continually justify themselves to a majority of the whole people, they can never feel themselves secure in public opinion even if for the time being they have the support of law. “Grafting,” said Governor Folk of Missouri, “may or may not be unlawful. It is either a special privilege exercised contrary to law or one that the law itself may give. Special privileges are grafts and should be hateful to all good citizens.”[110] The statement is an unguarded one, but it is thoroughly typical of a deep-seated American tendency to suspect corruption in every special privilege, whether it be legal or illegal, whether it be condemned by a sweeping consensus of moral opinion or only by some reforming voice crying in the wilderness. It is no part of this argument to assert that the rights and immunities enjoyed by the English aristocracy, for example, are corrupt. Under the definition earlier proposed this is clearly not the case. On the contrary these privileges have as yet the support of law, tradition, custom, public opinion, and public deference. A radical democrat might say that all this simply proves the blind ignorance of the great mass of Englishmen and the fatal ease with which they can be exploited by a horde of social parasites. From an unprejudiced point of view, however, we must concede the right of a people to govern itself according to its own lights. The English may be committing a monstrous political blunder in tolerating their aristocracy, but if they decide to do so that is their own concern, and the privilege so established is, both in morals and in law, beyond the accusation of corruption. Exactly the same defence may be made for the Prussian _Junkertum_ and the German military class, or, for that matter, for the caste system of India. The development of new standards of public opinion, morals, and politics, in these countries may at some time bring their privileged classes under effective criticism; the conviction that they are socially harmful may gain ground; and out of this conviction may come reform movements designed to secure their abolition. Until that time, however, while we may perceive clearly enough the political ills entailed upon our neighbours by special privilege, we cannot denounce them as corrupt because they tolerate it.