320 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



ing-fields into action perhaps as a subordinate officer on 

 active service, or as a civil servant in some remote corner of 

 the empire. We speak of such men as educated Englishmen ; 

 but after the inevitable lapse of their school knowledge they 

 are extraordinarily ignorant as a class of all except the simple 

 things that men pick up from newspapers or in conversation 

 with another. 



505. The rise and expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race in 

 modern time has been very remarkable, Constituting as it 

 does one of the great outstanding events of human history, 

 remote generations will probably regard it with much the 

 same feelings that we now bestow on the achievements of 

 Greece and Rome more especially since this expansion, un- 

 like that of the ancients, is, from the nature of the case, a 

 permanent one. But it differs from all similar outbursts of 

 national energy in one particular ; it has been the work 

 mainly of lower-class men. Greece and Rome and all the 

 other great nations of antiquity owed their rise and progress 

 to an enlightened patrician class. During the Dark Ages the 

 patricians were still the leaders of the people though they 

 produced very few great men. The Renaissance was largely 

 the work of the patrician classes. Russia owed her uprising 

 during the eighteenth century to one man; but the pre- 

 paratory work of the French Revolution was done principally 

 by patricians. Japan owes her sudden awakening to an 

 intelligent study by the same class of Western civilization. 

 But in Great Britain after the Reformation the masses 

 developed independence of mind ; the civilization consequently 

 put on an industrial and scientific aspect. The nation be- 

 came powerful because of its wealth and progressive and for- 

 midable because of the energy and enterprise of its common 

 men, who as commercial and military adventurers penetrated 

 to all parts of the world. Successful in war, it was yet more 

 successful in peace. Many daughter states were founded in 

 which their peculiar characteristics made the common men 

 successful colonists. Even where patricians ruled their tools 

 were of superlative excellence. Under the same inspiring 

 influence a great literature and philosophy came into being. 



506. The patrician class, at any rate subsequently to Tudor 

 times, participated least in the change of mental training, and 

 in proportion to their power and wealth contributed least to 

 the national success. The nation became great more in spite 

 of them than because of them. Their education fell into the 

 hands of a section of the Protestant clergy that most nearly 

 resembled the orthodox type into the hands of men averse 



