#pamphlets that aren't exactly pro- or anti-

[ardently-faithful]

The end of nobility.

Not many copies are made of this open letter; just a few, smudgily printed, are submitted to influential personages within the House of Lords and the House of Commons, with perhaps two or three extra for displaying at common gathering-places in the city of Ishgard. The one posted at the Forgotten Knight is tacked, perhaps pointedly, over the latest angry woodblock from the counterrevolutionaries.

It is quite long, and it opens as follows:

To both parliament and to the people on the street, I beg you to allow this humble servant of Halone to speak his thoughts.

I love my country, and I would not insult the heights of our culture, our engineering, and our learning by accusing it of stagnation – but that it has long suffered from corruption is the disturbing truth, one even plainer to those of us who have spent time within the nobility and the Church than to those who have ever stood without. Therefore we must acknowledge that, no matter what we each may think of the circumstances that brought us through this revolution, the opportunity it has brought for self-examination and reform is a blessing. The Ishgard we live in today is more open and tolerant than it has ever been before, and our new Parliament may yet prove a vehicle for advancing our people’s prosperity and happiness to new heights.

But there is one facet of our new government that fills me with unease, enough that I must protest; and even as I know that aught I have to say will be immediately dismissed as the whining of the disenfranchised elite, as I am both a long servant of the Tribunal and a nobleman who, as a consequence of the order of his birth, is barred from participating in the new legislature, I shall still try to express these earnest grievances I have carried from the earliest years of my service, in the hope that some person of like mind exists to hear my pleas and act upon them in a way that I, a man now ill, old, and feeble, cannot.

It is the House of Lords – less its membership full of bright and virtuous souls earnestly working for Ishgard and more its enshrinement, as an institution, in the laws of the new Republic of Ishgard – that concerns me.

For a thousand years the accepted truth was that we who are called the “highborn” traced their descent from the four High Houses of King Thordan’s most loyal knights. And by right of this descent from the Architects of Ishgard, the noble houses claimed the leadership of Ishgard in every area, alongside vast privilege on the basis of that leadership. Of course the Archbishop – highborn and carefully selected by the High Houses – steered our country, and servants of the Church drawn from all classes stewarded its laws and punishments, but outside the Vault and especially outside the Holy City, the nobility has controlled the day-to-day lives of those “below” it, for better and, more memorably, for worse.

Today the story told is that the ancestors of our noble families were traitors and warmongers, men to be condemned for beginning the Dragonsong War. And we know that their descendants’ vices and abuse have spread our bloodlines through all of Coerthas, even to those families we dare to call “low”. The founding fiction of our highborn arrogance thus has been exposed – and so the privileges we receive today we enjoy merely because our fathers did, our control over vast portions of Coerthas’s land and wealth maintained because we hang onto it – and defend it with house knights recruited from tenant families subject to our whims.

The Church has been humbled; its capacity for abuse of our people has been greatly curtailed. In contrast, the circumstances of the highborn have not much changed. In the Vault, we must share leadership with the elected members of the House of Commons – but in some sense this is not new, as the heads of the houses have always had to defer to the Church, an institution whose membership has long been made up of both nobility and commoners. But outside the Vault, life in the counties and baronies proceeds much as it ever has, if relieved from the pressure of the War and subject to the worsening pressure of the Calamity; lords still rule over their subjects, still own the farms and manufactories and enjoy the cream off their profits, still march their miniature armies back and forth to ensure their orders are obeyed.

Even as one who has enjoyed a life made easy by the privileges given to – not earned by – any babe who can boast of his lofty lineage, I must say that this is wrong – and it is even more wrong to write this state of affairs into the statute-book of our new Republic with the thought that, because this is how Ishgard is today, it is how Ishgard must continue to be.

If we truly believe that what makes our birth “higher” than all the rest of Her children is our proximate descent from men who betrayed and devoured their draconic overlords, how can we then cite that birth as grounds to sit above all other Ishgardians and claim, as our share of Coerthas’s bounty, the largest part?

Many of my fellows will protest that we now do not – that now the House of Lords stands on equal footing with the House of Commons and thus all people of Coerthas have an equal say in their country’s governance. I say that if this is not a lie, it is self-delusion.

It is problem enough to draw half the government from a tiny minority of families, giving deference to the even smaller number of patriarchs who control them, and to leave the entire rest of Coerthas to compete for representation in the other House. Far worse is the folly of calling this government an equal one when the members of one House control – following the humbling of the Church – nearly all the coin, land, livestock, machinery, and men-at-arms in the nation. To say that the everyman who sits in the House of Commons is equal to the Count or Baron who owns his home and his workshop, controls his livelihood, and casually wields the power to conscript his sons and station them anywhere is an insult.

