Part 6

One special point is here worth our attention for a moment. Not only does God, Nature, or dialectical materialism make the victory of the present under-dog certain. The present upper-dog can be shown--perhaps for propaganda purposes must be shown--to have acquired his preponderance by an accident, or a particularly dirty trick, while God or Nature was temporarily off duty. Thus in the English revolution the royalists and indeed the gentry as a whole were labeled “Normans,” descendants of a group of foreign invaders with no right to English soil. John Lilburne, the Leveller, goes so far as to assert that the whole common law was a badge of slavery imposed upon the free people of England by the Norman Conquest. American hatred of absentee British government hardly needed such artificial fanning. The French were told by no less a person than Siéyès that all their trouble came from the usurpations of the Franks over a thousand years ago. French nobleman in 1789 were descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans. Revolution was but restoring the conditions of 450 A.D. Marxism explained the exploiting class without recourse to such pseudo-historical notions. And yet there is plenty of reference in Russian revolutionary agitation to the usurpation of land by the nobles, to their Varangian, or Tartar, or Western, or at any rate foreign origins.

Finally, a great deal of energy has been expended on the question as to whether this revolutionary ideology “causes” revolutionary action, or whether it is merely a sort of superfluous decoration with which the revolutionists cover their real acts and real motives. Most of this discussion is in the highest degree futile, since it is based on a crude notion of causation altogether untenable in fruitful scientific work beyond a very simple level. There is no more point disputing whether Rousseau made the French revolution or the French revolution made Rousseau than in disputing whether egg or chicken came first. We note that in our pre-revolutionary societies the kind of discontents, the specific difficulties about economic, social and political conditions that hard-boiled moderns focus on are invariably accompanied by a very great deal of writing and talking about ideals, about a better world, about some very abstract forces tending to bring about that better world. It is, indeed, the expression of ideas, rather than particular ideas--which may vary enormously in different revolutions--that makes the uniformity. We find that ideas are always a part of the pre-revolutionary situation, and we are quite content to let it go at that. No ideas, no revolution. This does not mean that ideas cause revolutions. It merely means that they form part of the mutually dependent variables we are studying.

IV. Classes and Class Antagonisms

Certain groups in our four societies of the old regimes nourished feelings of dislike, mixed or unmixed with contempt, for other groups. If we avoid the narrow economic connotations of the term, we may call these groups classes; if we realize the struggle was not simply one between two contending classes, feudal vs. bourgeois or bourgeois vs. proletariat, we may even speak of class struggles. This type of struggle in one form or another seems as endemic as many other kinds of violence in the stablest of Western societies. Here again we must not postulate for the normal society with which we contrast our pre-revolutionary societies, a lying down together of the lion and the lamb. But even so, it will soon appear that these class hatreds are stepped up, exacerbated in a noticeable degree in the old regimes. Class distinctions are seen, not as barriers the clever, brave, or ambitious can cross, but as unnatural and unjust privileges, established by wicked men against the express intention of Almighty God, Nature, or Science. These class struggles are by no means simple duels; there are groups within groups, currents within currents. We must try and analyze some of these currents.

In the first place, what may be called the ruling class seems in all four of our societies to be divided and inept. By ruling class we understand, it may be too generously, the people who run things, the people in the public eye--the politicians, the important civil servants, the bankers, the men of affairs, the great landowning nobles, the officers, the priesthood, perhaps even some of the intellectuals. Formal nobility of the blood has in the Western world usually been a much too narrow test of membership in a ruling class. Even in early modern times, the ruling class was something like what we have outlined above, the minority of men and women who seemed to lead dramatic lives, about whom the more exciting scandals arose, who set the fashion, who had wealth, position, or at least reputation, who, in short, ruled. Indeed, in a socially stable society it seems likely that the great masses of poor and middling folk, as also the obscure and unsuccessful people who by birth and training might seem to be in the ruling class, really accept the leadership of those at the top of the social pyramid, and dream rather of joining them than of dislodging them.

