Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/469

 insignificance—even into actual dependence upon the enriched middle class. If the nobles wished to maintain their place beside the middle class, they must renounce all class traditions and begin to adopt the same methods of industrial acquisition to which the middle class owed their wealth and in consequence their de facto power. The comedies of Molière, who lived at the time of Louis XIV., show us, as an extremely interesting phenomenon, the nobles of the times despising the rich middle class and at the same time playing the parasite at its tables. Louis XIV. himself, this proudest of monarchs, takes off his hat in his palace at Versailles and humbles himself before the Jew, Samuel Bernard, the Rothschild of the times, in order to influence him in favor of a loan.

When Law, the famous Scotch financier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, formed in France his trading companies—a stock corporation which was formed for the exploitation of the Mississippi region, the East Indies, etc., the Regent of France himself was on its directorate—a member of a merchant company! The Regent found himself in fact compelled in August, 1717, to issue edicts in virtue of which the nobles might, without loss of dignity, enter into the naval and military service of these trading companies! To that point, then, the warlike and proud feudal aristocracy of France had fallen—to be the armed employees of the industrial and commercial enterprises of the middle class, whose relations extended through all continents.

Corresponding to this radical change, there had already developed a materialism and an eager, grasping struggle for money and property which could overcome all moral ideas and (what I regret to say was generally still more significant for the privileged classes) even all privileges of rank. Under this same Regent of France, Count Horn, one of the highest of the aristocracy and connected with the first families of France, even with the Regent himself, was broken on the wheel as a common robber and murderer;