will presume, sensible, capable, industrious, and respectable. But they have no notion of greatness, nay, they have an instinctive hatred of it. Whatever else they may have done, they have destroyed all nobility. In art, in literature, in drama, in the building of palaces or villas, _nihil tetigerunt quod non faedaverunt_. Such is the result of entrusting power to men who make their own living, instead of to a class set apart by hereditary privilege to govern and to realize the good life. But, you may still urge, this is only a temporary stage. We still have a parasitic class, the class of capitalists. It is only when we have got rid of them, that the real equality will begin, and with it will come all other excellence. Well, I think it possible that you might establish, I will not say absolute equality, but an equality far greater than the world has ever seen; that you might exact from everybody some kind of productive work, in return for the guarantee of a comfortable livelihood. But there is no presumption that in that way you will produce the nobility of character which I hold to be the only thing really good. For such nobility, as all history and experience clearly shows, if we will interrogate it honestly, is the product of a class-consciousness. Personal initiative, personal force, a freedom from sordid cares, a sense of hereditary obligation based on hereditary privilege, the consciousness of being set apart for high purposes, of being one's own master and the master of others, all that and much more goes to the building up of the gentleman; and all that is impossible in a socialistic state. In the eternal order of this inexorable world it is prescribed that greatness cannot grow except in the soil of iniquity, and that justice can produce nothing but mediocrity. That the masses should choose justice at the cost of greatness is intelligible, nay it is inevitable; and that choice is the inner meaning of democracy. But gentlemen should have had the insight to see, and the courage to affirm, that the price was too great to pay. They did not; and the penalty is that they are ceasing to exist. They have sacrificed themselves to the attempt to establish equity. But in that attempt I can take no interest. The society in which I believe is an aristocratic one. I hold, with Plato and Aristotle, that the masses ought to be treated as means, treated kindly, treated justly, so far as the polity permits, but treated as subordinate always to a higher end. But your feet are set on the other track. You are determined to abolish classes; to level down in order to level up; to destroy superiorities in order to raise the average. I do not say you will not succeed. But if you do, you will realize comfort at the expense of greatness, and your society will be one not of men but of ants and bees.