The social prestige of the aristocracy is, as everyone knows, immensely less than it was a hundred years or even fifty years since. Two great movements⁠—the two greatest of modern society⁠—have been unfavourable to it. The rise of industrial wealth in countless forms has brought in a competitor which has generally more mind, and which would be supreme were it not for awkwardness and intellectual gêne . Every day our companies, our railways, our debentures, and our shares, tend more and more to multiply these surroundings of the aristocracy, and in time they will hide it. And while this undergrowth has come up, the aristocracy have come down. They have less means of standing out than they used to have. Their power is in their theatrical exhibition, in their state. But society is every day becoming less stately. As our great satirist has observed, “The last Duke of St.