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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: continental caste, instead of recruiting their tainted blood by
healthy blood from below, did all, under pretence of keeping it
pure, to keep it tainted by continual intermarriage; and paid, in
increasing weakness of body and mind, the penalty of their exclusive
pride. It is impossible for anyone who reads the French memoirs of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to perceive, if he be
wise, that the aristocracy therein depicted was ripe for ruin--yea,
already ruined--under any form of government whatsoever, independent
of all political changes. Indeed, many of the political changes
were not the causes but the effects of the demoralisation of the
noblesse. Historians will tell you how, as early as the beginning
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