A select few, everywhere only a small minority, has a different scale of values to that of the masses. For them "life is not the supreme thing." There are things they value more highly. The masses have no understanding for these people's needs and fine feelings. Their self-respect and their dignity are dear to them as wealth, their honour more sacred than life itself. Unhesitatingly they sacrifice their property to freedom, and more unbearable than anxiety for their material interests is life in surroundings in which brutality, vulgar sentiments, harsh egotism, malice, hypocrisy and treachery preponderate. The Law does not consider this minority. It is the creation and the servant of the great majority. It clings to earth and is incapable of lofty flights. It is of no service to the elect in the preservation of their noblest spiritual possessions or the defence of their ideals against clumsy maltreatment. It declares itself to be incompetent to deal with any but material affairs. Therein lies at one and the same time the strength and the weakness of the Law. Its strength lies in the fact that it definitely limits its sphere of action and strives to achieve positive results by positive means, results intelligible even to a mean understanding. Its weakness lies in the fact that it ignores man's highest and noblest interests. And these interests are there, they too deserve consideration and protection, they have a right to demand that the guarantee of the community should embrace them as well. The well-being of the community, which is the object of Morality and of Law too, demands that such conditions should be created and maintained, as should enable the elect also to enjoy life or at least find existence bearable. But Law does not suffice for that. No law enjoins upon the careless throng of pachyderms to spare the tenderest and noblest sensibilities of lofty natures; no judge punishes thoughtless or purposely malicious injury to them. To remedy this evil we must rise from the lowly plain of Law, the natural dwelling-place of the masses, to the heights of Morality, the habitual abode of superior minds. At the theological stage of civilization refuge is sought with the gods in whose hands the protection of essential, spiritual possessions is placed. They are expected to punish the wicked whose evil deeds are beyond the reach of any penal code, they are expected to soothe and comfort when life is hard or even unendurable. That is the compromise that the elect made with life in the hard times of European barbarism. They escaped from the world and thus avoided contact with the repugnant masses. They shut themselves up in cloistered cells away from mankind and held mystic intercourse with God. Among the people, cruel authorities with difficulty maintained discipline and scanty law and order by means of flogging and the pillory, torture, the gallows and the wheel. The minority of the elect disciplined themselves, suppressed their lower