Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

ARISTOCRACY THE BULWARK OF LIBERTY. 321

magogue nor despot; I am an aristocrat in the broadest acceptation of the word. The elegance that I wish to preserve in communities is not frivolous, nor yet unfeeling; it is regulated by taste; taste excludes all abuses ; it is the surest preservative against them, for it dreads every kind of exaggeration. A certain elegance is essential to the arts, and the arts save the world; for it is through their agency more than any other that people attach themselves to civilisation, of which they are the last and the most precious recompense. By a privilege which belongs to them alone among the various objects that can shed a halo upon a nation, their glory pleases and profits all classes of society equally.

Aristocracy, as I understand it, far from allying itself with tyranny in favour of order, as the demagogues who misunderstand it pretend, cannot exist under an arbitrary government. Its mission is to defend, on one side, the people against the despot, and on the other, civilisation against that most terrible of all tyrants, revolution. Barbarism takes more than one form: crush it in despotism and it springs to life again in anarchy; but true liberty, guarded by a true aristocracy, is neither violent nor inordinate.

Unfortunately, the partisans of a moderating aristocracy in Europe are now blinded, and lend their arms to their adversaries: in their false prudence they seek for aid among the enemies of all political and religious liberty, as though danger could only come from the side of the new revolutionaries; they forget that arbitrary sovereigns were anciently as much usurpers as are the modern jacobins.

Feudal aristocracy has come to an end in all, except p 5