Now the ruling classes in our societies seem, and not simply a posteriori because they were in fact overthrown, to have been unsuccessful in fulfilling their functions. It is unlikely that short of Sparta or Prussia the simpler military virtues alone are enough for a ruling class. Such a class ought not, however, to shrink from the use of force to maintain itself, and it ought not to value wit and originality in its own members too highly. Wit, at any rate, it can usually hire adequately enough from other sources. A mixture of the military virtues, of respect for established ways of thinking and behaving, and of willingness to compromise, is probably an adequate rough approximation of the qualities of a successful ruling class--qualities clearly possessed by the Romans of Punic War times, and the English of the eighteenth century, though the latter failed in relations with America.

When numerous and influential members of such a class begin to believe that they hold power unjustly, or that all men are brothers, equal in the eyes of eternal justice, or that the beliefs they were brought up on are silly, or that “after us the deluge,” they are not likely to resist successfully any serious attacks on their social, economic and political position. The subject of the decadence of a ruling class, and the relation of this decadence to revolution, is a fascinating and, like so much of sociology, a relatively unexplored subject. We can here do no more than suggest that this decadence is not necessarily a “moral” decadence if by “moral” you mean what a good evangelical Christian means by that word. Successful ruling classes have not infrequently been quite addicted to cruel sports, drinking, gambling, adultery, and other similar pursuits which we should no doubt all agree to condemn. It is a reasonable assertion that the virtuous Lafayette was a much clearer sign of the unfitness of the French aristocracy to rule than were Pompadour or even Du Barry.

The Russians here provide us with a locus classicus. To judge from what appears of them in print, Russian aristocrats for decades before 1917 had been in the habit of bemoaning the futility of life, the backwardness of Russia, the Slavic sorrows of their condition. No doubt this is an exaggeration. But clearly many of the Russian ruling classes had an uneasy feeling that their privileges would not last. Many of them, like Tolstoy, went over to the other side. Others turned liberal, and began that process of granting concessions here and withdrawing them there that we have already noticed in France. Even in court circles, it was quite the fashion by 1916 to ridicule the Czar and his intimates. As Protopopov, a hated Czarist minister, writes: “Even the very highest classes became frondeurs before the revolution; in the grand salons and clubs the policy of the government received harsh and unfriendly criticism. The relations which had been formed in the Czar’s family were analyzed and talked over. Little anecdotes were passed about the head of the state. Verses were composed. Many grand dukes openly attended these meetings.... A sense of the danger of this sport did not awaken until the last moment.”

Finally, when those of them who had positions of political power did use force, they used it sporadically and inefficiently. We shall have more to say about this general problem of the use of force when we come to the first stages of actual revolution. In this connection it will be sufficient that the Russian ruling classes, in spite of their celebrated Asiatic background, were by the late nineteenth century more than half ashamed to use force, and therefore used it badly, so that on the whole those on whom force was inflicted were stimulated rather than repressed. The line in actual practice of government between force and persuasion is a subtle one, not to be drawn by formulas, by “science” or textbooks, but by men skilled in the art of ruling. One of the best signs of the unfitness of the ruling class to rule is the absence of this skill among its members. And this absence is recorded in history in the cumulated minor disturbances and discontents which precede revolution.

Russia remains the classic instance of an inept ruling class, but France is almost as good a case. The salons in which the old regime was torn apart--verbally, of course--were presided over by noblewomen and attended by noblemen. Princes of the blood royal became freemasons, and if they did not quite plot the overthrow of all decency, as witch-hunters like Mrs. Nesta Webster seem to think, at least sought to improve themselves out of their privileges and rank. Perhaps nowhere better than in France is to be seen one of the concomitants of the kind of disintegration of the ruling class we have been discussing. This is the deliberate espousal by members of the ruling class of the cause of discontented or repressed classes--upper-dogs voluntarily turning under-dogs. It is not altogether cynical to hazard the guess that this is sometimes an indication that there is about to be a reversal in the position of the dogs. Lafayette is in some ways a good example of this kind of upper-dog, since he seems to have been an unintelligent and ambitious man, whose course was largely determined by fashion. Lafayette tried to do what his own circle would most admire, and since he could not dance well--and his circle admired good dancing--he went to fight for freedom in America, which was also something his circle admired. But ruling classes cannot profitably fight for freedom--freedom, that is, for the other fellow.

