The American Notion of Equality

THE essence of the aristocratic system is that it separates people into castes. First, it divides all men into the two castes of gentlemen by birth and breeding and non-gentlemen ; and then there are the minor castes created by rank, station, and occupation. It is hard for an American to understand the respect paid in England to every member of the gentleman class, independently of his particular qualities. In describing the conduct of a tradesman whom the vicar of the parish was endeavoring to influence in a certain direction, Anthony Trollope says, “There was, however, a humility about the man, a confession on his part that in talking to an undoubted gentleman he was talking to a superior being.” And yet this same superior being was so far inferior to a marquis that the Marquis of Trowbridge (with whom, as the reader may remember, the vicar had quarreled) is represented as thinking of him in these terms : “ And now, this infidel clergyman had dared to allude to his lordship’s daughters. Such a man had no right even to think of women so exalted. The existence of the Ladies Stoute must no doubt be known to such men, and among themselves probably some allusion in the way of faint guesses might be made as to their mode of living, as men guess at kings and queens, and even at gods and goddesses.” Allowance must be made for the humorous exaggeration in this passage, but still it indicates a real feeling. These rigid distinctions of class necessarily produce a great deal of what in this country we call servility; and servility, no doubt, it is in many cases, but in other cases “ respect ” would be a better word than “ servility ” to describe the attitude held by members of one class toward members of a higher class.

A far worse evil which aristocracy produces is insensibility to the sufferings of other people, when those people belong to a lower order. One of the new impressions which an American receives upon his first visit to England is of the equanimity, of the perfect detachment, one might say perhaps of the faint curiosity, with which well-dressed people, rolling by in carriages, regard those spectres in human form which wander occasionally from the East End of London to Hyde Park or its vicinity. In former years, the country gentlemen of England suffered laborers upon their estates to live, and to fall sick and die, in cottages not fit for pigs to inhabit. This was possible because of the great gulf fixed by law and custom between Hodge and his landlord. Their common humanity was almost lost sight of, and the points in which they resembled each other — though the most important — were completely overshadowed by the points in which they differed. There is a good illustration of this feeling in Mrs. Humphry Ward’s novel, Marcella. Marcella, it will be remembered, had been ministering to the wife and children of a farm hand, who was in jail on a charge of murder ; and her conduct is thus discussed by Lady Winterbourne and Miss Raeburn, the elderly sister of Lord Raeburn : —

“ ‘ Do you mean to say, Agneta, that one can’t sympathize, in such an awful thing, with people of another class, as one would with one’s own flesh and blood ? ’ Miss Raeburn winced. She felt for a moment the pressure of a democratic world — a hated, formidable world — through her friend’s question. Then she stood to her guns. ‘ I dare say you ’ll think it sounds bad,’ she said stoutly, ‘ but in my young days it would have been thought a piece of posing, of sentimentalism, something indecorous and unfitting, if a girl had put herself in such a position.’ ”

