"Was it then for courage?"
"Certainly, the Gersdorfs had always been brave."
"With whom, then, had they fought?"
"At the time of the Crusades, I believed, against the infidels."
"And since then?"
I did not feel sure, but looking at the ruined castle of Bernstein and the neighbouring height, I was afraid it was against their neighbours.
And so, after much cross questioning, the distinctions of the Gersdorf family seemed to be chiefly reduced to their having been Gersdorfs, and having lived at Gersdorf for a great many hundred years.
Then Fritz desired to know in what way his cousins, the Gersdorfs of this generation, are to distinguish themselves? This question also was a perplexity to me, as I know it often is to Chriemhild. They must not on any account be merchants; and now that in the Evangelical Church the great abbeys are suppressed, and some of the bishoprics are to be secularized, it is hardly deemed consistent with Gersdorf dignity that they should become clergymen. The eldest will have the castle. One of them may study civil law. For the others nothing seems open but the idling dependent life of pages and military attendants in the castles of some of the greater nobles.
If the past is the inheritance of the knights, it seems to me the future is far more likely to be the possession of the active burgher families. I cannot but feel thankful for the lot which opens to our boys honourable spheres of action in the great cities of the empire. There seems no room for expansion in the life of those petty nobles. While the patrician families of the cities are sailing on the broad current of the times, encouraging art, advancing learning, themselves sharing all the thought and progress of the time, these knightly families in the country remain isolated in their grim castles ruling over a few peasants, and fettered to a narrow local circle, while the great current of the age sweeps by them.
Gottfried says, narrow and ill-used privileges always end in ruining those who bigotedly cling to them. The exclusiveness which begins by shutting others out, commonly ends in shutting the exclusive in. The lordly fortress becomes the narrow prison.