In America this decadence of a ruling class is not a prominent symptom of the coming revolution. Our native ruling class was still young, still in the process of formation, and seen as a class exhibited none of the ineptness we have noted in Russia and France. But of course a large part of our ruling class espoused the American revolution, which is probably one of the reasons why our revolution stopped short of a full-blooded Reign of Terror. As far as the ruling class in England at the time of our revolution is concerned, it was very far from being capable of a resolute course towards America. It managed to hold on in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but only by granting concessions to the middle classes, concessions which its French counterpart refused to grant. Many of these Englishmen were, however, anything but defenders of the established order as regards relations with America. Fox, Burke, the Whigs in general, sided with the Americans even after 1775, and their attitude unquestionably helped give the rebellious Americans heart.

Even in seventeenth-century England this sort of symptom is to be discerned. In the English aristocracy of Jacobean times there is not, of course, exactly the same mixture of weariness, doubt, humanitarian hopes, and irresponsibility we have found in Russia or in France. Yet most of these elements can be found in the group later known as Cavaliers. Picturesque, romantic, appealing though the Cavaliers seem to us now in literature and tradition, it would be hard to maintain that they displayed the solidarity and balance necessary to a ruling class. And the Cavalier legend is not wholly a product of the years after the Great Rebellion. The Cavaliers were romantic even to themselves, and in a harsh world of Puritans and money-making had already begun that search for a golden past so characteristic of the émigrés of later revolutions. Nor are the enlightened or inspired, the Lafayettes or the Tolstoys, altogether lacking in the English ruling classes of the time. Even though you accept the nineteenth-century evaluation of the English as always hard-headed, practical, compromise-loving, you will do well to recall that a Tudor gentleman gave the word “Utopia” to political thought, and that Harrington’s famous Utopia, Oceana, is a seventeenth-century product.

Still, what conceals from us the extent to which many able and ambitious English gentlemen had deserted the established order in early Stuart times is that they deserted, not as did Lafayette, to America and the abstract rights of man, but to God and the way of salvation. Puritanism, in one or another of its many forms, proved attractive not merely to humble men, nor even to traders and bankers, but to many of the gentry and the nobility. Do not forget that Cromwell himself was a gentleman. Finally, what we may call the politico-legal opposition to the first two Stuarts--though separation of political and religious for that time is purely a matter of analysis, the two being inextricably mixed in the feelings of contemporaries--this politico-legal opposition was, as far as leadership went, almost wholly recruited from gentry and nobility. Men like Hampden and Essex resemble Washington in that they are essentially conservatives driven to rebellion by the ineptness of their immediate rulers; they are not, like Lafayette, sentimental deserters of their class.

Except perhaps in America, we find the ruling classes in the old regimes markedly divided, markedly unsuited to fulfill the functions of a ruling class. Some have joined the intellectuals and deserted the established order, have indeed often become leaders in the crusade for a new order; others have turned rebels, less because of hope for the future than because of boredom with the present; others have gone soft, or indifferent, or cynical. Many, possibly even most of the rank-and-file of the ruling classes, the English squire, the French and Russian country nobleman, retained the simple faith in themselves and their position which is apparently necessary to a ruling class. But the tone of life in the upper classes was not set by such as these. Fashion had deserted with the intellectuals. The sober virtues, the whole complex series of value-judgments which guards a privileged class from itself and others, all these were out of fashion at Whitehall, at Versailles, at the old court of St. Petersburg. Esprit de corps is a subtle thing, difficult, indeed impossible, to analyze with the methods of the chemist or the statistician. The intricate balance of sentiments and habits which hold men together in any such group as those we have been discussing may be altered by changes apparently insignificant, and extremely difficult to trace. But the fact of the alteration is clear. The very wit, refinement, the cultural graces so evident in what we know of the Cavaliers, the French aristocrats of Versailles and the salons, the Russian upper classes of the ballet, the opera, the novel, are signs of the decadence, not necessarily moral, but certainly political, of a ruling class.

Nor is it possible, even for those who find the simple forms of the economic interpretation of history inadequate and misleading, to deny that in three of our societies--England, France, and Russia--there are clear signs that the ruling classes were in a very shaky economic position. In each case there had been a notable rise in the standards of living of the nobility and gentry; finer houses, finer clothes, the luxuries brought by the decorative arts, by sculpture, painting, and music all cost a great deal of money, and were not in a purely economic sense good investments. Though the prohibitions against a gentleman’s making money in business were by no means as absolute, even in France, as they sometimes appear in textbooks of history, it is a fact that most gentlemen had neither the gifts nor the training for such money-making. Most of them lived from agricultural rents, which could not be stretched to meet their rising costs, and from pensions, sinecures, and other aids from the government, which were at least as inelastic. Notably for the French and Russian upper classes, it is clear that some of the discontent which undermined their esprit de corps at the outbreak of the revolution had its origin in their economic difficulties.

