Nobility, then, in the strict sense of the word, is the hereditary handing on from generation to generation of some acknowledged pre-eminence, a pre-eminence founded on hereditary succession, and on nothing else. Such nobility may be immemorial or it may not. There may or there may not be a power vested somewhere of conferring nobility; but it is essential to the true idea of nobility that, when once acquired, it shall go on for ever to all the descendants—or, more commonly, only to all the descendants in the male line—of the person first ennobled or first recorded as noble. The pre-eminence so handed on may be of any kind, from substantial political power to mere social respect and precedence. It does not seem necessary that it should be formally enacted by law if it is universally acknowledged by usage. It may be marked by titles or it may not. It is hardly needful to prove that nobility does not imply wealth, though nobility without wealth runs some risk of being forgotten. This definition seems to take in all the kinds of nobility which have existed in different times and places. They have differed widely in the origin of the noble class and in the amount of privilege implied in membership of it; but they all agree in the transmission of some privilege or other to all the descendants, or to all the male descendants, of the first noble.

In strictness nobility and gentry are the same thing. This fact is overshadowed in England, partly by the habitual use of the word “gentleman” in various secondary uses, partly by the prevalent confusion between nobility and peerage. But that they are the same is proved by the use of the French word gentilhomme, a word which has pretty well passed out of modern use, but which, as long as it remained in use, never lost its true meaning. There were very wide distinctions within the French noblesse, but they all formed one privileged class as distinguished from the roturier. Here, then, is a nobility in the strictest sense. If there is no such class in England, it is simply because the class which answers to it has never been able to keep any universally acknowledged privileges. The word “gentleman” has lost its original meaning in a variety of other uses, while the word “nobleman” has come to be confined to members of the peerage and a few of their immediate descendants.

That the English peerage does not answer to the true idea of a nobility will be seen with a very little thought. There is no handing on of privilege or pre-eminence to perpetual generations. The peer holds a great position, endowed with substantial powers and privileges, and those powers and privileges are handed on by hereditary succession. But they are handed on only to one member of the family at a time. The peer’s children, in some cases his grandchildren, have titles and precedence, but they have no substantial privileges. His remoter descendants have no advantage of any kind over other people, except their chance of succeeding to the peerage. The remote descendant of a duke, even though he may chance to be heir presumptive to the dukedom, is in no way distinguished from any other gentleman; it is even possible that he may not hold the social rank of gentleman. This is not nobility in the true sense; it is not nobility as nobility was understood either in the French kingdom or in the Venetian commonwealth.

Nobility thus implies the vesting of some hereditary privilege or advantage in certain families, without deciding in what such privilege or advantage consists. Its nature may differ widely according to the causes which have led to the establishment of the distinction between family and family in each particular case. The way in which nobility has arisen in different times and places is very various, and there are several nations whose history will supply us with examples of a nobility of one kind giving way to a nobility of another kind. The history of the Roman commonwealth illustrates this perhaps better than any other. What we may call the nobility of earlier occupation makes way for the nobility of office. Our first glimpses of authentic Roman history set before us two orders in the same state, one of which is distinguished from the other by many exclusive privileges. The privileged order—the populus, patres, patricians—has all the characteristics which we commonly expect to find in a privileged order. It is a minority, a minority strictly marked out by birth from other members of the commonwealth, a minority which seems further, though this point is less clearly marked, to have had on the whole the advantage in point of wealth. When we are first entitled to speak with any kind of certainty, the non-privileged class possess a certain share in the election of magistrates and the making of laws. But the privileged class alone are eligible to the greatest offices of the state; they have in their hands the exclusive control of the national religion; they have the exclusive enjoyment of the common land of the state,—in Teutonic phrase, the folkland. A little research shows that the origin of these privileges was a very simple one. Those who appear in later times as a privileged order among the people had once been the whole people. The patricians, patres, housefathers, goodmen—so lowly is the origin of that proud name—were once the whole Roman people, the original inhabitants of the Roman hills. They were the true populus Romanus, alongside of whom grew up a secondary Roman people, the plebs or commons. As new settlers came, as the people of conquered towns were moved to Rome, as the character of Romans was granted to some allies and forced upon some enemies, this plebs, sharing some but not all of the rights of citizens, became a non-privileged order alongside of a privileged order. As the non-privileged order increased in numbers, while the privileged order, as every exclusive hereditary body must do, lessened, the larger body gradually put on the character of the nation at large, while the smaller body put on the character of a nobility. But their position as a nobility or privileged class arose solely because a class with inferior rights to their own grew up around them. They were not a nobility or a privileged class as long as there was no less privileged class to distinguish them from. Their exclusive possession of power made the commonwealth in which they bore rule an aristocracy; but they were a democracy among themselves. We see indeed faint traces of distinction among the patricians themselves, which may lead us to guess that the equality of all patricians may have been won by struggles of unrecorded days, not unlike those which in recorded days brought about the equality of patrician and plebeian. But at this we can only guess. The Roman patricians, the true Roman populus, appear at our first sight of them as a body democratic in its own constitution, but standing out as an order marked by very substantial privileges indeed from the other body, the plebs, also democratic in its own constitution, but in every point of honour and power the marked inferior of the populus.

