-informed gentry, the French journalists, humanely come forward to set us right in our estimate of ourselves, and indoctrinate us with a true conception of our own social conJition. According to these eminent and practical teachers, England is, and has been, groaning tinder the yoke of a burdensome and cruel aristocracy. It is the aristocracy which prevents all her workmen from earning five shillings a day, — it is the aristocracy which claims for property the rights which are due to labour alone, — it is the ' aristocracy which supports the cumbrous imposition of capital upon industry, It is the aristocracy which crushes the ingenuous aspirations of an embryo National Guard with the hateful staves of special constables ; finally, it is the aristocracy — the detested aristocracy^ — which, with its own kid glo.ves and tight pantaloons, checked the Chartist movement of the 10th of April, and forbade London, to be irrigated with blood, or Trafalgar Square planted with poplars. This is great" teaching. We ought to be, and we are, deeply thankful for it. It proves to us, if need there were for proof, how acutely observant our transmarine neighbours are of us and our institutions, and how little their observation is clouded by the haze of the revolutions which surround them. We can hardly repay attentions so touching and so timely ;. perhaps the best jreturn we can make is to explain our own popular — but of course unphilosophieal — notions on the subject. We would do this not in the spirit of refutation or disbelief, but simply by way of returning a -kindness, and showing how differently two nations may vrew the very same object. Now, our French contemporaries will hardly believe us when we say, that in England we are all puzzled as to the meaning of the

word " aristocracy." The term is common • enough, we admit, but the definition is not a! whit the, more easy for that. Take any five men you meet going along the Strand, and ask them what their definition of the aristocracy is, and we warrant not two will agree about it. The one will say it's the House of Lords, another the squirearchy, a third the people about the Court, a fourth the bankers, and the fifth — a Communist out of work — will point to a large jeweller's or mercer's shop, and exclaim, " that's the aristocracy." Now, all these are wrong, and at the same time right. The aristocracy is not the House of Lords, nor the mercantile class, nor the bishops, nor the shopkeepers. Yet it would be difficult to define the English aristocracy so as wholly to exclude those elements from its composition. Were any one to attempt this, he would be in the predicament of a costermonger who, in addressing a holiday sweep in the pit of the theatre, began with — " You and the rest of the lowbt orders." " Lower or-< ders ! what do you mean by that ?" was the indignant reply of the purifier of chimneys, whose social views contemplated an infinity of ranks beneath his own. The fact is, the grades of our society, like the finest shot silk, glide so imperceptibly from one shade into another, that it is almost impossible to note where one begins and another ends. Rank and property may in some degree segregate their actual possessors from other classes, but they do not, as in some continental states, extend the sanctity of privilege even to proximate successors and presumptive heirs. The destined inheritor of a peerage may. be, and not unfrequently has been, engaged in trade or manufactures. Not long ago the successor to one of the highest titles in the British dominions had to be fetched from the vaults which he occupied as a wine-merchant. At the present moment, the cadets of many noble families, dropping their honorary prefix, are scattered over different parts of the empire, following avocations which, whether mercantile or professional, are at all events incompatible with the exclusive privileges of an aristocratic caste, One man who knows that his son must some day inherit a Scotch peerage is feeding sheep at the Cape, or shearing them in Australia ; another, again, unable on his pittance to support the dignity of a baronet at home, has buried it for a time in the forests of New Zealand or North America. A third brings to the most laborious and most lucrative of professions &• name first made illustrious by similar exertions, and renews his ancestral honours at their parent source. That which we have said of rank applies more strongly to wealth. In a mercantile nation there ai c but few families whose fortunes are not affected by the fluctuations of trade and the embarrassments of commerce. Our commercial aristocracy is perpetually losing and receiving blood ; perpetually decimated, and perpetually recruited. Take, as ah instance, the great city house of Hobbs, Dobbs, and Fubbs. Hobbs has in reality retired from active business, and bequeathed the tutelary auspice of his name to his younger partners. His country house is in Surrey, his town house in Portland-place. His eldest sou has a commission in the Lancers ; his second is at the Chancery bar ; his youngest holds a country Hying. Mrs. Hobbs has an Opera box, gives splendid dinners, and speculates on a Viscount and a Baronet for her accomplished Adeliza and Georgiana. Mr. Hobbs is a type of our commercial aristocracy ; proud of