So much for the upper or ruling classes. The classes immediately beneath them in the social structure display in England, France, and Russia, and to a lesser degree in America, a more than ordinary dislike for their superiors. Here once more we are confronted with the problem of what is normal in class relationships in Western societies. The view that in a normal society there are no class antagonisms is as much to be rejected as the Marxist view that in such societies--at least up to the present--the class struggle has been unceasingly and equally bitter and ferocious. A picture of our Old South, for instance, which sees contented, well-fed slaves, prosperous artisans and traders with no dislike for their gentlemanly patrons, a serene plantation aristocracy nobly patriarchal, is plain nonsense; but so, too, is one which sees only smoldering discontent among the slaves, envy and hatred among poor whites, pride and fear among the planters. Men in Western societies have never been free, equal, and brothers; there has always been political, social, and economic inequality among groups within these societies, groups we commonly call classes. The existence of antagonisms among classes is a fact, however much it may be to the interest of the ruling class to deny it. But the various antagonisms, by no means purely economic, which set class against class are in a normal society subordinated to other concerns, wider or narrower, cut across by other conflicts, subdued by other interests. At any rate they are not concentrated, embittered, strengthened by an almost unanimous support from the intellectuals, as we shall find they were in the old regimes we are studying.

In England, where we have usually been taught to believe that class hatreds were minimized by the good relations between country gentlemen and villagers, by the absorption of younger sons of the nobility in the middle classes, by some English sense of solidarity and decency, the seventeenth century saw a bitter class struggle. The following quotation from Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson is not only a fair specimen of the feelings of a middle-class Puritan towards the nobility; it can stand as a sample of the kind of intense, and always highly moral, atmosphere of such class antagonisms in other pre-revolutionary societies: “The court of the King [James I] was a nursery of lust and intemperance ... the nobility of the land was utterly debased.... The generality of the gentry of the land soon learned the court fashion, and every great house in the country soon became a sty of uncleanness. Then began murder, incest, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, fornication, and all sorts of ribaldry to be countenanced vices because they held such conformity to the court example.” Or, more gently:

“courtesy, Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds With smoky rafters, than in tapst’ry halls And courts of princes, where it first was nam’d And yet is most pretended.”

This was not written by an eighteenth-century disciple of Rousseau, but by John Milton.

We need hardly labor the point that both the French and the Russian middle classes hated, and envied, and felt morally superior to their aristocracies, and that their writings are filled with passages indicative of the strength and spread of these sentiments. At fourteen years Manon Phlipon, later as Madame Roland something more than Egeria to the Girondin party, told her mother after a week spent with a lady of the suite of the Dauphiness, “Another few days and I shall detest these people so much that I shan’t be able to control my hatred.” And to her mother’s question as to what harm these aristocrats did her she answered, “It’s just feeling the injustice, thinking every moment about the absurdity of it all.” The higher the French bourgeois rose, the closer he came in his way of life to the aristocracy, the more vividly in some respects he felt the gap which separated him from his neighbor with four quarters of nobility. “It wasn’t the taxes,” wrote Rivarol in his memoirs, “nor the lettres de cachet, nor all the other abuses of authority; it wasn’t the vexations of the intendants, nor the ruinous delays of justice which most irritated the nation; it was the prejudice of nobility. What proves this is that it was the bourgeois, the men of letters, the financiers, in fine all those who were envious of the nobility, who raised against the nobility the petty bourgeois of the towns and the peasants in the country.”

How far the lower classes or the proletariat really were stirred against their betters in these societies is not wholly clear, save perhaps in Russia. In England there can be little doubt that the more prosperous artisan classes in the big cities, and in regions like East Anglia the peasantry, were won over to Puritanism; and this meant hostility to the Anglican upper classes. Mixed inextricably with the religious fervor and phrases of the pamphlet literature is a great deal of social hatred, which later came out fully as the revolution moved towards its radical extreme. The French peasantry in many, perhaps most regions, showed by acts in 1789 that they hated their absentee landlords, or the institutions of land tenure, but conclusive evidence that this hatred was much stronger and more universal than it had been for several hundred years has not yet been produced. We cannot be sure whether they hated individuals or a status. Certainly the old notion, evident even in the work of Taine, that the French peasantry were in 1789 smarting under a sharpened double oppression from government and from seigneurs, is at least a revolutionary myth rather than an historical fact. A great deal of work remains to be done in the objective study of the actual sentiments of suppressed or oppressed classes at the bottom of the social scale.

