Of the Inequality that is between Us

A king and a beggar: strip away the silks, the crown, the armed guards, the ten thousand ceremonies that surround the one, and the rags, the hunger, the deference of no one that surround the other, and what remains? Two men, of roughly similar stature, subject to the same fevers, the same lusts, the same fears of the dark. They bleed with equal readiness when cut. They die with equal certainty when the time comes. That one has spent his life being bowed to and the other has spent his life bowing does not appear, when you lay them out side by side, to have altered the underlying material.

I am of the nobility by birth, and I would be a hypocrite to pretend that this has cost me nothing, or that I take no pleasure in it. But I have enough honesty left to acknowledge that I did nothing whatsoever to earn my quarterings. I was born to them, as the poorest plowman on my estate was born to his. What separates us is not any virtue on my part or any deficiency on his — it is a fact about our respective fathers, which is to say a fact about Fortune, which is to say nothing at all about us.

“The prerogatives of nobility — if they are to mean anything — must be constantly re-earned by the man who bears them. A title that does no work, that is merely inherited and then worn like a garment, is a fine thing for a wardrobe and a poor thing for a soul.”

The truly great men I have read about — and I mean men who were great in themselves, not merely in the accidents of their station — were often not the most nobly born. Epaminondas was a Theban of no particular lineage. Socrates was the son of a stonecutter. What they had, they built in themselves, which is the only kind of greatness that deserves the name. A man may inherit gold; he cannot inherit the qualities that make a man worth knowing.

All of which is not to say that rank and birth are nothing — they are not nothing, they are very real forces in the world, and to pretend otherwise is to misunderstand how human societies actually function. But there is a difference between acknowledging them as facts of power and treating them as measures of worth. The one is realism. The other is a flattery we pay to Fortune for having placed us where she did, and Fortune, as any honest reader of her history knows, is entirely indifferent to desert.