PREFACE
conscience they find no deep reply to Socialism, although their natural longing to hold what they possess forces them to cast ridicule and odium upon it.
Now, in the present work, I outline the terms of a reply to Socialism and Democracy which I venture to hope is deeper than that usually made by their opponents. I offer a solution which I believe to be more fundamental, more consonant with the passions and foibles of human nature, more practical, and above all more vital and full of promise for the future, than anything Socialism or Democracy does and can bring forward.
I have entered exhaustively neither into the Democratic nor into the Socialistic solution of modern evils, but have confined myself closely to the statement of the true aristocrat's position, leaving the reader to see how fundamentally such a statement upsets the claims of both of the other parties.
Thus the book is not merely an argument in defence of true aristocracy; for, to all thinking men, who know it needs no defence, such an argument alone would be simply platitudinous. It is, in addition, an attempt at showing wherein hitherto the principles of a true Aristocracy have been misunderstood by the very aristocrats themselves, and that more than half the criticism directed against the Aristocratic principle to-day no more applies to a true Aristocracy than it does to the man in the moon.
I have called attention to a political and historical fact which too many writers appear to have overlooked: the fact that all political struggles, and all the fluctuations of fortune which have attended the history of aristocracies, have not consisted actually of a struggle between the principle of aristocracy and a better, nobler and more desirable principle, which by its superior virtues has supplanted the former, but of a struggle between the principle of aristocracy and its representatives, or, in other words, of Aristocracy versus the Aristocrats.
My conclusion that Aristocracy means Life and that
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