The Russian proletariat, at least in the cities, had certainly been exposed to several generations of Marxist propaganda, and had acquired, so far as its elite goes, a sense of mission against nobles and middle class alike. As the first manifesto of the Social Democratic party, issued in 1898 before the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, put it: “The farther one goes to the East of Europe the weaker, baser and more cowardly becomes the bourgeoisie and the larger cultural and political tasks fall to the lot of the proletariat. On its strong shoulders the Russian working class must bear and will bear the cause of conquering political liberty. This is necessary, but only as the first step toward the achievement of the great historic mission of the proletariat: the creation of a social order in which there will be no place for the exploitation of man by man. The Russian proletariat will cast off from itself the yoke of the autocracy in order with all the greater energy to continue the struggle with capitalism and with the bourgeoisie until the final victory of socialism.” Just how the Russian peasants felt towards classes above them is a difficult problem. We may assume a good deal of variety, as also in eighteenth-century France, depending on local conditions, the character of the landlord, the prosperity of the peasants themselves. There is some indication that by the twentieth century one can risk the generalization: the more prosperous the peasants, the more discontented. But here, as throughout the range of our study, trustworthy materials of one kind are scarce: neither historians nor sociologists have paid sufficient systematic attention to the sentiments towards other groups which seem to prevail in a given social group or class.

We have noted the ineptness of the ruling classes, and the existence among the middle and parts of the lower of more than normally strong sentiments hostile to the ruling classes. It remains to consider how far these class lines were rigid, how far, in particular the “career open to talents,” existed in these societies. One might well argue a priori that in Western societies any approach to a rigid caste-system which would bar the possibility of rise to the able but low-born, any stoppage of what Pareto calls the circulation of the elites, would be a very important preliminary symptom of revolution. Able men do seem to get born in the humblest ranks, and an accumulation of able and discontented men would provide splendid natural leaders for groups restive and ready for revolt. Yet this test of the career open to talents is one of the hardest to apply to our societies. The normal standard for a Western society is here very difficult indeed to sketch, even as roughly as we have done for our other variables.

One might start with a characteristic American assumption, and say that in this country at least we have full freedom of opportunity. Very well, let us take at random some self-made contemporaries--Babe Ruth, Henry Ford, Rudy Vallée, Sinclair Lewis. It would be comforting to be able to say confidently that in the societies of the old regimes these able men would have been kept down by hard-and-fast caste lines, condemned to obscurity or to revolt. Unfortunately, it would not be true. We must not, indeed, be indecently sure about such hypothetical matters. The professional athlete as such could probably not have attained in any other society than our own the wealth Mr. Ruth has nor as much honor--public attention, if you prefer--save perhaps in the Rome of the gladiators. Yet in early feudal society sheer physical strength might have won him knighthood, and even in later societies noble patronage might have carried him far. Mr. Ford may be taken as the entrepreneur-inventor, and though one doubts whether any other society than our own would have made him a national hero, it is likely that in eighteenth-century France or in twentieth-century Russia he could have secured substantial financial success. Mr. Vallée is the man who amuses, and Western society has usually rewarded adequately, and sometimes highly, those who could amuse it. Perhaps aristocracies have never quite concealed their contempt and democracies have made no attempt to conceal their admiration for those who amused them. Yet actors, musicians, jesters and their like seem not, in spite of the example of Figaro, to have been greatly irked by their social status in the past. Certainly the French eighteenth century was kind enough to them, even economically. As for Mr. Lewis, he would presumably have been in his element among the philosophes, and with proper national and racial adjustments, among the Gorkys and the Chekhovs. He would have made proportionately quite as much money, and have been even more honored.

