The Man in Possession — page 105: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

100 THE MAN IN POSSESSION. The working class will be the peerage of the future; by which term I mean the class who have brains and use them, and are judged by what they achieve, not by what they inherit. Poor effete aristocracy ! Can one look without pity on its degeneration, on the pale-faced feeble dude, whose highest ambition is to /ée actresses and ballet girls, to back horses or run off with some other man’s wife, who is perpetu- ally ‘up a tree,’ and sacrifices his ancestral acres to the money-lenders, who has lost all the feudal virtues of his race, and only lives to disgrace the ‘grand old order’ with every year of shameful sloth and self- indulgence ? ” He spoke warmly, and Kate looked at him with surprise. She wasa great believer in the advantages of birth, and held exalted ideas of the chivalrous graces and virtues of ‘‘ blue blood.” He laughed at her grave and wondering eyes. | ‘¢ You don’t believe me, I see,” he said, ‘‘ or per- haps you think the heir to a brewery can scarcely be a judge of the heirs of aristocrats and lordlings. Yet I assure you I am not speaking without knowledge orauthority, and I am not envious, and therefore look- ing at what I describe through jaundiced glasses. What men do for themselves and for their fellow-men is alone their patent of worth. By their actions only should they be judged, not by that mere accident of birth which places them on what they consider an elevation of superiority.” ‘“‘Would you have us all equal then?” said Kate and then blushed at the foolishness of the question, ‘I think,” he said gravely, ‘‘that you know as ECOMICHOOKS C(O)