Every Intendant, chosen by the Comptroller-General out of the lower-born members of the Council of State; a needy young plebeian with his fortune to make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of his greed, ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a better man--abler, more energetic, and often, to judge from the pages of De Tocqueville, with far more sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantry--than was the count or marquis in the chateau above, who looked down on him as a roturier; and let him nevertheless become first his deputy, and then his master.
Understand me--I am not speaking against the hereditary principle of the Ancien Regime, but against its caste principle--two widely different elements, continually confounded nowadays.
The hereditary principle is good, because it is founded on fact and nature.If men's minds come into the world blank sheets of paper--which I much doubt--every other part and faculty of them comes in stamped with hereditary tendencies and peculiarities.There are such things as transmitted capabilities for good and for evil; and as surely as the offspring of a good horse or dog is likely to be good, so is the offspring of a good man, and still more of a good woman.If the parents have any special ability, their children will probably inherit it, at least in part; and over and above, will have it developed in them by an education worthy of their parents and themselves.If man were--what he is not--a healthy and normal species, a permanent hereditary caste might go on intermarrying, and so perpetuate itself.But the same moral reason which would make such a caste dangerous--indeed, fatal to the liberty and development of mankind, makes it happily impossible.Crimes and follies are certain, after a few generations, to weaken the powers of any human caste; and unless it supplements its own weakness by mingling again with the common stock of humanity, it must sink under that weakness, as the ancient noblesse sank by its own vice.Of course there were exceptions.The French Revolution brought those exceptions out into strong light; and like every day of judgment, divided between the good and the evil.But it lies not in exceptions to save a caste, or an institution; and a few Richelieus, Liancourts, Rochefoucaulds, Noailles, Lafayettes were but the storks among the cranes involved in the wholesale doom due not to each individual, but to a system and a class.