“The Aristocracy of the Future.”

South Canterbury Times, Issue 4989, 24 April 1889, Page 3

“The Aristocracy of the Future. ”

The aristocracy of the future will be very unlike the aristocracy of the present if, as Charles Eingley maintained in a lecture delivered at Crowe in 1871, but published for the first time in “ Good Words,” it is an aristocracy of sound and rational science. Here is the passage m which the prediction occurs. After urging them to keep themselves well up in the study of natural science and to cultivate the scientific spirit by which alone social and political questions can be judged, Kingsley Bind “ Take my advice for yourselves, and for your children after you ; for, believe me, I am showing you the way to be true and useful, and therefore to be just and deserve power. lam showing you the way to become members of what I trust will be—what lam certain ought to be—the aristocracy of the future. I say it deliberately, as a student of society and histoiy. Power will pass more and more, if all goes healthy and well, into the hands of scientific men. For the rest events seem but too likely to repeat themselves again and again all over the world in the same hopeless circle. Aristocracies of mere birth decay and die, and give place to aristocracies of mere wealth ; and they again to aristocracies of mere genius, which are really aristocracies of tho noisiest of scribblers and spouterß,BUch as France is writhing under at the present moment. And when these last have blown off their steam, with mighty roar, but without moving the engine a yard, then they are too likely to give place to the worst of all aristocracies—the aristocracies of mere ‘ order which means organised brute force and military despotism. And after that what can come, save anarchy and decay and social death ? What else ?—unless there be left in the nation, in the society, as the salt of the land to keep it nil from rotting, a sufficient number of wise men to form a true working aristocracy,an aristocracy of sound and rational science? If they be strong enough (and they are growing stronger day by day over tho civilised world) on them will the futureof tho world mainly depend. They will rule and they will act—cautiously, we may hope, and modestly and charitably, because in learning true knowledge they will have learned also their own ignorance and the vastness, the complexity, the mystery of Nature. But they will be able to rule, they will be able to act, because they have taken the trouble to learn the facts and the laws of Nature. They will rule.”