In short, the continued existence of a highborn caste in Ishgard, after its ancient justification has been debunked and appeals to tradition in every other part of our society have been rejected, is an injustice we should no longer tolerate.

And yet any man of sense recognizes that there is no way to rectify it immediately. For even were it declared from a high seat that henceforth, there shall be no nobility, those words would be but words if the wealth and power of Coerthas remained in the same hands, and same lords would continue to rule under different names; and there is no hope of stripping that wealth and power from those lords without creating a great civil disturbance, if not outright war, and seeing Her land afflicted with yet more violence and suffering, which is aught that I, for one, could not bear to see again. And, furthermore, I acknowledge that many are persuaded by the argument that the highborn, raised and educated to be landlords and war-leaders, are better-suited than the unwashed masses to the business of government – even if I am not wholly convinced of it myself. But what I do believe is that there is no way that we mortals may hope to see Halone’s equality enacted on this earth, peacefully and fairly, in a single generation.

For that reason do I issue this challenge to you – o Lords who decorate your ermines with reformist credentials – o men and women who need no longer bear the insult of your honorable births called “low” – o children of Halone whose faith in Her justice runs deeper than convenience:

Let us see, 200 years hence, the end of nobility.

With time, with the debates of learned men and women, with experiment and with piece-by-piece reform, I at least believe that we can see this arbitrary division of our people ended peacefully.

It has been said that money is power not only in the south but here as well; so let us see Ishgard’s wealth divided more equitably among its citizens. Let us overcome the very natural impulse to provide the best possible life for our own children in favor of recognizing that we are all Halone’s children; let us make as many opportunities for our neighbors’ children as for our own, and, yes – mayhap even hand over our coin directly, if our wisest advisors decide it is best.

It has been said that the common people of Coerthas lack the education and experience that would make them statesmen as effective as firstborn sons of lords are, supposedly, guaranteed to be; so educate them. We in Ishgard have our native-grown pedagogical traditions, theory and practice formed by centuries of experience; let us draw upon that wisdom when we expand schooling so it may reach all Halone’s children.

It has been said that if the High Houses cannot be deprived of their knights and garrisons, for without them the far-flung corners of Coerthas and the towns and villages still struggling along would be left defenseless; so let us see the Counts’ personal armies integrated into Ishgard’s army. As the Temple Knights were once called upon to serve the Archbishop and the Holy See before any other lord or faction, let our future knights be truly Ishgardian and swear their swords to the nation above all.

It has been said that we need the nobility, that wealthy and privileged few, because, now that the Church has lost control of its coffers, there are no others who are as poised to become patrons of charity and care for the needy and deprived; so let us see an end to deprivation, so that the charity we need today will no more be needed by the morrow’s morrow. Let us plan to feed the poor of the Brume and beyond not with handouts of bread from capricious benefactors but with the safe and dignified work for which so many are desperate; let us provide them with the support they need, through housing, sanitation, and medicine, to live life well and as they choose. And while it is true that this project more than any other will, mayhap, take far more than two centuries – if we are unwilling to begin today, our children must wait that much longer to see it done.

To my highborn brothers and sisters who think themselves, as I think myself, the allies of reform: I pray that you do not intend to call your duty to Halone’s justice done exactly at the point where your own power and influence stops increasing and begins to decline, nor to stop uplifting your lowborn friends when that means you and your family begin to sink. For it will be by your consent to see your own fortunes divided, your ambitions thwarted, and your children given lives less comfortable than yours that Ishgard will be able to attain equality without civil war. To shrink from pain and loss is natural; to covet good lives for your most beloved ones is even more so. But to shrink from our duty here would make us cowards; let us not pretend that self-sacrifice is only for the battlefield and make peace our excuse for becoming fat and idle aristocrats.

To my lowborn brothers and sisters, for you are just as much so: I pray that you do not give way to highborn excuses for stalled progress and insist, patiently but firmly, that each turn of the heavens bring our beloved nation closer to its most perfect form. May the Fury give you and your children the unceasing strength to hold us to account, and by so doing, set us all free.

Years it will surely take, but we must start now, lest the work be pushed on to our children, our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren, till the dream of an Ishgard united in true equality fades and the potential of this moment lost.

And by the Goddess, let it not be lost – for I know no nation which, after such long suffering, deserves Her ruth like ours.

Yours in Her service, H. Inq. Rosaire Ledigne