Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/157

Rh become a law, there would be hardly any one who would take advantage of this open, honest, business transaction and buy a title before the eyes of the public as he would a coat or a watch-chain. But at the same time if an advertisement is inserted into some prominent newspaper saying that titles of nobility will be procured for wealthy people without publicity, a hundred replies to it are received by each mail. If the title of duke or marquis of the Republic of San Marino, or of the Principality of Reuss-Schleiz-Greiz, is offered for sale at the same or even higher prices than those proposed by the French legislature for a similar title, a purchaser will soon be found. And yet, in the first case, it would be a correct, straight-forward sale, in the other an underhanded and equivocal one; in the first, the title would have legal weight in a country containing thirty seven millions of inhabitants, and in the other only in a few villages. Yes, but in one case it would be publicly proclaimed that the title of nobility is free to any one who could produce the necessary cash, while in the other, the fiction would be thrown around the sale that the title was presented as a reward for services rendered, and that the newly-made nobleman is a being of a higher mould than the rest of mankind. Consequently people prefer to get their titles of nobility in some underhand way, through the intervention of some equivocal go-between, rather than by the open purchase in court, because they like to keep up, at least externally, the appearance of a nobility founded on genuine merit or royal favor.

The privileges accorded to the aristocratic class not consist of titles and compliments alone, neither are they only of a social nature. Notwithstanding the that all citizens are declared by the laws to have absolutely equal rights and duties, the nobility, in countries