After all, is it merely sentimentalism and a sense of the picturesque that leads us to look backward with some wistfulness to the days of which the record is still left us in legends and fairy-tales and old romance, when ignorance and vulgarity did not sit in high places even if arrogance and pride and tyranny sometimes did, and when the profiteer and the oriental financier and the successful politician did not represent the distinction and the chivalry and the courtesy and the honour of the social organism man builds for his own habitation? The idea of knighthood still stirs us and the deeds of chivalry and the courtesy and the honour of the social Knights of the Round Table, Crusaders and knights errant, the quest of the Holy Grail, rescue and adventure, the fighting with paynims and powers of evil, still stir our blood and arouse in our minds strange contrasts and antinomies. Princes and fair chatelaines in their wide domains with castle and chase and delicate pleasaunce, liege-men bound to them by more than the feudal ties of service. All the varied honours of nobility, vitalized by significant ritual and symbolized by splendid and beautiful costumes. Courts of Love and troubadours and trouvères, kings who were kings indeed, with the splendour and courtesy and beneficence of their courts--Louis the Saint and Frederic II, Edward III and King Charles--above all the simple rank and high honour of the "gentleman," the representative of a long line of honourable tradition, no casual and purse-proud upstart, but of proud race and unquestioned status, proud because it stood for certain high ideals of honour and chivalry and loyalty, of courtesy and breeding and compassion. All these old things of long ago still rouse in us answering humours, and there are a few of us who can hardly see just why they are inconsistent with liberty and opportunity, justice, righteousness and mercy. Somehow the last two generations, and especially the last ten years, have revealed many things hitherto hidden, and as we envisage society as it has come to be, estimating it by new-found standards and establishing new comparisons through a recovery of a more just historical sense, the question comes whether it is indeed more wholesome, more beautiful, more normal to man as he is, than the older society that in varying forms but always the same principle, had held throughout all history until the new model came in, now hardly a century ago.