The merchant laid his hand on the young man's shoulder. "The very reason. Believe me, a large number of these landed gentry, who pay the penalty of their old family memories, are beyond help. I am the last to deny that many worthy and admirable men belong to this class. Indeed, wherever remarkable talent or nobility of character shoots up among them, no doubt their position offers peculiar scope for its development, but for average men it is not a favorable one. He who considers it his hereditary privilege to enjoy life, and who assumes a distinguished position in virtue of his family, will very often fail to put forth his whole strength in order to deserve that position. Accordingly, numbers of our oldest families are declining, and their fall will be no loss to the state. Their family associations make them haughty without any right to be so--limit their perceptions and confuse their judgment." "Even if all this be true," cried Anton, "it does not absolve us from helping individuals of the class who have excited our sympathy." "No," said the principal, "if it be excited. But it does not glow so rapidly in advancing years as in youth. The baron has endeavored to isolate his property from the current of circumstances, in order to leave it forever to his family. Forever! You, as a merchant, know how to estimate the attempt. True, every rational man must allow it to be desirable that the culture of the same soil should be handed down from father to son. We all prize what our forefathers have possessed before us, and Sabine would unlock every room in this house with pride, because her great-great-grandmother turned the same keys before her. It is therefore natural that the landed proprietor should desire to preserve those familiar scenes, which are the source of his own prosperity, to those nearest and dearest to him. But there must be means to this end, and these means are the making his own existence available for the maintenance and increase of his patrimony. Where energy dies in families or individuals, then it is well that their means die too, that their money should circulate through other hands, and their plowshare pass to those who can guide it better. A family that has become effete through luxury ought to sink down into common life, to make room for the uprising of fresh energies and faculties. Every one who seeks, at the cost of free activity for others, to preserve permanent possessions and privileges for himself or his family, I must look upon as an enemy to the healthy development of our social state. And if such a man ruin himself in his endeavors, I should feel no malicious pleasure in his downfall, but I should say that he is rightly served, because he has sinned against a fundamental law of our social being; consequently, I should consider it doubly wrong to support this man, because I could but fear that I should thus be supporting an unsound condition of the body politic."