If in Britain capacity is discouraged because honours and power go by prescription, in America it is misdirected because honours do not exist and power goes by popular election and advertisement. In certain directions--not by any means in all--unobtrusive merit, soundness of quality that has neither gift nor disposition for “push,” has a better chance in Great Britain than in America. A sort of duty to help and advance exceptional men is recognized at any rate, even if it is not always efficiently discharged, by the privileged class in England, while in America it is far more acutely felt, far more distinctly impressed upon the young that they must “hustle” or perish. It will be argued that this enumeration of American and British defects is a mere expansion of that familiar proposition of the logic textbooks, “all men are mortal.” You have here, says the objector, one of two alternatives, either you must draw your administrators, your legislators, your sources of honour and reward from a limited, hereditary, and specially-trained class, who will hold power as a right, or you must rely upon the popular choice exercised in the shop and at the polling booth. What else can you have but inheritance or election, or some blend of the two, blending their faults? Each system has its disadvantages, and the disadvantages of each system may be minimized by education; in particular by keeping the culture and code of honour of your ruling class high in the former case and by keeping your common schools efficient in the latter. But the essential evils of each system are--essential evils, and one has to suffer them and struggle against them, as one has to struggle perpetually with the pathogenic bacteria that infest the world. The theory of monarchy is, no doubt, inferior to the democratic theory in stimulus, but the latter fails in qualitative effect, much more than the former. There, the objector submits, lies the quintessence of the matter. Both systems need watching, need criticism, the pruning knife and the stimulant, and neither is bad enough to justify a revolutionary change to the other. In some such conclusion as this most of the English people with whom one can discuss this question have come to rest, and it is to this way of looking at the matter that one must ascribe the apathetic acquiescence in the British hereditary system, upon which I have already remarked. There is a frank and excessive admission of every real and imaginary fault of the American system, and with the proposition that we are on the horns of a dilemma, the discussion is dismissed.