NOBILITY. The slightest attention to the nature and the actual experience of man must convince every one that society has a tendency to inequality in the condition of the persona composing it. Take half a dozen youths, and place them in a society apart from all other per sons of their kind ; place them under no other condition than that each person shall enjoy what is his own in his own way ; let the whole be at first as nearly on an equality as possible in respect of advantages which are not those of mere nature; and it is certain that at the end of fifty years they and their families will be in a state of great ine quality, that some one among them will have attracted to himself more of the things which make life easy than any of the rest, and that there will be not only a difference but a very great difference between the most and the least successful of the party.
This arises from the inequality of the physical, the moral, and intel lectual power of each, that is, of some one of those things which we say are the gifts of nature, combined with the introduction of principles and habits at a very early period of life, the things in short which make the man himself, independently of the adventitious advantages which are derived from the possession of things external to himself.
Thus bodily strength, adroitness, quickness of eye, capacity of bear ing fatigue, steady industry, frugality, temperance, cantion, foresight, aptness to seize opportunities, knowledge of the dispositions and cha racters of other men, will in any situation of life prove advantageous to those who possess them; and those who want them and are without an equivalent in some other valuable quality, can never expect to be in a situation equally favourable, when time has been allowed for the exercise of those faculties and for the production of their natural fruits.
When once a little advantage is gained, and another generation arises starting in life with the possession of the advantages which the talent or the good fortune of the father secured for it, if the same good physical, moral, or intellectual faculties are inherited, as may be the case, it is manifest that the elevation will become higher and the distinction greater. This will go on in an accelerating ratio, for the adventitious advantages operate as in a series of compound interest.
On the other hand there may be a declension in another, till the lowest possible point of destitution has been reached. It seems that if once the principle of property is admitted, and every man is guaranteed In the possession of that which belongs to him, what we have described must necessarily take place. Society may by its institutions do some thing to restrain this tendency, or something which shall iu its effects promote it ; but society can never preclude it, except by measures which shall annihilate property. Whether such measures can be desirable, it is not our present business to discuss.
It is thus, we conceive, that the distinction of tobites and rulyares, which we find in the earliest records of human society, must have originated.
Political consideration and political power will in some degree always follow wealth ; and thus it has been that a larger share of influence in the direction of the affairs of a community has always fallen to the lot of those in whose hands, by their own exertions or those of their ancestors, a larger share of adventitious advantages had been accumu lated than in the hands of others less able or leas fortunate.
Nobility, in the earlier stages of civilisation, consisted, it is probable, in nothing more than the union of political power with wealth; but this would soon 1468 Into that other state in which wo in Europe now see it, where the particular political advantages were guaranteed to the family of him who once possessed himself of them, by which means there was CrattOd a new and very important distinction in society, and it became necessary that society should define who the persons were that were admitted by it to such desirable privileges. It was not now the mere possession of wealth and of that political power which will always more or Ices attend wealth which made a man nobilis ; there must be some recoguition of his admission into what constituted an order endowed with such privileges. Being once secured as an hereditary possession, these privileges might fall to persons who had not wealth or the means of obtaining it, nor the influence and power which wealth brings with it.