5. “Class” is in democratic countries no longer a political institution. A man’s vote is secured to him on a minimum qualification, and his practical influence and acceptance depend neither on {311} birth nor on occupation, but on the power which he can exercise by his qualities or his possessions. This is a consequence of the recognition of humanity as such, and has its bad side and its good side according to the baseness and nobility of the influences which tell _de facto_ upon human nature. It is horrible, we may say, that influence should belong to wealth without any security whatever for a discharge of social function. But this, given human nature as it is to-day, is a result of the same causes which enable us to boast, with some truth, that a man ranks in the general world by his powers, character, and behaviour, and that we do not know or care whether his livelihood comes to him as a miner or as a duke. Wealth has weight because people give it weight; but no one need give weight to wealth in politics or social intercourse unless he likes. It is a consequence, then, of the recognition of free humanity that “class” no longer is an institution in political right as such, while in social intercourse, though it practically exists as an institution, it claims to be an expression of what people are in character and behaviour, and its differences are not annexed by any iron bond to differences of occupation. [1] [1] It may be taken as proved that a “gentleman” can make his living as a labourer or mechanic--at least in the U.S.A., where irrational tradition is weaker than in England--and remain a gentleman in the drawing-room sense of the term as well as in essentials. This being so, there can be no inherent impossibility in men born and bred as labourers or mechanics realising the same qualities. It would be cant, I think, to say that full equality of social class, full pleasantness and freedom of intercourse, could be attained without those qualities. But though occupation no longer determines either social or political class, in the sense of {312} gradation by any formal bond, yet it remains and must always remain a determinant of class in a narrower sense, and one of the main ideas which constitute the ethical structure of the mind.