In each Walled Town there are several Academies, each made up of those masters in the several guilds who have achieved the highest eminence. There is one Academy of Science and Craft, an Academy of Arts and Letters, an Academy of Philosophy, etc. Entrance into this circle of supreme achievement is effected either by direct choice of the members of the Academy, in which case the guild from which the candidate is chosen must ratify the choice, or by nomination on the part of the guild, when the recommendation so made must be sanctioned by the members of the Academy. Only high proficiency in some specified direction is ground for election to these Academies, and membership is an honour of the greatest distinction. The Order of Knighthood, however, is conferred rather for high qualities of character and for public service; any man, apprentice, minor official, servant, may be made a Knight if he demonstrates some high quality of honour or service. Here the power to nominate lies in the hands both of the Provost and of the knights themselves, but the latter have the right to confirm or reject the nominee of the Provost, while he has the same power if the nomination comes from the knights. Both the Academies and the knights have the right to degrade and expel a member of their own order; but when this is done it must be as the result of an open trial, if the accused so demands. Conviction of certain crimes and offences works degradation automatically. The object of these higher circles of specially chosen individuals is the official recognition of character and achievement and the constituting of certain groups of distinguished men whose duty it is to guard the highest ideals, not only of their own crafts, but of society itself through the free city which embodies their communal life. The Walled Towns know well that, while all men are equal in the sight of God and before the Law, there is otherwise no such thing as equality, that it would be fatal were it ever achieved, and that the efforts at its accomplishment have undermined such society as we once had until it has crumbled and crashed into the unhandsome _débris_ of its own ruin. The determination of inequalities by false standards of comparative value is almost as ill-favoured a thing as a doctrinaire equality; between the cash values of the bourgeois nineteenth century and the crazy overturnings and levellings and topsy-turvydom of twentieth century “democracy,” or Bolshevism, there is little to choose. High values, few, cherished, recognized and honoured, are one great end of society, of life itself, and it is in these crowning marks of distinction and achievement that humanity finds its best expression as well as its safe guides and sure leaders. In the Walled Towns is always the ardent quest for something to honour, whether it is some concrete product of art, science, letters, craftsmanship, or whether it is a citizen, an ideal, a memory of the past, a figure in history, a