is paying handsomely enough for their service by permitting large patrimonies to descend from generation to generation, thus giving to the inheritors a very substantial support, against which it draws a moderate return of public service. Because all inheritors of estates do not make such return, the implied compact is somewhat obscured to the intelligence of some observers. The true principles stand out more clearly in the actual relations of the royal family, and the theoretical relations of the nobility, toward the State. In so far as the inheritance of great fortune, without public service, is continued, there begin now to appear adjustments which express the public conscience on the subject. These are obvious in England. They were loud as the thunder, vivid and fatal as the lightning, about a century ago, in France.
This excursive reflection upon the lordly states of our Western world may seem to be an unwarranted going-away from our text, which is just now the poor mountain state of the snow-world. But the comparison is meant to suggest something which I consider more important at my hands than the piling up of detailed description of Tibetan custom. Other travellers have had much larger opportunity than I to obtain such facts, and, in all their manifold suggestiveness to various special students, they have been admirably set forth in works from which, if such full presentation were my task, I should be forced to bountifully copy. But it has seemed to me a better use of my small experience and my reading to set forth only the larger features of Tibetan life; to seek that which is common to us all,
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