The Economic Functions of Vice

ne page, and on the next go down to oblivion. One rarely finds the name of a century or two ago mentioned in any of the European news of to-day. Mr. Freeman, the eminent English historian, says, conclusively, that in spite of the perennial vaunt of ancestors who "came over with the Conqueror," and of Tennyson's musical mendacity about the "daughter of an hundred Earls," the families who can trace back to even so recent a date as the reign of the Stuarts are very rare. {35} Frequently hundreds of years elapsed before the historic titles were "revived" to gild some parvenu. Since then these families have been kept up only by intermarriages with later parvenus.

The royal family itself has been repeatedly on the point of extinction, and the continuity of the line only maintained by extraordinary efforts.

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IDLENESS, luxury, and more or less flagrant debauchery have done their appointed work in removing the deteriorated forms of human life {36} from the world, that their room might be had