ber and lower in intelligence and education, and still more in moral qualities. So that nowadays the wealthy class and men at the head of government do not constitute, as they did in former days, the élite of society; on the con trary, they are inferior to the middle class.
In Russia and Turkey as in America and France, how ever often the government change its officials, the majority of them are self-seeking and corrupt, of so low a moral standard that they do not even come up the elementary requirements of common honesty expected by the govern ment. One may often nowadays hear from persons in authority the naive complaint that the best people are always, by some strange—as it seems to them—fatality, to be found in the camp of the opposition. As though men were to complain that those who accepted the office of hangman were—by some strange fatality—all persons of very little refinement or beauty of character.
The most cultivated and refined people of our society are not nowadays to be found among the very rich, as used formerly to be the rule. The rich are mostly coarse money grubbers, absorbed only, in increasing their hoard, generally by dishonest means, or else the degenerate heirs of such money grubbers, who, far from playing any prominent part in society, are mostly treated with general contempt. And besides the fact that the class from which the servants of government and the wealthy are drawn grows less in number and lower in caliber, they no longer them selves attach the same importance to their positions as they once did; often they are ashamed of the ignominy of their calling and do not perform the duties they are bound to perform in their position. Kings and emperors scarcely govern at all; they scarcely ever decide upon an internal reform or new departure in foreign politics. They mostly leave the decision of such questions to government institutions or to public opinion. All their duties are reduced to
