Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/569

NOBILITY 525 from the roturier. Here, then, is a nobility in the strictest sense. If there is no such class in England, it is simply because the class which answers to it has never been able to keep any universally acknowledged privileges. The word " gentleman " has lost its original meaning in a variety of other uses, while the word " nobleman " has come to be confined to members of the peerage and a few of their immediate descendants. That the English peerage does not answer to the true idea of a nobility will be seen with a very little thought. There is no handing on of privilege or pre-eminence to perpetual generations. The peer holds a great position, endowed with substantial powers and privileges, and those powers and privileges are handed on by hereditary suc cession. But they are handed on only to one member of the family at a time. The peer s children, in some cases his grandchildren, have titles and precedence, but they have no substantial privileges. His remoter descendants have no advantage of any kind over other people, except their chance of succeeding to the peerage. The remote descendant of a duke, even though he may chance to be heir presumptive to the dukedom, is in no way distinguished from any other gentleman ; it is even possible that he may not hold the social rank of gentleman. This is not nobility in the true sense ; it is not nobility as nobility was understood either in the French kingdom or in the Venetian commonwealth. Nobility thus implies the vesting of some hereditary privilege or advantage in certain families, without decid ing in Avhat such privilege or advantage consists. Its nature may differ widely according to the causes which have led to the establishment of the distinction between family and family in each particular case. The way in which nobility has arisen in different times and places is very various, and there are several nations whose liistory will supply us with examples of a nobility of one kind giving way to a nobility of another kind. The history of the Roman commonwealth illustrates this perhaps better than any other. What we may call the nobility of earlier occupation makes way for the nobility of office. Our first glimpses of authentic Roman history set before us two orders in the same state, one of which is distinguished from the other by many exclusive privileges. The privi- Roman leged order the popvlnu, patres, patricians has all the Populus, characteristics which we commonly expect to find in a privi leged order. It is a minority, a minority strictly marked out by birth from other members of the commonwealth, a minority which seems further, though this point is less clearly marked, to have had on the whole the advantage in point of wealth. When we are first entitled to speak with any kind of certainty, the non- privileged class possess a certain share in the election of magistrates and the making of laws. But the privileged class alone are eligible to the greatest offices of the state ; they have in their hands the exclusive control of the national religion ; they have the exclusive enjoyment of the common land of the state, in Teutonic phrase, the folkland. A little research shows that the origin of these privileges was a very simple one. Those who appear in later times as a privileged order among the people had once been the whole people. The patricians, patres, housefathers, goodmen so lowly is the origin of that proud name were once the whole Roman people, the original inhabitants of the Roman hills. They were the true populus Romanus, alongside of whom grew up a secondary Roman people, the plebs or commons. As new settlers came, as the people of conquered towns were moved to Rome, as the character of Romans was granted to some allies and forced upon some enemies, this plebs, sharing some but not all of the rights of citizens, became a non-privileged order alongside of a privileged order. As the non-privileged order increased in numbers, while the privileged order, as every exclusive hereditary body must do, lessened, the larger body gradually put on the char acter of the nation at large, while the smaller body put on the character of a nobility. But their position as a nobility or privileged class arose solely because a class with inferior rights to their own grew up around them. They were not a nobility or a privileged class as long as there was no less privileged class to distinguish them from. Their exclusive possession of power made the commonwealth in which they bore rule an aristocracy; but they were a democracy among themselves. We see indeed faint traces of distinction among the patricians themselves, which may lead us to guess that the equality of all patricians may have been won by struggles of unre corded days, not unlike those which in recorded days brought about the equality of patrician and plebeian. But at this we can only guess. The Roman patricians, the true Roman populus, appear at our first sight of them as a body democratic in its own constitution, but standing out as an order marked by very substantial privileges indeed from the other body, the plebs, also democratic in its own constitution, but in every point of honour and power the marked inferior of the populus. The old people of Rome thus grew, or rather shrank Patri- up, into a nobility by the growth of a new people by cians > their side which they declined to admit to a share in their rights, powers, and possessions. A series of struggles raised this new people, the plebs, to a level with the old people, the populus. The gradual character of the process is not the least instructive part of it. There are two marked stages in the struggle. In the first the plebeians strive to obtain relief from laws and customs which were actually oppressive to them, while they were profitable to the patricians. When this relief has been gained by a series of enactments, a second struggle follows, in which the plebeians win political equality with the patricians. In this second struggle, too, the ground is won bit by bit. No general law was ever passed to abolish the privileges of the patricians ; still less was any law ever passed to abolish the distinction between patrician and plebeian. All that was done was done step by step. First, marriage between the two orders was legalized. Then one law admitted plebeians to one office, another law to another. Admission to military command was won first, then admis sion to civil jurisdiction ; a share in religious functions was won last of all. And some offices, chiefly those reli gious offices which carried no political power with them, always remained the exclusive property of the patricians, because no special law was ever passed to throw them open to plebeians. In this gradual way every practical advantage on the part of the patricians was taken away. But the result did not lead to the abolition of all dis tinctions between the orders. Patricians and plebeians went on as orders defined by law, till the distinction died out in the confusion of things under the empire, till at last the word " patrician " took quite a new meaning. The distinction, in truth, went on till the advantage turned to the side of the plebeians. Both consuls might be plebeians, both could not be patricians; a patrician could not wield the great powers vested in the tribunes of the commons. These were greater advantages than the exclusive patrician possession of the offices of interrex, rex sacrorum, and the higher flamens. And, as the old distinction survived in laAv and religion after all substantial privileges were abo lished, so presently a new distinction arose of which law and religion knew nothing, but which became in practice nearly as marked and quite as important as the older one. This was the growth of the new nobility of Rome, that body, partly patrician, partly plebeian, to which the name