The dominant crowd, therefore, in just so far as it must remain a crowd in order to secure its own position of supremacy, must strive to force all social realities into the forms of its own conflicts and dilemmas. Inevitably the self-feeling of a great many people, who are forced by the dominant crowd to conform and labor with no compensation, is hurt. They cannot but contrast their own lot with that of their more fortunate neighbors. Of all things, people probably resist most the feeling of inferiority. Any suggestion that the difference in social position is due to a similar difference in personal worth or in ability is hotly resented. The resentment is in no wise abated by the fact that in some cases this suggestion may be true. Compensations are at once created by the unconscious. In mediæval times "all men were brothers and were equal before the altars of the Church and in heaven." Thus distinctions of merit, other than those which prevailed in the social order, were set up in the interest of the common man. As the influence of the Renaissance directed general attention from the realm of the spiritual to practical affairs of earth, these compensations changed from thoughts of the future world to dreams of the future of this world. The injured self-feeling dwells upon the economic or political inequalities which flow from the dominance of the ruling crowd. The injustices and acts of exploitation, which are certainly neither new nor rare occurrences in human relations, are seized upon as if it were these things, not the assumption to superiority, which were the issue at stake. At the time of the French Revolution the Third Estate, or Bourgeois, which showed itself quite as capable of exploiting the poor as ever were the older aristocrats, saw itself only as part of the wronged and exploited "people." The sufferings of the poor, which it was frequently even then profiting in quite as heartily, to say the least, as the titled nobility, were represented as the grievance of all mankind against the hated nobility. That the ideas of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" which these good tradesmen preached may easily become the sort of compensatory ideas we have been discussing is shown by the fact of the genuine astonishment and indignation of the burghers when later their employees made use of this same phrase in the struggles between labor and capital. Sans-culottism had quite as many psychological motives as economic behind it.