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[146] more repeat words, which, however often repeated, have still a value, from their truth — aristocracy now sets up in our country a false ideal, which materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. It misleads the young, makes the worldly more worldly, the limited more limited, the stationary more stationary. Even to the imaginative, whom Lord John Manners thinks its sure friend, it is more a hindrance than a help. Johnson says well: “Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.” But what is a Duke of Norfolk or an Earl of Warwick, dressed in broad-cloth and tweed, and going about his business or pleasure in hansom cabs and railway carriages, like the rest of us? Imagination herself would entreat him to take himself out of the way, and to leave us to the Norfolks and Warwicks of history.

I say this without a particle of hatred, and with esteem, admiration, and affection for many individuals in the aristocratical class. But the action of time and circumstance is fatal. If one asks oneself what is really to be desired, what is expedient, one would go far beyond the substitution of an elected Second Chamber for

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