The old people of Rome thus grew, or rather shrank up, into a nobility by the growth of a new people by their side which they declined to admit to a share in their rights, powers, and possessions. A series of struggles raised this new people, the p>lebs, to a level with the old people, the populus. The gradual character of the process is not the least instructive part of it. There are two marked stages in the struggle. In the first the plebeians strive to obtain relief from laws and customs which were actually oppressive to them, while they were profitable to the patricians. When this relief has been gained by a series of enactments, a second struggle follows, in which the plebeians -win political equality with the patricians. In this second struggle, too, the ground is won bit by bit. No general law was ever passed to abolish the privileges of the patricians; still less was any law ever passed to abolish the distinction between patrician and plebeian. All that was done was done step by step. First, marriage between the two orders was legalized. Then one law admitted plebeians to one office, another law to another. Admission to military command was won first, then admission to civil jurisdiction; a share in religious functions was won last of all. And some offices, chiefly those religious offices which carried no political power with them, always remained the exclusive property of the patricians, because no special law was ever passed to throw them open to plebeians. In this gradual way every practical advantage on the part of the patricians was taken away. But the result did not lead to the abolition of all distinctions between the orders. Patricians and plebeians went on as orders defined by law, till the distinction died out in the confusion of things under the empire, till at last the word “patrician” took quite a new meaning. The distinction, in truth, went on till the advantage turned to the side of the plebeians. Both consuls might be plebeians, both could not be patricians; a patrician could not wield the great powers vested in the tribunes of the commons. These were greater advantages than the exclusive patrician possession of the offices of interrex, rex sacrorum, and the higher flamens. And, as the old distinction survived in law and religion after all substantial privileges were abolished, so presently a new distinction arose of which law and religion knew nothing, but which became in practice nearly as marked and quite as important as the older one.

This was the growth of the new nobility of Rome, that body, partly patrician, partly plebeian, to which the name nobilitas strictly belongs in Roman history. This new nobility gradually became as well marked and as exclusive as the old patriciate. But it differed from the old patriciate in this, that, while the privileges of the old patriciate rested on law, or perhaps rather on immemorial custom, the privileges of the new nobility rested wholly on a sentiment of which men could remember the beginning. Or it would be more accurate to say that the new nobility had really no privileges at all. Its members had no legal advantages over other citizens. They were a social caste, which strove to keep, and which largely succeeded in keeping, all high offices and political power in its own hands. Such privileges, even of an honorary kind, as the nobles did enjoy by law belonged to them, not as nobles, but as senators and senators’ sons. Yet practically the new nobility was a privileged class; it felt itself to be so, and it was felt to be so by others. This nobility consisted of all those who, as descendants of curule magistrates, had thejws imaginum, — that is, who could point to forefathers ennobled by office. That is to say, it consisted of the remains of the old patriciate, together with those plebeian families any members of which had been chosen to curule offices. These were naturally those families which had been patrician in some other Italian city, but which were plebeian at Rome. Many of them equalled the patricians in wealth and antiquity of descent, and as soon as intermarriage was allowed they became in all things their social equals. The practical result of the Licinian reform was that the great plebeian families became, for all practical purposes, patrician. They separated themselves from the mass of the plebeians to form a single body with the surviving patricians. Just as the old patricians had striven to keep plebeians out of high offices, so now the new nobles, patrician and plebeian alike, strove to keep “new men,” men who had not the jus imaginum, out of high office. But there was still the difference that in the old state of things the plebeian was shut out by law, while in the new state of things no law shut out the new man. It needed a change in the constitution to give the consulship to Lucius Sextius; it needed only union and energy in the electors to give it to Caius Marius.

