“Now it is a law which hardly admits of exceptions, that aristocracies do not maintain their numbers. The ruling race rules itself out; nothing fails like success.”
William Ralph Inge
Outspoken Essays (Primary source)
Outspoken Essays is a two-volume collection, examining the intellectual, social, and moral challenges of early 20th-century Britain. The essays reflect Inge’s Christian Platonist perspective and his characteristic scepticism toward modern democracy, the idea of progress, and the direction of contemporary society.
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“The other factor, which is really promoting the gradual disappearance of the Anglo-Saxons from the United States, is of a very different character. The descendants of the old immigrants are on the whole the aristocracy of the country. Now it is a law which hardly admits of exceptions, that aristocracies do not maintain their numbers. The ruling race rules itself out; nothing fails like success. Gibbon has called attention to the extreme respect paid to long descent in the Roman Empire, and to the strange fact that, in the fourth century, no ingenuity of pedigree makers could deny that all the great families of the Republic were extinct, so that the second-rate plebeian family of the Anicii, whose name did appear in the Fasti, enjoyed a prestige far greater than that of the Howards and Stanleys in this country. Our own peerage consists chiefly of parvenus. Only six of our noble families, it is said, can trace their descent in the male line without a break to the fifteenth century. The peerage of Sweden tells the same tale. According to Gallon, the custom or law of primogeniture, combined with the habit of marrying heiresses who, as the last representatives of dwindling families, tend to be barren, is mainly responsible for this. Additional causes may be the greater danger which the officer-class incurs in war, and, in former times, the executioner's axe. In our own day the reluctance of rich and self-indulgent women to bear children is undoubtedly a factor in the infertility of the leisured class.”
William Ralph Inge
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”History is a graveyard of aristocracies.”
— Vilfredo Pareto Primary source“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! […] Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary sourceAristocracies History Success Failure