This is one aspect of an aristocratic society. It might be said, without much exaggeration, that aristocracy produces servility in every class but the highest, and inhumanity in every class but the lowest. However, I shall not enlarge upon this aspect of the subject; we are all familiar with what can be said against the aristocratic system, but seldom, indeed, in this country, do we consider what can be said for it. We ought to remember that although the aristocratic or caste system assigns most men to low positions in society, it guarantees some position to every man ; and within his own position or caste each man has free play for spontaneousness and self - respect. Lord Buchan declined to accept the post of secretary to the English embassy at Lisbon, because the ambassador was inferior to him in rank ; and Dr. Johnson commended his refusal. Had the earl done otherwise, said the doctor, he would have been a traitor to his rank and family. The same obligation rests upon the servant not to discharge any office which, according to the custom of English society, belongs to servants of an inferior class. Swift’s coachman, when he refused to fetch a pail of water from the well, was certainly in the right; and his master, in ordering him to drive to the well with coach and four, took a humorous but hardly a just revenge. The security of the caste system, the sacredness of the laws and customs which hedge it about, make it possible for members even of a low caste to have a certain dignity of speech and conduct. “ Englishwomen of the lower classes,” wrote Mr. Hawthorne, “ have a grace of their own, not seen in each individual, but nevertheless belonging to their order, which is not to be found in American women of the corresponding class. The other day, in the police court, a girl was put into the witness-box, whose native graces of this sort impressed me a good deal. She was coarse, and her dress was none of the cleanest and nowise smart. She appeared to have been up all night, too, drinking at the Tranmere wake, and had since ridden in a cart, covered up with a rug. She described herself as a servant - girl out of place ; and her charm lay in all her manifestations, — her tones, her gestures, her look, her way of speaking, and what she said being so appropriate and natural in a girl of that class ; nothing affected ; no proper grace thrown away by attempting to appear ladylike, which an American girl would have attempted, and she would also have succeeded in a certain degree. If each class would but keep within itself, and show its respect for itself by aiming at nothing beyond, they would all be more respectable. But this kind of fitness is evidently not to be expected in the future, and something else must be substituted for it.”

Such being its practical operation, what is the rationale, the intellectual basis, of the aristocratic or caste system ? It is the recognition by law of certain differences between one man and another. These differences exist independently of law, and perhaps they are more insisted upon in democratic than in aristocratic countries. People who belong to what is called the " best society ” in large towns or cities are usually quite unconscious of the fact that society is graded just as minutely beneath them as it is in the plane with which they are familiar. But, in fact, every individual in a complex society, down to the beggar in the street or the tramp on the highway, has his “ social position.” The city missionaries of Boston report, with some astonishment, that a great social gap exists between the peanut-vender on the sidewalk and the peripatetic organ-grinder, and that the children of the former are forbidden by their parents to play with the children of the latter. It is indeed asserted, and with considerable truth, that mere wealth is a passport to the best society ; but this is less true in America than it is in England, and less true in Australia than it is in America. The reason is that in England the best society is a state institution, and therefore is more sure of its position and can afford to be less exclusive, — to be more hospitable not only to wealth, but also to intellect and originality, than is possible for the corresponding class in a democratic country. Moreover, even from the most aristocratic point of view, a good reason can be given for accepting wealth as a substitute for birth. The fact that a man has made much money implies, as a rule, that both his mind and his physical strength are far above the average. From what better stock, then, could the best society be recruited ? This, of course, is not the motive of the rich man’s reception in good society : it might better be described as nature’s reason for permitting the anomaly. The same traits of courage and of executive ability which render a great contractor rich may reveal themselves, a generation or two later, on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war; and probably it could be shown that no small part of the aptitude for state business displayed by the English nobility was inherited from ancestors who had exhibited a similar talent in trade.

The aristocratic principle at work in almost all societies is therefore more rational, more logical, than it appears to be at first sight. And if we ask what motive, what instinct, is at the bottom of this segregation, — why does the peeress, why does the huckster’s wife, value so highly and guard so fiercely her " social position,”— perhaps the true answer would be that the instinct of self-preservation is concerned. Man knows himself to be an extremely imitative, a very easily debased creature, and consequently he has an instinctive desire to defend his society — the society in which his children are to be brought up, and in which they will have ail inherited place — from contamination by inferior persons.

The aristocratic or caste system is, then, nothing more than a legal recognition by the state, of certain differences between people which, whether the state recognizes them or not, are always enforced. Why, then, should the state meddle with them ? Why not allow these matters to regulate themselves, instead of drawing hard-and-fast lines of division which result in that great evil, servility ? There is an answer to this objection. Boswell relates a conversation between Dr. Johnson and several other persons about equality and inequality, which one of those present endeavored to sum up as follows : “ The result is that order is better than confusion.” “ Why, no,” said the sage ; “ the result is that order cannot be had but by subordination.”

