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although the effects are different, the same cause may easily be traced.
Both classes constitute small communities in the heart of the nation, and certain permanent notions of right and wrong are ultimately engendered among them. The different acts of human life are viewed by one particular and unchanging light. In the society of servants as in that of masters, men exercise a great influence over each other; they acknowledge settled rules, and in the absence of law they are guided by a sort of public opinion; their habits are settled, and their conduct is placed under a certain control.
These men, whose destiny it is to obey, certainly do not understand fame, virtue, honesty, and honour in the same manner as their masters; but they have a pride, a virtue, and an honesty pertaining to their condition; and they have a notion, if I may use the expression, of a sort of servile honour.[1] Because a class is mean, it must not be supposed that all who belong to it are mean-hearted; to think so would be a great mistake. However lowly it may be, he who is foremost there, and who has no notion of quitting it, occupies an aristocratic position which inspires him with lofty feelings, pride, and self-respect, that fit him for the higher virtues and actions above the common.
Among aristocratic nations it was by no means rare to find men of noble and vigorous minds in the service of the great, who felt not the servitude they bore, and who submitted to the will of their masters without any fear of their displeasure.
But this was hardly ever the case among the inferior ranks of domestic servants. It may be imagined that he who occupies the lowest stage of the order of menials stands very low indeed. The French created a word on purpose to designate the servants of the aristocracy—they called them ‘lacqueys.’ This word lacquey served as the strongest expression, when all others were exhausted, to designate human meanness. Under the old French monarchy, to
- ↑ If the principal opinions by which men are guided are examined closely and in detail, the analogy appears still more striking, and one is surprised to find among them, just as much as among the haughtiest scions of a feudal race, pride of birth, respect for their ancestry and their descendants, disdain of their inferiors, a dread of contact, a taste for etiouette, precedents, and antiquity.
