J. F. Cooper, giving life to the English commoner's concern for his betters at the other end of the century from the Edwardian era:

"Our aristocratic columns, though they get a little cracked and defaced, are, after all, the pillars of the throne; and it does not become us to let vulgar eyes look too closely into their unsoundness." The Red Rover (1827)

Complicity in depravity not one's own is pretty common.

jack