For, in scoffing at all mercy, all fraternity, he places in the heart of the superman he deifies a Satanic disregard of the weak and the disinherited; he legitimizes all privileges of self-will and force to governments of the gibbet and the lash, and with logical resolution comes to his keynote: ‘‘Society does not exist for itself, but for its elect.” Truly it is not this monstrous notion that we oppose as our standard to that false equalitarianism which aims at the leveling of all to a common vulgarity. Happily, so long as there shall be in our world the possibility of so disposing two pieces of wood that they form a Cross — which is to say, eternally— so long shall future man persist in thinking that it is Love that is the basis of all stable order; and that the only true hierarchy is that of those who have the highest capacity for love.

The new science — a fountain of inexhaustible moral inspirations — shows, in explaining life’s laws, how the principle of democracy may be reconciled with an aristocracy of morals or of culture in the organization of human collectivities. On the one hand, as Henri Bérenger’s suggestive book has shown, the affirmations of science but contribute to sanction and fortify the idea of democracy in society, revealing how great is the value of collective effort, how valuable the labour even of the smallest hand, how immense the field of action reserved to the anonymous and obscure fellow-workman in any manifestation of our social evolution. It exalts, no less than Christianity, the dignity of the lowly; this new thought, which in nature ascribes to the labour of the infinitely little, the nummulite and the briozoӧn at the depths of the ocean, the construction of the cements of geology; which derives from the vibration of a formless primitive cell all the elevating impulses of organized life; which shows the great rôle that in our psychology we must ascribe to vague and inconspicuous phenomena, even the fugitive perceptions of our subconscious self; and which, coming to sociology and history, restores to the heroism of the masses, often doubted, the share which was ignored in the glorification of the individual hero; and reveals the slow accumulation of individual research which through many centuries has prepared, in obscure workshops or laboratories of forgotten toilers, the discoveries of genius.

But at the same time that it thus demonstrates the immortal efficacy of collective force, and dignifies the participation of unknown collaborators in the universal work, science shows that it is a necessary condition to all progress that there should be leadership amid the immense mass of persons and of things. Relations of dependence and subordination are a condition of life, between the individual members of society and the elements of individual organization. In fine, there is an inherent necessity for the universal law of imitation that there be present models, alive and influential, for the making perfect human society, to realize their superiority by the progressive making general of it.

To show how both these universal lessons of science can be transformed into action, working together in the organization and spirit of society, we need only insist on our conception of a democracy that is just and noble, impelled only by the knowledge and sense of true superiorities, in which the supremacy of intelligence and virtue, the only limits to the just equality of men, receives its authority and prestige from liberty and sheds over all multitudes the beneficent aura of love. And at the same time that it reconciles these two great lessons, of our observation of the order of nature, such a society will realize the harmony of two historic forces which give our civilization its essential character, its regulative principles of life. From the spirit of Christianity, in fact, is born the sentiment of equality, albeit tainted now with something of the ascetic disdain for culture and selection of the spirit. And from the classic civilizations rises that sense for order, for authority, and the almost religious respect for genius, though tainted with something of aristocratic disdain for the weak and the lowly. The future shall synthesize these two suggestions in immortal formula; then shall Democracy have triumphed definitely. Democracy — which, when threatening an ignoble leveling, justifies the lofty protests and the bitter melancholies of those who see sacrificed in her triumph all intellectual distinction, every dream of art, each delicacy of life, — will, now even more than the old aristocracies, extend inviolable guaranties for the cultivation of those flowers of the soul which fade and perish in the surroundings of the vulgar, amid the pitiless tumult of the multitude.

The utilitarian conception as the idea of human destiny, and equality at the mediocre as the norm of social proportion, make up the formula which in Europe they call the spirit of Americanism. It is impossible to think on either of these as inspirations for human conduct or society, while contrasting them with those which are opposed to them, without at once conjuring up by association a vision of that formidable and fruitful democracy there in the North, with its manifestations of prosperity and power, as a dazzling example in favour of the efficacy of democratic institutions and the correct aim of its ideas. If one could say of utilitarianism that it is the word of the English spirit, the United States may be considered the incarnation of that word. Its Evangel is spread on every side to teach the material miracles of its triumph. And Spanish America is not wholly to be entitled, in its relation to the United States, as a nation of Gentiles. The mighty confederation is realizing over us a sort of moral conquest. Admiration for its greatness, its strength, is a sentiment that is growing rapidly in the minds of our governing classes, and even more, perhaps, among the multitude, easily impressed with victory or success. And from admiring it is easy to pass to imitating. Admiration and belief are already for the psychologist but the passive mood of imitation. “The imitative tendency of our moral nature,” says Bagehot, “has its seat in that part of the soul where lives belief.” Common sense and experience would suffice of themselves to show this natural relation. We imitate him in whose superiority and prestige-we believe. So it happens that the vision of a voluntarily delatinized America, without compulsion or conquest, and regenerate in the manner of its Northern archetype, floats already through the dreams of many who are sincerely interested in our future, satisfies them with suggestive parallels they find at every step, and appears in constant movements for reform or innovation. We have our mania for the North. It is necessary to oppose to it those bounds which both sentiment and reason indicate.

Not that I would make of those limits an absolute negation. I well understand that enlightenment, inspiration, great lessons lie in the example of the strongs nor do I fail to realize that intelligent attention to the claims of the material and the study of the useful, directed abroad, is of especially useful result in the case of people in the formative stage, whose nationality is still in the mould. I understand how one must try by persevering education to rectify such traits of a society as need to be made to fit in with new demands of civilization and new opportunities in life, thus by wise innovation counteracting the forces of heredity or custom. But I see-no-good in denaturalizing the character of a people — its personal genius—to-impose on it identity with a foreign model to which they will sacrifice the originality of their genius, that, once lost, can never be replaced; nor in the ingenuous fancy that this result may ever be obtained artificially or by process of imitation. That thoughtless attempt to transplant what is natural and spontaneous in one society into the soil of another where it has no roots, historically or naturally, seemed to Michelet like the attempt to incorporate by mere transference a dead organism in a living body.

In societies, as in art or literature, blind imitation gives but an inferior copy of the model. And in the vain attempt there is also something ignoble; a kind of political snobbery, carefully to copy the ways and acts of the great; as, in Thackeray’s satire, those without rank or fortune ineffectually imitate only the foibles of the mighty. Care for one’s own independence, personality judgment, is a chief form of self- respect.