The democrat is therefore profoundly convinced of two things; first, that all men are equal and that there is no such thing as inferiority or failing, and secondly, that what men call faults are really natural characteristics of great interest. He believes that faults are popular prejudices invented by intriguers, priests, nobles and rulers, for their own base purposes to inspire the poor with humility. He looks upon this sense of inferiority as a curb on the people's power, all the more potent that it works from within and has a paralysing effect on its energy. He is persuaded that, from this point of view, politeness is an aristocratic instrument of tyranny. This explains why, when the wave of democracy swept over France, it brought with it a perfect frenzy of rudeness, all the more curious in a nation remarkable for courtesy. It was an affirmation that, appearances notwithstanding, neither superiorities nor excellences of human character had any real existence. Rudeness is democratic. CHAPTER X. PROFESSIONAL CUSTOMS. The contempt for efficiency is carried far even in the liberal professions and in professional customs. We all know the story, perhaps a mythical one, of the judge who said to an earnest young barrister who was conscientiously elaborating a question of law: "Now, Mr. So and So, we are not here to discuss questions of law but to settle this business." He did not say this by way of jest; he wished to say: "The courts no longer deliver judgment on the merits of a case according to law, but according to equity and common sense. The intricacies of the law are left to professors, so please when conducting a case do not behave like a professor of law." This theory, which even in this mild form would have horrified the ancients, is very prevalent nowadays in legal circles. It has crept in as an infiltration, as one might call it, from the democratic system. A magistrate, nowadays, whatever remnant of the ancient feeling of caste he may have retained, certainly does not consider himself bound by the letter of the law, or by jurisprudence, the written tradition; when he is anything more than a subordinate with no other idea of duty than subservience to the Government, he is a democratic magistrate, a Heliast of Athens; he delivers judgment according to the dictates of his individual conscience; he does not consider himself as a member of a learned body, bound to apply the decisions of that body, but as an independent exponent of the truth. An eccentric, but in truth very significant, example of the new attitude of mind is to be found in the judge, who formally attributed to himself the right to make law and who in his judgments made references, not to existing laws, but to such vague generalities as appealed to him, or to doctrines which he prophesied would _later on_ be embodied in the law. His Code was the Code of the future.