The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

The aristocrats of the nineteenth century have destroyed entirely their / one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant; / but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are / depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of / variety, vivacity, and fulness of life; oligarchy was the world's first / experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of / 'good form,' which may be defined as Puritanism without religion. Good / form has sent them all into black like the stroke of a funeral bell. / They engage, like Mr. Gilbert's curates, in a war of mildness, a / positive competition of obscurity. In old times the lords of the earth / sought above all things to be distinguished from each other; with that / object they erected outrageous images on their helmets and painted / preposterous colours on their shields. They wished to make it entirely / clear that a Norfolk was as different, say, from an Argyll as a white / lion from a black pig. But to-day their ideal is precisely the opposite / one, and if a Norfolk and an Argyll were dressed so much alike that they / were mistaken for each other they would both go home dancing with joy.

The consequences of this are inevitable. The aristocracy must lose their / function of standing to the world for the idea of variety, experiment, / and colour, and we must find these things in some other class. To ask / whether we shall find them in the middle class would be to jest upon / sacred matters. The only conclusion, therefore, is that it is to / certain sections of the lower class, chiefly, for example, to / omnibus-conductors, with their rich and rococo mode of thought, that we / must look for guidance towards liberty and light.