his fortune and his family ; not ashamed to own that he has made both himself, and fond of telling how he came up to town with only.4|d. in his pocket and his mother's blessing. What Hobbs already is, Dobbs and Fubbs hope to be. Already Mes-» dames Dobbs and Fubbs look with an anxious eye upon the Opera box and the dinners in Portland-place. Already they sigh .for a more rustic retreat and a greater metropolitan display. But Dobbs and Fubbs are prudent men. Dobbs lives at Clapham, and content? Mrs. Dobbs with a three week's gaiety in the season, and an autumnal trip to the coast. Fubbs lives at Blackheath, where he occasionally gives a low church dinner, and from the solitudes of which Mrs. Fubbs evolves at intervals into the religious dissipation of Exe-ter-hall. But the two partners are doomed men. Despite prudence, despite care, despite saving, despite knowing, Dobbs and Fubbs fail. A great house at Hamburgh goes ; another at Calcutta follows : bills protested return upon the embarrassed firm, and they are ruined. The petty liabilities of Hobbs are soon discharged ; but the whole fortunes of Dobbs and Fubbs are unable to satisfy theirs. The modest carriage — the plate with Dobbs's hard-found crest and arms — the pony with which little Fubbs had been presented for his premature development at school — all are" surrendered to the hammer. Fubbs, who had not long since emerged from the chrysalis con-: ditiou of a protracted clerkship, meets the storm with fortitude, goes manfully into the Gazette, and begins life again as a clerk. But

I" as for poor Dobbs — painstaking,' 1 plodding, | ambitious, careworn Dobbs — the blow stunt him. After selling all — after seeing one son go into Smith's retail hosiery house as a supernumerary sbopboy, another into Thomson's wholesale warehouse as an office-sweeper, — after witnessing, his only daughter (that daughter whose education cost him £300 a- year)' set off to be a governess in a retired trades-! man's family, where she is to teach French, music, Italian, and German, for £40 a-year, poor Dobbs loses his senses. The partial re-" covery of bis intellect finds him utterly destitute of the means of subsistence. Old Hobbs: supports him for some time ; but old Hobbs dies. After that he has no friend but the parish, no retreat but the union workhouse. Thither he turns his aged steps, and is welcomed there by the comfortable matron, who. twenty years ago commenced life as his housemaid. | Such is a picture of a not uncommon vicissitude in Bnglaod. Hobbs, Dobbs, and Fubbs all sprang from what are called in; France "the people." They all had the same start in life, and up to .a certain age the, same success. Hobbs, by a lucky accident, avoided the misfortunes of his partners. They, by an unlucky catastrophe, missed his elevation. The first died a Member of Parliament — one of the governing class — leaving his son with means to follow in his steps, and equal his exaltation. The third died a clerk in comfortable circumstances — one of the middle classes ; the second, a pauper. Now, a very slight difference of age and opportunity would have reversed their respective fates; Dobbs and Fubbs might have become senators, and Hobbs have died in a poor house. It is, then, absurd to talk of aristocratic privileges and aristocratic predominance in a country where the members of different classes arc in a continual state of reciprocal oscillation ; where those at the top of the wheel are coming down, and those at the bottom going up ; where the upper classes are recruited from the middle, and the middle from the upper and lower together ; where misfortune or imprudence humbles rank and strips pomp of its appanage ; but where prudence, ability, and opportunity seldom fail to crown their possessors with merited honours. That fortune is variable, and luck capricious, is the destiny of man. That gold is not picked up in the streets, nor titles^ showered down from heaven like manna, is but the sim-> pie exposition of the primaeval law which en* joined that man should live by the sweat of his brow. Were it otherwise, there would be no labour, no emulation, no prudence, ho economy. But the simple fact that these contingencies and conditions are alike to nearly all, and that industry, economy, and capacity do, in the majority of cases, lead to station and wealth, is to our vulgar English mind a satisfactory indication that we are not insulted by the sectarian privileges of a monopolist class, nor rough-ridden by the insolence of a dominant caste. Our aristocracy is manifold, and from many sources. Its greatest recommendation in our eyes is, that it is not for the most part very ancient, nor at all exclusive. The highest portion ot it — the peerage — has been drawn from the families of shopkeepers, lawyers, surgeons, and country parsons. Our lowest reckons amongst its elements the fallen representatives of ancient houses, and the victims of commercial mischance. The one carries along with it the feelings and prejudices of its origin ; the latter iv its descent does not forget the tastes, the habits, and the bearing of the order from which it has been disjointed. Can a country whose social conditions are of this kind, justly be said to be tyrannized over by one monopolist, exclusive, and invariable class ?