The Aristocracy
Mr. Lothair Bucher, in the Transactions of the Philological Society, Berlin, 1858, writes:
“One may safely affirm beforehand that the word aristocracy has been part and parcel of the English language from a very early period. But the Attorney-General in Horne Tooke’s trial (1795) in enumerating the new opinions propagated by the friends of the accused, and the new terms in which they conveyed those opinions, says—‘To the rich was given the name Aristocracy;’ and in considering this application of the term as a new one, he is evidently quite correct.”
“Now,” writes a critic in the Saturday Review, “Aristocracy is the name of a particular form of Government; it is an abuse of language to apply it to a class of people. Yet, when one says—‘the Government of Berne was an aristocracy,’ it is a very slight change to speak of ‘the aristocracy of Berne,’ meaning the patrician order, or its members. The word was doubtless brought into use in England because the class which it was intended to stigmatize as an ‘aristocracy’ was a class more extensive than the ‘nobility,’ in the English use of that word. Now the name has ceased to be a stigma. The words ‘aristocrat,’ ‘aristocratic,’ ‘aristocracy,’ are often used in a complimentary way. But, to our taste at least, there is always a smack of vulgarity about them.”