Anthony Ludovici - Gentlemanly Virtues

Portrait of Herbert Bernard John Everett by William Orpen (1900)

All the world over, where flourishing and powerful societies have been formed and maintained, the notion of the gentleman has appeared in some form or other as a national ideal. 
Nobody reading Confucius, for instance, or the Li-Ki — which is the Chinese Book of Ceremonies — can doubt for one instant that the idea of the gentleman was and still is a very definite thing in China; nor could such a reader doubt that the Chinese gentleman, even of two thousand years ago, would have been able perfectly to understand every movement and every scruple of his fellow in rank in England of the twentieth century.

There was also the gentleman of ancient Egypt, the gentleman of Athens, and the gentleman of Rome.
All huge and powerful administrations have to rely very largely upon the trust which they can place in a number of high responsible officials who, in moments of great temptation or great trial, will stand honestly and bravely at their posts. All stable family life, too, depends upon the existence of a number of such men, who need not necessarily be State servants, but who, engaged in other walks of life, reveal a similar reliability.

The very existence of a large administration, or of a large nation of citizens, is impossible without such men. And all societies which have started out with the idea of lasting, growing and standing upright, have always instinctively developed the high ideal of the gentleman — the man who can be trusted at all times and all places, the man who is sincere, the man who is staunch and constant in matters of principle, the man who never sacrifices the greater to the less, and the man who is sufficiently, self-reliant to be able to consider others.
It is obvious that the gentleman class, or the body of men who possess the above qualities, falls naturally into various orders; but by far the highest order, is that consisting of those men who, without being necessarily examples of flourishing life, are yet so square and strong in body and soul, that their honour can be subjected to the greatest strain without snapping.
Now it is upon such men alone, that a great nation relies for the preservation and maintenance of its best traditions, for the filling of its most responsible civil offices, and for the high duty of inspiring trust in the mind of the public.

If England has shown any stability at all, it is owing to the fact that as a nation she has reared crop after crop of such men, and that these men have been sent to all corners of the globe, from Barhein in the Persian Gulf, to Kingston in the Island of Jamaica, to represent her and to teach the gentleman's idea of decent living to the world.
Once this class begins to decline, England will be in sore straits; for even examples of flourishing life, when they appear, must find worthy and trusty servants to fill high places, otherwise the best supreme administration would be helpless.

But how do you suppose the virtues of the gentleman are reared? For you are too wise to believe that copybook precepts can do any good, save as a mere confirmation of a deep bodily impulse. You are surely too experienced to suppose that the leopard can change his spots, or that a negro can beget a white child? Then how do you suppose that a strong virtue — a virtue which, like a powerful iron girder, nothing human can snap — is cultivated and produced in a family, in a line of human beings, even in an animal?
On this question Aristotle spoke words of the deepest wisdom. He declared that all virtue was habit, habituation, custom. "The virtues," he says, "we get by first performing single acts . . . by doing just actions, we come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery, we come to be perfected in self mastery; and by doing brave actions, brave." 
And then he proceeds: "And to the truth of this, testimony is borne by what takes place in communities; because the law-givers make the individual members good men by habituation, and this is the intention certainly of every law-giver, and all who do it not fail of their intent; but herein consists the difference between a good Constitution and a bad."
A gentleman in body and soul, then, is a creature whose very tissues are habituated to act in an honourable way. For many generations, then, his people must have acted in an honourable way. In order that the first and strongest impulse in his body may be an honourable impulse, such impulses must constantly have been favoured at the cost of other impulses by his ancestors, until the voice of the others is weak and the roar of the honourable impulse tills his being with a noise that drowns all other voices. 

~ from 'A Defence of Aristocracy: A Text-Book for Tories, 1915.    

Many thanks to Julian Louis Hick for suggesting this passage.