The Roman case is often misunderstood, because the later Roman writers did not fully understand the case themselves. Livy could never get rid of the idea that the old struggle between patrician and plebeian was something like the struggle between the nobility and the people at large in the later days of the commonwealth. In a certain sense he knew better; at any rate, he often repeats the words of those who knew better; but the general impression given by his story is that the plebeians were a lθλv mob and their leaders factious and interested ringleaders of a mob. The case is again often misunderstood because the words “patrician” and “plebeian,” like so many other technical Roman and Greek words, have come in modern language to be used in a way quite unlike their original sense. The word “plebeian,” in its strict sense, is no more contemptuous than the word commoner in England. The plebs, like the English commons, contained families differing widely in rank and social position, among them those families which, as soon as an artificial barrier broke down, joined with the patricians to form the new nobility. The whole lesson is lost if the words “patrician” and “plebeian” are used in any but their strict sense. The Catuli and Metelli, among the proudest nobles of Rome, were plebeians, and as such could not have been chosen to the purely patrician office of interrex, or flamen of Jupiter. Yet even in good writers on Roman history the words “patrician” and “plebeian” are often misapplied by being transferred to the later disputes at Rome, in which they are quito out of place.

We may now compare the history of nobility at Rome with its history in some other of the most famous citycommonwealths. Thus at Athens its history is in its main outlines very much the same as its history at Rome up to a certain point, while there is nothing at Athens which at all answers to the later course of things at Rome. At Athens, as at Rome, an old patriciate, a nobility of older settlement, a nobility which had once been the whole people, was gradually shorn of all exclusive privilege, and driven to share equal rights with a new people which had grown up around it. The reform of Clisthenes answers in a general way to the reform of Licinius, though the different circumstances of the two cities hinder us from carrying out the parallel into detail. But both at Rome and at Athens we see, at a stage earlier than the final reform, an attempt to set up a standard of wealth, either instead of or alongside of the older standard of birth. This same general idea comes out both in the constitution of Servius and in the constitution of Solon, though the application of the principle is different in the two cases. Servius made voting power depend on income; by Solon the same rule was applied to qualification for office. By this change power is not granted to every citizen, but it is put within the reach of every citizen. No man can change his forefathers, but the poor man may haply become richer. The Athenian «ΰττατρίδαι, who were thus gradually brought down from their privileged position, seem to have been quite as proud and exclusive as the Roman patricians; but when they lost their privileges they lost them far more thoroughly, and they did not, as at Rome, practically hand on many of them to a new nobility, of which they formed part, though not the whole. While at Rome the distinction of patrician and plebeian was never wiped out, while it remained to the last a legal distinction even when practical privilege had turned the other way, at Athens, after the democracy had reached its full growth, the distinction seems to have had no legal existence whatever. At Rome down to the last it made a difference whether the candidate for office was patrician or plebeian, though the difference was in later times commonly to the advantage of the plebeian. At Athens, at any rate after Aristides, the eupatrid was neither better nor worse off than another man.

But, what is of far greater importance, there never arose at Athens any body of men which at all answered to the nobilitas of Rome. We see at Athens strong signs of social distinctions, even at a late period of the democracy; we see that, though the people might be led by the lowborn demagogue—using that word in its strict and not necessarily dishonourable meaning—their votes most commonly fell on men of ancient descent. We see that men of birth and wealth often allowed themselves a strange licence in dealing with their low-born fellow-citizens. But we see no sign of the growth of a body made up of patricians and leading plebeians who contrived to keep office to themselves by a social tradition only less strong than positive law. We have at Athens the exact parallel to the state of things when Appius Claudius shrank from the thought of the consulship of Caius Licinius; we have no exact parallel to the state of things when Quintus Metellus shrank from the thought of the consulship of Caius Marius. The cause of the difference seems to be that, while the origin of the patriciate was exactly the same at Rome and at Athens, the origin of the commons was different. The four Ionic tribes at Athens seem to have answered very closely to the three patrician tribes at Rome; but the Athenian demos grew up in a different way from the Roman plebs. If we could believe that the Athenian demos arose out of the union of the other Attic towns with Athens, this would be an exact analogy to the origin of the Roman plebs ; the ei'τrατpt'δαι would be the Athenians and the demos the Atticans (’Αττικοί). But from such glimpses of early Attic history as we can get the union of the Attic towns would seem to have been completed before the constitutional struggle began. That union would answer rather to the union of the three patrician tribes of Rome. Such hints as we have, while they set before us, just as at Rome, a state of things in which small landed proprietors are burthened with debt, also set before us the Attic demos as, largely at least, a body of various origins which had grown up in the city. Clisthenes, for instance, enfranchised many slaves and strangers, a course which certainly formed no part of the platform of Licinius, and which reminds us rather of Cnaeus Flavius somewhat later. On the whole it seems most likely that, while the kernel of the Roman plebs was rural or belonged to the...