Aristotle has made yet another wise and profound observation on the question of equality: "_We must establish equality_," he said, "_in the passions rather than in the fortunes of men._" And he adds: "And this equality can only be the fruit of education derived from the influence of good laws." That is indeed the point. Education should have but one object; to reduce the passions to equality, or rather to _equanimity_, and to a certain equilibrium of mind. The education given to modern democracy does not lead to this, but leads in the opposite direction. CHAPTER XII. THE DREAM. What remedies can we apply to this modern disease, the worship of intellectual and moral incompetence? What is, as M. Fouillee puts it, the best way of avoiding the hidden rocks which threaten democracies? It is hard to say, for we have to do with an evil which can only be cured by itself, with an evil which is more than content with itself. M. Fouillee (in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of November, 1909) proposes an aristocratic Upper Chamber, that is to say, one that would represent all the competence of the country, inasmuch as it would be appointed by everything which is based on some particular form of excellence, the magistracy, the army, the university, the chambers of commerce, and so on. Nothing could be better; but the consent of the democracy would be necessary, and it is precisely these incorporations of efficiency that the democracy cannot abide, looking on them, not without reason, as being in a sense aristocracies. He proposes also an energetic intervention on the part of the State to restore public morality, action for the suppression of alcoholism, gambling and pornography. Beyond the fact that his argument savours of reaction, for it recalls to us the programme of "moral order" of 1873, we must remark, as indeed M. Fouillee himself acknowledges, that the democratic State can hardly afford to kill the thing which enables it to live, to destroy its principal source of revenue. Democracy, as its most authoritative representatives have admitted, is not a cheap form of government. It has always been instituted with the hope, and partly with the expressed design, of being an economical government, and it has always been ruinous, because it requires a much larger number of partisans than other forms of government, and a smaller number of malcontents than other forms of government, and these partisans have to be remunerated in one fashion or another and the malcontents have to be silenced and bought in one way or another.