when rationalism becomes omnipotent, in practice, even the bloody practice of revolutions. Nobility and clergy, so far as they are still extant, appear rather markedly as privileged classes, the tacit significance of the emphasis being that their claim to prescriptive rights on the ground of historical status is (from the point of view of timeless rational or "natural" law) obsolete nonsense. They now have their centre in the capital city (this also a Late-period idea) and now, and now only, develop aristocratic forms to that imposing combination of hauteur and elegance that we see, for example, in the portraits of Reynolds and Lawrence. In opposition to them stand the intellectual powers of the now supreme city, economy and science, which in conjunction with the mass of artisans, functionaries, and labourers feel themselves as a party, diverse in its constituents, but invariably solid at the call to battle for freedom — that is, for urban independence of the great old-time symbols and the rights that flowed from them. As components of the Third Estate, which counts by heads and not by rank, they are all, in all Late periods of all Cultures, "liberal" in one way or another — namely, free from the inward powers of non-urban life. Economy is freed to make money, science freed to criticize. And so in all the great decisions we perceive the intellect with its books and its meetings having the word ("Democracy"), and money obtaining the advantages ("Plutocracy") — and it is never ideas, but always capital, that wins. But this again is just the opposition of truths and facts, in the form in which it develops from the city-life.
Moreover, by way of protest against the ancient symbols of the soil-bound life, the city opposes to the aristocracy of birth the notion of an aristocracy of money and an aristocracy of intellect — the one not very explicit as a claim, but all the more effective as a fact; the other a truth, but nothing more than that and, as a spectacle for the eye, not very convincing. In every Late period there grows on to the ancient nobility — that in which some big bit of history (say, Crusades, or Norman conquest) has become stored as form and beat, but which often has inwardly decayed at the great courts — a genuine second crop. Thus in the fourth century B.C the entry of great plebeian families as conscripti into the Roman Senate of patres produced within the senatorial order an aristocracy of "nobiles" — a nobility holding lands, but entitled by office. In just the same way a nobility of nepotism arose in Papal Rome; in 1650 there were scarcely fifty families of more than three centuries' status. In the Southern States of the American Union there grew up, from Baroque times onward, that planter-aristocracy which was annihilated by the money-powers of the North in the Civil War of 1861-5 . The old merchant-nobility of the type of the Fugger, Welser, and Medici and the great Venetian and Genoese houses — to this type, too, must be assigned practically the whole of the patriciate of the Hellenic colonial cities of 800 — had always something of aristocracy in them,[1] race, tradition, high standards, and the nature-impulse to re-establish connexion
- ↑ Ambrogio Spinola is a case in point. — Tr.
