In all these branches there were great--in some, very great--prizes to
be obtained; prizes not always of money, but of honour: in some of
them the prizes included what was considered the greatest of all
rewards--a Peerage. The country, indeed, was already beginning to
insist that the national distinctions should be bestowed upon all
those--and only upon those--who rendered real services to the State.
One poet had been made a Peer. One man of science had been made a
Privy Councillor, and another a Peer; two painters had been made
baronets; and the humble distinction of Knight Bachelor, which had
been tossed contemptuously to city sheriffs, provincial mayors, and
undistinguished persons who used back-stairs influence to get the
title, was now brought into better consideration by being shared by a
few musicians, engineers, physicians, and others. Nothing could more
clearly show the real contempt in which literature and science were
held in an aristocratic country than that, although there were a dozen
degrees of peerage and half a dozen orders of knighthood, there was
not one order reserved for men of science, literature, and art. Feeble
protests from time to time were made against this absurdity, but in
the end it proved useful, because the chief argument against the
continuance of titles of honour in the great debate on the subject, in
the year 1920, was the fact that all through the nineteenth century
the men who most deserved the thanks and recognition of the State were
(with the exception of soldiers and lawyers) absolutely neglected by
the Court and the House of Lords.
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