Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
So much for the question of administration. We come now to a second need
in the modern state if it is to get the best result from the citizens
born into it, and that is the need of honours and privileges to reward
and enhance services and exceptional personal qualities and so to stir
and ennoble that emulation which is, under proper direction, the most
useful to the constructive statesman of all human motives. In the United
States titles are prohibited by the constitution, in Great Britain they
go by prescription. But it is possible to imagine titles and privileges
that are not hereditary, and that would be real symbols of human worth
entirely in accordance with the Republican Idea. It is one of the
stock charges against Republicanism that success in America is either
political or financial. In England, in addition, success is also
social, and there is, one must admit, a sort of recognition accorded to
intellectual achievement, which some American scientific men have found
reason to envy. In America, of course, just as in Great Britain,
there exists that very enviable distinction, the honorary degree of a
university; but in America it is tainted by the freedom with which bogus
universities can be organized, and by the unchallenged assumptions of
quacks. In Great Britain the honorary degree of a university, in spite
of the fact that it goes almost as a matter of course to every casual
Prince, is a highly desirable recognition of public services.
Beyond this there are certain British distinctions that might very
advantageously be paralleled in America, the Fellowship of the Royal
Society, for example, and that really very fine honour, as yet untainted
by the class of men who tout for baronetcies and peerages, the Privy
Council.
There are certain points in this question that are too often overlooked.
In the first place, _honours and titles need not be hereditary_; in the
second, _they need not be conferred by the political administration_;
and, in the third, they are not only--as the French Legion of Honour
shows--entirely compatible with, but _they are a necessary complement to
the Republican Idea_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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