Why is the sinister role of the upper classes not universally grasped? Because the ideas and teachings of former generations still survive, however much contradicted by present developments. At the time of the American and French Revolutions and for nearly a century afterwards, when political democracy was first securing a world-wide acceptance _as an ideal_, it was looked upon as a creed which had only to be mentally accepted in order to be forthwith applied to life. The only forces of resistance were thought to be due to the ignorance or possibly to the unregenerate moral character of the unconverted. The democratic faith was accepted and propagated by the French and others almost exactly as religion had been. As late as the middle of the last century this conception of democracy, due to the wide diffusion of small and in many localities approximately equal farms and small businesses, continued to prevail. About the middle of the nineteenth century the first advance was made. It became recognized with the coming of railroads and steamships that society could never become fixed as a Utopia or in any other form, but must always be subject to change,--and the ideal of social evolution gained a considerable acceptance even before the evolution theory had been generally applied to biology. It was seen that if the ideal of democracy was to become a reality, a certain degree of intellectual and material development was required,--but it was thought that this development was at hand. It was a period when wealth was rapidly becoming more equally distributed, when plenty of free land remained, and when it was commonly supposed that universal free trade and universal peace were about to dawn upon the nations, and equal opportunity, if not yet achieved, was not far away. The obstacles in the way of progress were not the resistance of privileged classes, but the time and labor required for mankind to conquer the world and nature. With the establishment of so-called democratic and constitutional republics in the place of monarchies and landlord aristocracies, and the abolition of slavery in the United States, all systematic opposition to social progress, except in the minds of a few perverted or criminal individuals, was supposed to be at an end. A generation or two ago, then, though it was now recognized that the golden age could not be attained immediately by merely converting the majority to a wise and beneficent social system (as had been proposed in the first half of the century), yet it was thought that, with the advance of science and the conquest of nature, and without any serious civil strife, "equality of opportunity" was being gradually and rapidly brought to all mankind. This state of mind has survived and is still that of the majority to-day, when the conditions that have given rise to it have disappeared.