In fact, there is a philosophical principle implied in snobbery, a principle which is certainly false if made absolute, but which fairly expresses the moral relations of things in a certain perspective. If we all really stood on different steps in a single ladder of progress, then to admire and imitate those above us and to identify ourselves with them by hook or by crook would be simply to accelerate our natural development, to expand into our higher self, and to avoid fatal abysses to the right and to the left of the path marked out for us by our innate vocation. Life would then be like the simple game which children call Follow the Leader; and this scrupulous discipleship would be perfect freedom, since the soul of our leader and our own soul that chooses him would be the same. This principle is precisely that of the transcendental philosophy where it maintains that there is but one spirit in all men, and one logical moral evolution for the world. In fact, it is the Germans rather than the English that are solemn, convinced, and universal snobs. If they do not seem so much snobs in particular, it is because they are snobs _überhaupt_. It is not only from the nobility that grateful dews descend on their sensitive hearts, as upon open flowers; they yearn also after the professors and the artists, and assiduously dress their domestic mind, so far as the cloth will go, in the latest intellectual fashion. Their respect for what holds the official stage, and holds it for the moment, is beautiful in its completeness. They can change their front without changing their formation. And the occasional pricks and heartburnings of snobbery are entirely drowned, in their case, in its voluminous vicarious joys.