I might show from the history of Russia how the despotism of the Autocrat has been made necessary to save the empire from a worse foe--from a serf-mastering aristocracy. And I might go further and show how the statesmanship which has emancipated the lower class in Russia has recognized the great truth that the nation is not safe against the aristocracy--that no barrier can stand against them except the enfranchised endowed with rights and lands.[55] But I am aware that an objection to this estimate of the noxious activity of an Aristocracy may be raised from the history of England. It may be said that there the course of the nobles has been different--that some of the hardest battles against tyrants have been won by combination of nobles, that they have laid the foundations of free institutions, that, under monarchs who have hated national liberty, nobles have been among the foremost martyrs. Let us look candidly at this. It is true that the Earl of Pembroke and the Barons of England led the struggle for Magna Charta; it is true that the Earl of Leicester and his associate barons summoned the first really representative Parliament;[56] it is true that Surrey and Raleigh and Russell suffered martyrdom at the hands of tyrants. It is true, moreover, that English nobles have not generally been so turbulent in what I have called the Vitriolic period, nor so debased in the Narcotic period, as most other European Aristocracies. They were, indeed, very violent in the wars of the Roses,--many of them were very debased under Charles the Second, and again under the first and last Georges, and it is quite likely will be again under that very unpromising ruler, Albert Edward, who seems developing the head of George the Third and the heart of George the Fourth[57]--but they have never been quite so violent or debased as the Continental nobles at similar periods. But all this, so far from weakening the thesis I support, strengthens it--nay, clenches it. For the nobility of England, less than any other in Europe, was based upon the oppression of a subject class. From the earliest period when law begins to be established in England we find that the serf system begins to be extinguished. The courts of law quietly adopted and steadily maintained the principle that in any question between lord and serf the presumption was in favor of the inferior's right to liberty rather than the superior's right to property.[58] The whole current set that way, and we find growing in England that middle class, steady and sturdy by the possession of rights, which won Agincourt and Crecy and Marston Moor and Worcester,--which made her country a garden and her cities marts for the world.[59] It is because England had so little of a serf-ruling caste in her history that she has been saved from so many of the calamities which have befallen other nations.