We are dealing with very subtle variables of human sentiments. At all times and in all societies, probably, some men feel that they have abilities which are denied free play by existing social, political, and economic restrictions. Some men always feel balked, cramped, kept-down, and some of them really are. Probably in societies on the eve of revolution there are very large numbers of such men. Yet it is very difficult to put one’s finger on those kinds of activity, those fields of distinction, where this restraint is most felt. Here as elsewhere the given situation is always a complex of restraints, no one or two or three of which would, without additional elements of disturbance, be anything but a quite normal social fact. Moreover, there are other elements besides restraint. Men conditioned to loyalty may put up with great hardships. Fact and feeling seem to vary independently. Thus in Western society there has always been--say in comparison with Hindu caste-society--a very high degree of the “career open to talents.” The circulation of the elites has always gone on. We can here but glance at our societies and see whether there were any special limitations to that circulation in the years prior to the revolution.

In eighteenth-century France, the way to wealth and fame was open practically unrestricted to business men, adventurers, adventuresses, actors, artists, writers--to Pâris-Duverney, to Cagliostro, to Mme. Du Barry, to Talma, to Watteau, to Voltaire. The way to political power was much harder, though the Abbé Dubois, an apothecary’s son, could attain its highest peak. On the whole, substantial political power, the power of making programs and policies, was open to the courtier talents even more than to noble birth; administrative power was almost entirely in the hands of the noblesse de robe, an hereditary, conscientious, and not incapable bureaucracy. Social position, the highest honors, we are frequently told, went only to those who could show four quarters of nobility. Certainly a privileged nobility did exist, and was disliked in the abstract by many a bourgeois who had no concrete experience of it. Twentieth-century Russia is in many ways a close parallel in these respects. A privileged nobility topped the social system, and closed the very highest social honor to plebeian talent. This class was disliked and bitterly disliked by those who saw it from the outside; and no doubt many of its individual members were insufferably haughty, overbearing, dissolute, vain, empty-headed, and the rest, just as if they had come from the pages of A Tale of Two Cities. Yet the way to fame and fortune was far from closed in pre-revolutionary Russia, with new industries rising, with an active theatrical, ballet, and musical life, with university and administrative positions open to ambitious and able young men even from the villages. Rasputin you may perhaps regard as an unhealthy example of the career open to talents, but you can hardly deny that the Siberian monk reached the top.

One clue to this problem of the circulation of the elite may lie in a stoppage of that circulation in a particular and very delicate spot, such as the professions, and especially the “intellectual” professions; that is, among people especially liable to the feeling of frustration, of being excluded from good things. One is struck in studying French society in the years just preceding the revolution with a kind of jam in the stream of bright young men descending on Paris to write and talk their way to fortune. Mercier in his Tableau de Paris tells how every sunny day young men may be seen on the quays, washing and drying their only shirts, ruffled and lacy symbol of high social status. There are also in Russia signs of pressure in competition in the ranks of what we should call “white-collar men,” intellectuals, bureaucrats, clerks, and the like. We know that a similar stoppage in the society of the Weimar Republic had a great deal to do with the Nazi revolution of 1933. This symptom is, like most others that indicate strong social tensions, nearly lacking in eighteenth-century America, and extremely difficult to trace, partly for lack of proper historical materials, in the English revolution. Naturally enough, a stoppage in the circulation of the elite into journalism, literature, and such professions is likely to be rapidly reflected in the desertion of the intellectuals.

Finally, social antagonisms seem to be at their strongest when a class has attained to wealth, but is, or feels itself, shut out from the highest social distinction, and from positions of evident and open political power. This, broadly speaking, does describe the situation of the Calvinist gentry and merchants in seventeenth-century England, the colonial aristocracy and merchants of America, at least in relation to the British ruling class, the French bourgeois of the eighteenth and the Russian bourgeois of the nineteenth centuries. Individuals in each society might rise from ranks even lower than the middle class, and surmount all these barriers. Even as a class, the bourgeoisie in all four societies really had a determining voice in major political decisions even before the revolutions. But the countries were “run” by other, and privileged, beings, and from the highest social distinctions the bourgeoisie as a class were hopelessly excluded. Moreover, this exclusion was symbolized, manifested continuously in all but the most remote rural districts. Long before Marx, long before Harrington’s Oceana, practical men knew that political power and social distinction are the handmaids of economic power. Where wealth cannot buy everything--everything of this world, at any rate--you have a fairly reliable preliminary sign of revolution.