I am inclined to expect that, owing to somewhat more settled conditions of life, inheritance of function will be rather more common, and the tendency to see the individual as one of a stock rather greater, in the future than in the immediate past. On the other hand it is nearly certain that educational opportunities will become more open and varied, making it easier than now for special aptitude to find its place. These things are not inconsistent, and both will make for order and contentment. Also much more endeavor will be directed to the welfare of the less privileged classes as classes—that is, of those who are content to remain in the ancestral status instead of trying to get into one more favored. Heretofore we have given too much thought, relatively, to the one man who aims at distinction, and too little to the ninety and nine who do not. FOOTNOTES: [112] Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 3. CHAPTER XXI OPEN CLASSES THE NATURE OF OPEN CLASSES—WHETHER CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS IS DESIRABLE—FELLOWSHIP AND COÖPERATION DEFICIENT IN OUR SOCIETY—CLASS ORGANIZATION IN RELATION TO FREEDOM. With the growth of freedom classes come to be more open, that is, more based on individual traits and less upon descent. Competition comes actively into play and more or less efficiently fulfils its function[113] of assigning to each one an appropriate place in the whole. The theory of a free order is that every one is born to serve mankind in a certain way, that he finds out through a wise system of education and experiment what that way is, and is trained to enter upon it. In following it he does the best possible both for the service of society and his own happiness. So far as classes exist they are merely groups for the furtherance of efficiency through coöperation, and their membership is determined entirely by natural fitness. This ideal condition is never attained on a large scale. In practice the men who find work exactly suited to them and at the same time acceptable to society are at the best somewhat exceptional—though habit reconciles most of us—and classes are never wholly open or wholly devoted to the general good. The problem of finding where men belong, of adapting personal gifts to a complex system, is indeed one of extreme difficulty, and is in no way solved by facile schemes of any sort. There are, fundamentally, only two principles available to meet it, that of inheritance or caste and that of competition. While the former is a low principle, the latter is also, in many of its phases, objectionable, involving waste of energy and apt to degenerate into anarchy. There are always difficulties on either hand, and the actual organization of life is ever a compromise between the aspiration toward freedom and the convenience of status.