And the common people,
too, have undoubtedly, as Mr. Gladstone says, a wonderful preference for
a lord. Yet our aristocracy, from the action upon it of the Wars of the
Roses, the Tudors, and the political necessities of George the Third, is
for the imagination a singularly modern and uninteresting one. Its
splendor of station, its wealth, show, and luxury, is then what the
other classes really admire in it; and this is not an elevating
admiration. Such an admiration will never lift us out of our vulgarity
and brutality, if we chance to be vulgar and brutal to start with; it
will rather feed them and be fed by them. So that when Mr. Gladstone
invites us to call our love of inequality "the complement of the love of
freedom or its negative pole, or the shadow which the love of freedom
casts, or the reverberation of its voice in the halls of the
constitution," we must surely answer that all this mystical eloquence is
not in the least necessary to explain so simple a matter; that our love
of inequality is really the vulgarity in us, and the brutality, admiring
and worshipping the splendid materiality.
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