“... Add to all these causes of suffering and discontent among the workmen the apprehension of still greater evils, and the tyranny of the ’butties,’ or middlemen, and it will with little difficulty be felt that the public mind of this district was well prepared for the excitement of the political agitator, especially if he were discreet enough rather to descant on their physical sufferings and personal injuries, than to attempt the propagation of abstract political principles with which it was impossible for them to sympathise.... It generally happens, however, that where a mere physical impulse urges the people to insurrection, though it is often an influence of slow growth and movement, the effects are more violent and sometimes more obstinate than when they move under the blended authority of moral and physical necessity, and mix up together the rights and the wants of man.” The pendant to the “rights” is the “_equality_” of man. Here, again, nothing is more self-evident than man’s natural inequality. The whole development of societies, which we call civilisation, is for the very purpose of redressing or relieving these inequalities of occasion, of equipment. By nature man, like the brute, starts without equality and without rights. By his “mights” he has created these ideas, and acquired something of their substance by his superior faculties, by the spiritual energy which differentiates him. His “rights” spring from the “law” which he has propagated. The political equality which he has founded more than compensates him for the personal inequality of his beginnings. The “personal equation,” indeed, would imply the reversal both of his nature and of his craftsmanship; of all conditions, moreover, compatible with variety of character and freedom of action. It means, in fact, a denial of the existence of that natural aristocracy which we find in every class and every order, and which decides that everywhere the game of “follow my leader” must be played. What is wanted is a real aristocracy which “claims great privileges for great purposes.” What is always dangerous is the monopoly of action by an aristocracy that shirks its duties, that plays at government, that is dilettante in leadership or sybarite in life; or that, as in the three decades preceding the French Revolution, revenges its exclusion from influence by multiplying sinecures. It is such a class, as contrasted with individuals--wherever found--of genuine capacities, that so often evoked Disraeli’s irony, and has lately been satirised by Mr. Barrie in a whimsy accentuating the natural inequality of man. Speaking through the lips of “Egremont,” in that fine passage where he cheers “Sybil”--the noble daughter of the people, disappointed by the Charter and the Chartists--with a vista of the future, Disraeli says: “The mind of England is the mind ever of the rising race. Trust me it is with the People.... Predominant opinions are generally the opinions