Now, it might be said, just as there can be no order without subordination, so also there can be no personal dignity without subordination. Man is constituted in such a manner that unless respect for others is demanded from him, he will not demand or invite respect for himself. Human nature has to be helped out in this regard. Left to themselves, as in a democratic society, men disintegrate ; they cease to respect themselves or one another. Plato declared that in a democratic state the very dogs and horses in the street wear a look of impudence. On the other hand, in an aristocratic society, all are bound up together. Each man has his niche : something is due from him, and something is due to him. Every citizen occupies, or at least every class of citizens occupy, a particular round on the ladder, and they are under obligations to concede just so much to their superiors, and to exact just so much from their inferiors. Hence, to belong to an aristocratic society is to undergo a continual education in the feeling both of personal dignity and of respect for others. “ There is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed.”

Such, roughly sketched, is the philosophic basis of the aristocratic or caste system. It proceeds upon the assumption that man’s natural tendency is to social anarchy ; that subordination is the condition not only of order, but of personal dignity ; and that this subordination must be found in the very structure of the state.

Let us glance now at a democratic society, or at the nearest approach to it which this country affords. The democratic spirit, even in the United States, is a recent development, for we were not emancipated from the aristocratic tradition until the close of the civil war. It is a fact, often cited, that in the last century, both at Harvard and at Yale, the names of the students were arranged in the catalogue, not alphabetically, but in the supposed order of family importance. Seats in church were assigned upon the same principle ; and I have been told by a man now living how in his young days a stranger, who had moved into town, having been put at the back of the meeting-house in the same pew with a negro, was so incensed that he forswore churchgoing altogether.

In the little town of Amherst, New Hampshire, there lived (and died in 1853) a lawyer named Atherton, whose appearance is thus described in a history of the New Hampshire Bar : “ Erect, dignified, and handsomely clad, with ruffled shirt, hanging watch-chain and seals, and all the other adornments of his station, at a time when the dress was a distinctive badge of the different classes of society, he was recognized at a glance as belonging to what might be called the patrician order.”

The aristocratic tradition was, however, gradually giving way, under pressure of a democratic political system, and the civil war greatly hastened this process. Since then it would be true to say, I think, that in the United States good birth and good breeding, apart from wealth or talent, do not confer upon their possessor any real distinction in the view of people in general. With the close of the civil war there came a new influence and a new spirit, — the influence and the spirit of plutocracy. That was the era of the Mansard roof and of the Saratoga trunk. The tone of American society was at that time perceptibly lowered. Immense wealth had fallen into hands unfit to receive, or at least to dispense it. There has been an improvement in taste since then ; but the spirit of plutocracy, with all its selfishness and aloofness, remains, and gathers strength day by day.

Nevertheless, here and there equality has been realized in the United States as perhaps it never was realized before in the history of the world. What is equality ? In what sense can men be called equal, when we consider what vast differences there are between them in respect to character, intellect, education, and refinement ? Two men are equal when they meet freely and pleasantly, without condescension on one side or suspicion on the other, and when the consideration which each shows for the other is not dependent upon or qualified by the station or outward circumstances of either. This condition prevails in some New England towns, especially in those remote from the railway, and I presume that it prevails also in most parts of the West. In such communities, every man who is not a criminal or an outcast does feel himself to be in a very real sense the “ equal” of every other man. Wealth, though it is respected as a source of power, is never thought of as conferring “ social position ; ” in fact, that hideous phrase is not found in the rural vocabulary ; and as to the word " snob,” it would be difficult to make its meaning understood among the people whom I have in mind. Among them an employer of labor would of course expect those whom he employed to obey his orders; but it would strike him as ludicrous beyond expression that his hired man should wear a particular kind of dress, touch his hat when he was spoken to, and in general comport himself as if he belonged to an inferior order. Under such conditions want of respect is undoubtedly carried too far, but equality is attained ; and that self-respect which the feeling of equality produces makes the best members of the community equal to any society ; it gives them simplicity and sincerity. Take them to New York or Boston, and no magnificence or display, no society of rich or eminent persons, will put them out.

