The part of the coming generation that is trained in Democracy is the part that will survive and prosper and progress. The part that is bred in exclusiveness and caste feeling is going to be bitterly discontented and deplorably unprogressive certainly, and in all probability, except in a few rare cases, downright unprosperous. Why do not the plutocratic “exclusives” and aspirants to exclusiveness see these things and take warning? Because vanity is so much stronger in influence over the average human being than is reason. They pile up the millions, make safe investments, plot monopolies that will insure stability of property, and imagine that their family line will be secure. Then they educate their children to folly and superciliousness and economic helplessness or at best give them a training not in business, in useful labor, but in the truly aristocratic chicanery of high finance. Thus does Nature, abhorring permanence, craftily use them for their own undoing. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make drunk on the fumes of vanity. The plutocracy and its imitators bring up their children in hot-houses. Some of the youngsters are ejected from the hot-house and exposed as soon as they are grown--or sooner; others remain in the hot-house and perhaps breed there. But the day of fate comes. The hot-house is emptied or destroyed. Fortunately for the masses and their children, fortunately for the prosperity and progress of the race, few can build these hot-houses; only a few can dwell in them. And with the swift progress of Democracy in these modern days, this cruel, mocking favoritism swiftly decreases. Manners there can be, but they must be democratic manners. Refinement, culture, there can be, but it must be democratic. Idealism there can be, but it must be true idealism, broad, deep and high, not a “class” matter, not a vanity, not a pretentious crushing down of millions to make luxurious holiday for a few. The aristocratic idealisms in manners, education, politics, religion, mode of life, are fleeing like shades of night before the bright daylight of Democracy. Only ignorance could ever have thought them fair. CHAPTER X THE COMPELLER OF EQUALITY