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To reduce the king to a doge was its object; and in proportion as it
decreased the power of the crown it increased that of the people.
Royalty knew this, and hated the peerage. Each endeavoured to lessen the
other. What was thus lost by each was proportionate profit to the
people. Those two blind powers, monarchy and oligarchy, could not see
that they were working for the benefit of a third, which was democracy.
What a delight it was to the crown, in the last century, to be able to
hang a peer, Lord Ferrers!
However, they hung him with a silken rope. How polite!
"They would not have hung a peer of France," the Duke of Richelieu
haughtily remarked. Granted. They would have beheaded him. Still more
polite!
Montmorency Tancarville signed himself peer of France and England;
thus throwing the English peerage into the second rank. The peers of
France were higher and less powerful, holding to rank more than to
authority, and to precedence more than to domination. There was between
them and the Lords that shade of difference which separates vanity from
pride. With the peers of France, to take precedence of foreign princes,
of Spanish grandees, of Venetian patricians; to see seated on the lower
benches the Marshals of France, the Constable and the Admiral of France,
were he even Comte de Toulouse and son of Louis XIV.; to draw a
distinction between duchies in the male and female line; to maintain the
proper distance between a simple comté, like Armagnac or Albret, and a
comté pairie, like Evreux; to wear by right, at five-and-twenty, the
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