‘Did you ever hear of the Forest of Rossendale?’ said Millbank. ‘If you were staying here, you should visit the district. It is an area of twenty-four square miles. It was disforested in the early part of the sixteenth century, possessing at that time eighty inhabitants. Its rental in James the First’s time was 120_l._ When the woollen manufacture was introduced into the north, the shuttle competed with the plough in Rossendale, and about forty years ago we sent them the Jenny. The eighty souls are now increased to upwards of eighty thousand, and the rental of the forest, by the last county assessment, amounts to more than 50,000_l._, 41,000 per cent, on the value in the reign of James I. Now I call that an instance of Saxon industry competing successfully with Norman manners.’ ‘Exactly,’ said Coningsby, ‘but those manners are gone.’ ‘From Rossendale,’ said Millbank, with a grim smile; ‘but not from England.’ ‘Where do you meet them?’ ‘Meet them! In every place, at every hour; and feel them, too, in every transaction of life.’ ‘I know, sir, from your son,’ said Coningsby, inquiringly, ‘that you are opposed to an aristocracy.’ ‘No, I am not. I am for an aristocracy; but a real one, a natural one.’ ‘But, sir, is not the aristocracy of England,’ said Coningsby, ‘a real one? You do not confound our peerage, for example, with the degraded patricians of the Continent.’ ‘Hum!’ said Millbank. ‘I do not understand how an aristocracy can exist, unless it be distinguished by some quality which no other class of the community possesses. Distinction is the basis of aristocracy. If you permit only one class of the population, for example, to bear arms, they are an aristocracy; not one much to my taste; but still a great fact. That, however, is not the characteristic of the English peerage. I have yet to learn they are richer than we are, better informed, wiser, or more distinguished for public or private virtue. Is it not monstrous, then, that a small number of men, several of whom take the titles of Duke and Earl from towns in this very neighbourhood, towns which they never saw, which never heard of them, which they did not form, or build, or establish, I say, is it not monstrous, that individuals so circumstanced, should be invested with the highest of conceivable privileges, the privilege of making laws? Dukes and Earls indeed! I say there is nothing in a masquerade more ridiculous.’ ‘But do you not argue from an exception, sir?’ said Coningsby. ‘The question is, whether a preponderance of the aristocratic principle in a political constitution be, as I believe, conducive to the stability and permanent power of a State; and whether the peerage, as established in England, generally tends to that end? We must not forget in such an estimate the influence which, in this country, is exercised over opinion by ancient lineage.’