And all on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue, and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is the easiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbish of genders; simplified immensely its declensions and conjugations; thrown overboard most of the nonsensical ballast we know as grammar. It is only weighted now by its grotesque and ridiculous spelling--one of the absurdest among all the absurd English attempts at compromise. The pressure of the newer speakers will compel it to make jetsam of that lumber also; and then the tongue of Shelley and Newton will march onward unopposed to the conquest of humanity. I pen these remarks, I hope, "without prejudice." Patriotism is a vulgar vice of which I have never been guilty. II. _IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY._ Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation and morals than the democracy they live among. I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of people at large (and especially of that particular European people which "dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies and democracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a common though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners, than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profound superiority by birth to the world around him--a superiority as of fine porcelain to common clay--that the world around him has at last actually begun to accept him at his own valuation. Most English people in particular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures and wines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But history shows us the exact opposite. It is a plain historical fact, provable by simple enumeration, that almost all the aristocracies the world has ever known have taken their rise in the conquest of civilised and cultivated races by barbaric invaders; and that the barbaric invaders have seldom or never learned the practical arts and handicrafts which are the civilising element in the life of the conquered people around them.