When in 1890 it was revealed that the old and sober house ...

When in 1890 it was revealed that the old and sober house of

Baring had lost its foothold

in the torrent of foreign speculation, it was revealed also that hardly one English name figured any longer among the leaders of high finance. As the historic associations of wealth grew fainter, the imaginative or sentimental defence of inequality grew less assured: the world which had taken it as a natural thing that a Duke of Devonshire should grow the Victoria Regia in a glass-house like an Arabian palace, grew restive when Whittaker Wright began to display his ill-gotten glory in a subaqueous billiard room on the Surrey Heaths.

It would have been hard to find even a Conservative who felt for a rich man, or a titled man, as such, the respect which Early Victorians had, not wrongly, paid to the founders of great industries or the heads of historic houses, on

whose capacity they depended for good

government and progress.

There is a taint in the air recalling the corruption of the Second Empire, and the leanings of the Prince of Wales gave the new plutocracy a standing which cast some shadow over the whole world of rank and splendor. Men spoke still of the land, but more and more the land was coming to mean house property or industrial sites.

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