444 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



been going on from the earliest recorded times, we see this state of 

 things substantially realized : there is little or nothing of hereditary- 

 rank, and the only rank recognized is that of official position. Besides 

 the different grades of appointed state functionaries, there are no class 

 distinctions, or none having political meanings. 



A tendency to subordination of the original ranks and a substitu- 

 tion of new ranks is otherwise caused : it accompanies the progress of 

 political consolidation. The change which has occurred in China well 

 illustrates this effect. Gutzlaff says : " Mere title was afterward (on 

 the decay of the feudal system) the reward bestowed by the sovereign, 

 . . . and the haughty and powerful grandees of other countries are 

 here the dependent and penurious servants of the Crown, . , . The 

 revolutionary principle of leveling all classes has been carried in China 

 to a very great extent. . . . This is introduced for the benefit of the 

 sovereign, to render his authority supreme." 



The causes of such changes are not difficult to see. In the first 

 place, the subjugated local rulers losing, as integration advances, more 

 and more of their power, lose, consequently, more and more of their 

 actual if not of their nominal rank, passing from the condition of trib- 

 utary rulers to the condition of subjects. Indeed, jealousy on the part 

 of the monarch sometimes prompts positive exclusion of them from 

 influential positions ; as in France, where " Louis XIV systematically 

 excluded the nobility from ministerial functions." Presently their 

 distinction is further diminished by the rise of competing ranks cre- 

 ated by state authority. Instead of the titles inherited by the land- 

 possessing military chiefs, which were descriptive of their attributes 

 and positions, there come to be titles conferred by the sovereign. 

 Certain of the classes thus established are still of militant origin ; as 

 the knights made on the battle-field, sometimes in large numbers before 

 battle, as at Agincourt, when five hundred were thus created, and 

 sometimes afterward in reward for valor. Others of them arise from 

 the exercise of political functions of different grades ; as in France, 

 where, in the seventeenth century, hereditary nobility was conferred 

 on officers of the great council and officers of the chamber of accounts 

 officers who had habitually been of bourgeois extraction. The ad- 

 ministration of law, too, presently originates titles of honor. In France, 

 in 1607, nobility was granted to doctors, regents, and professors of 

 law; and "the superior courts obtained, in 1644, the privileges of no- 

 bility of the first degree." " So that," as Warnkoenig remarks, " the 

 original conception of nobility was in the course of time so much wid- 

 ened that its primitive relation to the possession of a fief is no longer 

 recognizable, and the whole institution seems changed." These, Avith 

 kindred instances, which our own country and other European coun- 

 tries furnish, show us both how the original class-divisions become 

 blurred and how the new class-divisions are distinguished by being de- 

 localized. They are strata which run through the integrated society, 



