So the services of aristocracy did not save it when it monopolized
privilege and power too narrowly, when it oppressed the people with selfish
and myopic exploitation, when it retarded the growth of the nation by a
blind addiction to ancestral ways, when it consumed the men and resources
of the state in the lordly sport of dynastic or territorial wars. Then the
excluded banded together in wild revolt; the new rich combined with the
poor against obstruction and stagnation; the guillotine cut off a thousand
noble heads; and democracy took its turn in the misgovernment of
mankind.
Does history justify revolutions? This is an old debate, well illustrated by
Luther’s bold break from the Catholic Church versus Erasmus’ [Erasmus,
Desiderius (1466?-1536)] plea for patient and orderly reform, or by Charles
James Fox’s [Fox, Charles James (1749-1806)] stand for the French
Revolution versus Edmund Burke’s [Burke, Edmund (1729-97)] defense of
“prescription” and continuity. In some cases outworn and inflexible
institutions seem to require violent overthrow, as in Russia in 1917. But in
most instances the effects achieved by the revolution would apparently
have come without it through the gradual compulsion of economic
developments. America would have become the dominant factor in the
English-speaking world without any revolution. The French Revolution
replaced the landowning aristocracy with the money-controlling business
class as the ruling power; but a similar result occurred in nineteenth-
century England without bloodshed, and without disturbing the public
peace. To break sharply with the past is to court the madness that may
follow the shock of sudden blows or mutilations. As the sanity of the
individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of a group
lies in the continuity of its traditions; in either case a break in the chain
invites a neurotic reaction, as in the Paris massacres of September, 1792.
Since wealth is an order and procedure of production and exchange
rather than an accumulation of (mostly perishable) goods, and is a trust (the
