This rapid growth exposes our future to the dangers of a democratic degeneration which smothers under the blind force of the mass all idea of quality, deprives the social consciousness of all just notion of order, and, yielding its class organization to the rough hands of chance, causes the triumph of only the most ignoble, unjustifiable supremacies.

It is, of course, true that our selfish advantage—not the virtue of it alone— bids us be hospitable. Long since the need of peopling the emptiness of the desert made a famous publicist coin the phrase, “To govern is to populate.” But this famous aphorism contains a truth that must not be closely interpreted; it must not ascribe civilizing virtues to mere number.

To govern is to populate by assimilation, first of all, and then by education and selection. If the appearance and growth in a society of the highest human activities require a dense population, it is precisely because great numbers make possible the most complete division of labour, and the birth of elements of strong leadership which bring about the predominance of quality over quantity. .The multitude, the anonymous mass, is nothing by itself.

It will be an instrument of barbarity or of civilization according as it has or lacks the coefficient of high moral leadership. There is deep truth in Emerson’s paradox that every country on earth should, be judged by its minorities and not majorities. The civilization of a country acquires its grandeur, not by its manifestations of material prosperity and predominance, but by the higher order of thinking or of feeling made thereby possible. So Comte: it is senseless to pretend that excellence can ever be replaced by number, that by an accumulation of vulgar minds one may hit upon a brain of genius, or by the addition of many mediocre virtues get the equivalent of a deed of heroism. So our democracy, proclaiming the universality and equality of rights, will sanction the ignoble predominance of mere number unless it be careful highly to maintain the idea of human superiorities that are legitimate ; and to make authority, bound to a popular vote, not the exponent of an absolute equality, but (as I remember some young Frenchman said) ‘‘the consecration of a hierarchy based on liberty.”

The clash between the democratic rule and the higher life becomes a fatal reality when that rule imparts the disregard of even legitimate superiorities and the substitution of mechanical government for a faith in heroism (in Carlyle’s sense). All in civilization that is more than material excellence, economic prosperity, is a height that will be levelled when moral authority is given to the average mind. Though there be no longer external invading hordes to hurl themselves upon the beacon lights of civilization with a might now devastating and now regenerating, the high culture of to-day should guard itself against the soft and gradual dissolvent work of those other crowds, pacific, even educated —the unescapable multitudes, of the vulgar, whose Attila might well be personified in “Mr. Homais,” whose heroism is shrewdness, ordered by an instinctive repugnance for what is great; whose device is the leveller. Immovable indifference and quantitative superiority are its attributes, the usual result of its labours; yet is it not entirely incapable of rising to epic heights, usually of anger, giving free reins to its antipathies. Charles Morice called it ‘‘those phalanxes of ferocious Prudhommes who have for their device Mediocrity, and march together in their hatred of all that is extraordinary.”

Elevated to power, these Prudhommes will make of their triumphant will an organized hunting-party against all that shows aptitude or daring wing to fly high. Its social formula will be a democracy which leads to the consecration of Pope Anyone, the coronation of King Average. They will hate merit as a rebellion. In their dominion all noble superiority will be like a marble statue placed in a miry road to be spattered by the mud of any passing waggon. They will call the dogmatism of common sense, wisdom; mean avidness of heart, gravity; adaptation to the mediocre, sound judgment; and bad taste, manly indifference to trifles. Their notion of justice will lead them either to substitute in history the immortality of great men by the common forgetfulness of all, or to preserve it with the equal memory of a Mithridates who knew the names of all his soldiers. Its manner of republicanism will resemble that of Fox, who used to submit his projects to the criterion of that member who seemed to him the most perfect type of the country gentleman, judging by the limitation of his faculties and the rudeness of his gestures. Then we shall be in that. Zoӧcracy that Baudelaire imagined, and Shakespeare’s Titania, kissing an ass’s head, will be the emblem of that liberty which calls but for the middling. Never could a tyrant’s conquest compass a more sinister end!

And if you make a prophet of your neighbour who preaches the belittling lesson of the mediocre, if you make him your hero and seek your salvation in his bureaucratic content—you will encounter that rancorous, implacable hostility against all that is beautiful, all that is dignified or delicate in the spirit of humanity which,

even more than its brutal shedding of blood, is so repugnant in the Jacobite tyranny. Before its tribunal the wisdom of a Lavoisier, the genius of a Chenier, the dignity of a Malesherbes, become only faults; amid the' shouting of its Conventions we hear the cry, Distrust that man, he has written a book! Confounding the idea of democratic simplicity with Rousseau's state of nature, it would take the vignette of his first edition as symbolic of the antinomy between democracy and culture, that famous diatribe against the arts and sciences in the name of morality; a satyr, rudely seizing the torch of Prometheus from his hands, only to learn that its flame is mortal to him who touches it!

Equalitarian ferocity has not, indeed, yet shown itself in the democratic development of our century, nor opposed in brutal manner the serenity and liberty of our intellectual growth. But like some savage beast now domesticated, its later progeny have changed their native ferocity to an artful and ignoble tameness, equalitarianism; and this mild tendency to all that is utilitarian or vulgar may fairly be blamed upon the democracy of the nineteenth century. No sensitive or sagacious mind has ever studied this without anxiously considering some of its results in their social and their political aspect. Contemporary thought, while rejecting that false conception of equality that made the delirium of the French Revolution, has yet maintained a severe scrutiny of the very theory of democracy, which you, who are about to create the future, must begin with; not necessarily to upset, but to educate, the spirit of our time.

Since our century began to assume independence, personal liberty in the evolution of its ideas, German idealist philosophy has rectified the equalitarian Utopia of the eighteenth century and again exalted, albeit with too much Cesarism, the part played in history by individual greatness. Comte’s positivism, not recognizing in the democratic equality anything but a transitory wiping out of ancient class systems, and denying with equal conviction the definitive efficiency of popular rule, sought in the principles of natural classification a basis for that social classification which should be the substitute for the hierarchies recently destroyed. The criticism of the democratic régime took a severer form in the generation of Taine and Renan: to this modem Athenian the only equality which appealed was one like that of Athens, ‘‘an equality of demigods.’’ And as to Taine, he wrote “the Origin of contemporary France”; and if, on the one hand, his conception of society as an organism leads him logically to reject all idea of uniformity opposed to the principles of dependent and subordinate organisms, on the other his fine instinct for intellectual selection leads him to abominate the invasion of the heights by the multitude. Already the great voice of Carlyle had preached against irreverent levelling, and for heroism; meaning by that word any noble superiority; and Emerson echoed this idea in the bosom of the most positivist of democracies. The new science spoke of natural selection as a necessity of all progress; and in art, where the feeling for the exquisite has its most obvious application, those notes reverberated which seek to express the feeling of what we may call the estrangement of the spirit to modem conditions of life.