Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/150

136 lies open to us, we have only to read to find the reply to this question. There is hardly a single instance of the elevation to the peerage of a grand and noble nature, which could present to mankind an ideal type of its possibilities. If, as happened once in a great while, a man of genuine merit was presented with a coronet, he must have had combined with his fine qualities, others of a lower and contemptible character, and to the latter alone did he owe the royal recognition of his services. The causes of the exaltation of numerous families are such that they can not be mentioned in respectable society: these families owe their honors to the shame of their female progenitors. Their coats of arms keep in perpetual remembrance the fact that complaisant fathers and husbands and unprejudiced beauties laid the foundations of their high estate. In other cases, the patent of nobility was the reward of some rascality or crime, by which the founder of the house had served his royal master. I must admit however, that unchastity and assassination, although often enough the starting point of brilliant earthly careers, have yet been the means by which only the minority of noble families attained their privileges. The majority gained their pre-eminence in a more ordinary way. We find wealth or many years' service in the army or government, frequent causes of the elevation of men to the peerage. How can men amass wealth sufficient to attract royal notice? By being unscrupulous or extraordinarily fortunate, and the former is of far more frequent occurrence than the latter. During the times of the Reformation they plundered the churches; at a later period they fitted out cruisers, that is, became pirates; then slave-traders or slave-owners; in modern times they become government contractors and defraud the State, or else speculators and wrest the hard-earned savings from the