I think that we may trace something of the results of these influences in the position of the oldest English nobility. That there was a difference between the noble and the common freeman, in Old-English phrase between the _Eorl_ and the _Ceorl_(28), is shown by countless allusions to the distinction in our earliest records. But it is by no means easy to say what the distinction really was. And, as we shall presently see that this primitive nobility gradually gave way to a nobility of quite another kind and founded on quite another principle, we may perhaps be inclined to think that, at least after the settlement of the English in Britain, the privileges of the _Eorlas_ were little more than honorary. I need hardly say that a traditional deference for high birth, a traditional preference for men of certain families in the disposal of elective offices, may go on when birth carries with it no legal privilege whatever. Nowhere has this been more strikingly shown than in those democratic Cantons of Switzerland of which I have already spoken. In a commonwealth where magistrates were chosen yearly, where every freeman had an equal vote in their choice, it still happened that, year after year, the representatives of certain famous houses were chosen as if by hereditary right. Such were the Barons of Attinghausen in Uri and the house of Tschudi in Glarus(29). And, whatever we say of such a custom in other ways, it was surely well suited to have a good effect on the members of these particular families; it was well suited to raise up in them a succession of men fitted to hold the high offices of the commonwealth. A man who knows that, if he be at all worthy of a certain post of honour, he will be chosen to it before any other man, but who also knows that, if he shows himself unworthy of it, he may either fail to attain it at all or may be peacefully removed from it at the end of any twelvemonth, is surely under stronger motives to make himself worthy of the place which he hopes to fill than either the man who has to run the chance of an unlimited competition or the man who succeeds to honour and authority by the mere right of his birth.