Nor to hear them is it necessary to copy that Parnassian spirit of a delicate and feeble stock which an aristocratic disdain for the present drives to reclusion in the past. Of the constant inspirations of Flaubert—from whom springs directly the most democratized of all the modern schools—none is more intense than his hatred for a mediocrity animated by the spirit of leveling and the tyranny of mass. And within contemporary Scandinavian literature, so much preoccupied by social questions, the same idea most often occurs. Ibsen weaves the lofty harangue of his Stockmann upon the affirmation that “compact majorities are the greatest danger to liberty and truth.” And the awesome Nietzsche opposes to the ideal of a mediatized humanity that of supermen who surge above its level like a tidal wave. A lively desire for a reform of the social system which shall make secure the leading of the heroic life and assure to its thought a purer atmosphere of dignity and just consideration is now everywhere apparent, and promises to be a fundamental note in the harmonies of the coming century.

Yet the spirit of democracy is essentially, for our civilization, a principle against which it were idle to rebel. The discontent we feel for the imperfections of its actual historic form has often led us to judge unjustly what it has that is both final and fruitful. Thus Renan's wisdom of the aristocrat it is which formulates the most explicit condemnation of its fundamental principle, equality-of-rights, which he believes to be permanently contrary to any possible government of intellectual superiority. He even goes so far as to call it, in a forceful image, “the antipodes of the path of God—since God has not willed that all should live in the same degree of spiritual life." These unjust paradoxes, together with his famous ideal of an omnipotent oligarchy of wise men, are like the exaggerated image in a nightmare of some true thought that has obsessed our waking hours. Failure to recognize the real work of democracy because it has not yet succeeded in reconciling its principle of equality with social safeguards for that of selection, is as to ignore the parallel labour of science because, when interpreted in the narrow manner of a certain school, it has occasionally wrought harm to the spirit of poetry or religion. Democracy and science are indeed the two props on which our civilization rests, the two Fates that spin our future; as Bourget phrases it, “In them we are, we live, we move.”

As it is impossible, therefore, to hope with Renan for a more positive consecration of the moral superiorities, the realization of a hierarchy of reason, any effective dominion of the loftier gifts of intelligence and free will which shall be based on the destruction of that democratic equality,—the only thing left us is to bethink us how to educate, reform, democracy itself. We must seek “how gradually to inculcate in popular feeling and custom the idea of that necessary subordination, the sense of true superiorities, the instinctive yet conscious cultivation of all that multiplies the cipher of human worth in the eye of reason.

Popular education thus acquires its supreme interest considered in its relation to such a work, and with thought for the future.1 And it is at school where we first mould the clay of the multitude; there come the first and broadest manifestations of social equity; schools consecrated to the equal right of all to learning and the most efficient measures for superior attainment. They have to round out a noble task — to make the sense for order and the will for justice prime objects of its instruction; the realization of all that Authority which is legitimate.

1 “Plus l'instruction se répand, plus elle doit faire de part aux idées genérales et généreuses. On croit que 1'instruction populaire doit être terre-á-terre. C’est le contraire qui est la vérité.''

Fouillée: L' Idée modern du droit, Libre, 5, iv

v

There is no distinction more easily lost sight of in the popular mind than that between equality of opportunity and actual equality — of influence or of power — among members of organized society. All have the same right to aspire to a moral superiority which may justify and explain an effective one; but only those who have really achieved the former should be rewarded by the latter. The true and worthy notion of equality rests on the assumption that all reasonable beings are endowed by nature with faculties capable of a noble development. The duty of the State consists in seeing that all its members are so placed as to be able to seek without favour their own best; in so arranging things as to bring to light each human superiority, wherever it exists. In such wise, after the initial equality, inequality, when it comes, will be justified; few it will be sanctioned either by the mysterious powers of nature or the deserving merit of volition. So understood, democratic equality, far from antagonizing a choice of either customs or ideas, will become the useful instrument of that spiritual election, the native soil for culture. For it is born of intellectual energy; as Tocqueville said, poesy and eloquence, the graces of the mind, the flashes of the imagination, all these gifts of the soul, scattered from the heavens at hazard, are co-workers in' the labour of democracy and serve it even when they belong to its enemies; for they tend to bring into relief the natural—not the inherited— greatness of which man’s spirit is capable. Emulation, the most powerful spur of all that urge to action, as well in thought as in other human activities, needs as well equality at the starting-point in order to produce at the finish that inequality which gives the palm to the apter scholar or the greater man. And the democratic regime can carry in its bosom both these two conditions of emulation only when it does not degenerate into a levelling equality, but is content to look forward to it only as a glorious ideal, a counsel of perfection, a future equality of all men in their common ascent to the highest culture possible.

Rationally conceived, democracy always admits that indispensable aristocratic principle which shall concede superiority to the better man when recognized and sanctioned by the common consent. It consecrates, as much as aristocracy, the distinction of equality; but it resolves in favour of such qualities as are truly superior — those of mind, character, virtue. It does not immobilize them into a separate class which shall have the execrable privilege of caste, but renews them continually from the living fountain of the people, making justice or affection the reason of their choice. In such wise recognizing, as a necessity for any, progress, the selection and predominance of the best equipped, it avoids that humiliation which in other human contests falls to the lot of the vanquished. “the great law of natural selection will go on functioning in human society only so long as it works more and more on a basis of liberty,” said Fouillée. The odious character of traditional aristocracies arose in that they were oppressive in their action and unjust in their foundation and so their authority became intolerable. Now we know that there exists no other legitimate limit for man's equality than that which consists in the dominion of intelligent and virtue, freely consented to by all. But we do know that it is necessary that this limit shall exist. On the other hand, our Christian view of life teaches that those moral superiorities which are the basis of rights really give rise only to duties; and that each superior being owes to others more in proportion to his excess in ability over them. The anti-equality views of Nietzsche, who seems to have ploughed so deep a furrow in our contemporary literature of thought, have brought into his tremendous revindication of what he calls natural rights, implicit in human superiorities, an abominable and reactionary genius.