It therefore becomes necessary to choose between incompetent honesty, which injures your property through its blindness and inertia, and the cleverness which looks out for itself.
Hence the social nomenclature and natural history of land-stewards as defined by a great Polish noble.
"There are," he said, "two kinds of stewards: he who thinks only of himself, and he who thinks of himself and of us; happy the land-owner who lays his hands on the latter! As for the steward who would think only of us, he is not to be met with." Elsewhere can be found a steward who thought of this master's interests as well as of his own.

("Un Debut dans la vie," "Scenes de la vie privee.") Gaubertin is the steward who thinks of himself only.

To represent the third figure of the problem would be to hold up to public admiration a very unlikely personage, yet one that was not unknown to the old nobility, though he has, alas! disappeared with them.

(See "Le Cabinet des Antiques," "Scenes de la vie de province.") Through the endless subdivision of fortunes aristocratic habits and customs are inevitably changed.

If there be not now in France twenty great fortunes managed by intendants, in fifty years from now there will not be a hundred estates in the hands of stewards, unless a great change is made in the law.