_"While the advances made by objective science and its industrial applications are palpable and undeniable all around us, it is a matter of doubt and dispute if our social and moral advance towards happiness and virtue has been great or any."_--MARK PATTISON. After all, a nation gets the politics that it deserves. The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. If the tone of public life is a low one it is because the tone of society is not a high one. The remedy, then, is not "Sack the lot," but rather, "Repent, lest a worse thing befall thee." It seems to me that a beginning in moral and social reformation might be made if aristocracy could be encouraged to affirm its ancient rights by the performance of its inherent duties. We are a nation without standards, kept in health rather by memories which are fading than by examples which are compelling. We still march to the dying music of great traditions but there is no captain of civilization at the head of our ranks. We have indeed almost ceased to be an army marching with confidence towards the enemy, and have become a mob breaking impatiently loose from the discipline and ideals of our past. Aristocracy, it must be boldly said, has played traitor to England. It has ceased to lead, and not because it has been thrust from its rightful place by the rude hand of democracy, but because it has deliberately preferred the company of the vulgar. No one has pulled it down, it has itself descended. It has lost its respect for learning, it has grown careless of manners, it has abandoned faith in its duty, it is conscious of no solemn obligations, it takes no interest in art, it is indifferent to science, it is sick of effort, it has surrendered gladly and gratefully to the materialism of plutocracy. If it could have lost itself in plutocracy the harm would not have been so great; but it still remains for the multitude a true aristocracy, and looking up to that aristocracy for its standards--an aristocracy whose private life is now public property--the multitude has become materialistic, throwing Puritanism to the dogs, and pushing as heartily forward to the trough as any full-fed glutton in the middle or the upper ranks of life. The standards set by the privileged classes at this time are the same standards as ruled in France before the Revolution. There is no example of modesty, earnestness, restraint, thrift, duty, or culture. Everything is sensual and ostentatious, and shamefacedly sensual and ostentatious.