MMa^l T "' ■

194

DOMESTIC MA.NNEES OF TUE PRUSSIANS.

mestic by assisting in the duties of the housc; and wo ourselveshave scen the daughter of a Prussian banker engaged in openingthe parlour shutters outside the Windows on a Sunday morning.

The reader, however, must not imagine that we believe suchacts to be niean or degrading in themselves; on the contrary,our objeet is merely to draw attention to the contemptible ab-surdity of pcople, who are compelled to be industrious, apingthe pornps and vanities of those who can afford to be idle.What we really desire to see is industry possessed of suffi-cient moral courage to claim rank upon its own merits,and not be itself the first to cast a stigma upon its functionby assuming tliat other social positions are more honourablethan its own.

Nor have we, on the other band, any disposition to decryan aristocracy of birth or possessions as a social Institution: forthere is not one of us, however violently opposed to hereditaryhonours, that would not rather have Sprung frora the familyof the Ilussells than that of the Greenacres; and we know füllwell, that so long as wealth is to the million the most desirableof all things in the World, so long must the possessors of itseem the most admirable and powerful in the nation. Still wecannot but hold that lordly pride in derision which assumesthat there is necessarily any innate nobility connected with amere grandiloquent cognominal prefix (a prefix that is simplya state-flam at best), and which not only arrogates to itself thehighest mental and moral excellence solely on account of itsnominal superiority, but has the insolence to affect to scornthe very industry or commerce from which, by a lucky acci-dent merely, it has cscaped.

From the tenor of our remarks, the reader will not accuseus of any extreme patrician or plebeian tendencies; we can,therefore, without fear of being thought prejudiced in favour