It is only in small country towns that such absolute equality prevails, but even in our large cities, even taking us at our worst, there is at least an absence of servility which distinguishes the American from the English social structure. In a memoir of Cardinal Newman it is related that once, while he was a tutor at Oxford, a carter whom he met riding on the shaft fell, shortly after Mr. Newman had passed him, was run over, and killed. After that, the biographer states, Mr. Newman made it a rule, whenever he met a man riding in that dangerous position, to compel him to get off and walk. Now, if an American gentleman should issue a command of this sort to an American laborer, it would probably evoke some such reply as was once made to a certain dignified and portly judge. The court was in process of removal from one building to another, and a porter engaged in the work inquired of a subordinate official, " Who is that fat man sitting on the bench in the court-room ? ”

“ Oh,” was the answer, “ that is Judge —. He is busy with some papers, before court opens. But why do you want to know ? ”

“ Well,” said the porter, “ I was carrying a big armful of books into the room, with my hat on, just now, and that man told me never to come into his presence without taking my hat off.”

” And what did you say ? ”

“ Oh,” said the fellow, with perfect nonchalance, and as if he had done the only thing proper under the circumstances, “ I told him to go to hell.”

This retort, considering that it was made in ignorance of the judge’s official capacity, stems to me to indicate a better state of society than does the subserviency of the English carter.

“ America,” as Mr. Leslie Stephen exclaims in an unwonted burst of enthusiasm, “ is still the land of hope . . . where, in spite of some superficially grotesque results, every man can speak to every other man without the oppressive sense of condescension ; where a civil word from a poor man is not always a covert request for a gratuity and a tacit confession of dependence.” In other words, America is, to some extent, the land of equality.

It is most interesting to note the impression made upon the English mind by the late J. A. MacGahan, the famous war correspondent, who was the son of an Ohio farmer. His English friend and fellow worker, Mr. Archibald Forbes, writes of him as follows : —

“ I never saw such a fellow for making himself at home among high officials. In his manner there was no flavor of impudence or presumption. I question whether of that word, indeed, he understood the meaning. It was as if he, in the character of a man and a Republican man, had reasoned the matter down to bare principle. 'I am a man,’ seemed, to me to be his attitude, ‘ and I am a man who honestly and legitimately, for a specific purpose of which you are aware, or of which I shall be glad to make you aware, want something. That something — be it information, be it a passport, be it what it may — you can give me best: therefore I ask you for it. It is immaterial to the logic of the position I virtually take whether you are an office messenger or the chancellor of an empire, a lieutenant or the commander-in-chief.’ ”

No wonder, then, that, as another friend of his put it, “ MacGahan could do anything he liked with Ignatieff, calmly made love to Madame Ignatieff, rather patronized Prince Gortschakoff, and nodded affably to the Grand Duke Nicholas.”

It is to be observed that in writing the description which I have quoted, Mr. Forbes had no design of making a general statement, much less of analyzing the American notion of equality. He was simply indicating in his acute, straightforward manner what he conceived to be MacGahan’s attitude toward all the world. “ It was as if he, in the character of a man and a Republican man, had reasoned the matter down to bare principle. ' I am a man ! ’ ” That describes exactly the American notion, the notion of equality which I am attempting to examine. “ It is immaterial to the logic of the position I virtually take whether you are an office messenger or the chancellor of an empire.” Such was MacGahan’s logic, and such is the logic of the American idea of equality. That a man could so feel and act seems to have come upon Mr. Forbes, even in these democratic days, as a kind of revelation. It does not strike us so, and this proves that, in some measure, we have realized the notion of equality.

But let us come to closer quarters with our subject. When and under what conditions does this mysterious thing, equality, exist ? Many philosophers, many clever essayists, many statesmen, have declared that equality is a mere delusion. I suppose that the weight of educated opinion is, and always has been, against it. And yet the passion for equality is deeply planted in the human heart; it was one cause — some historians tell us the main cause — of the French Revolution, and it has been for ages a source of hope and inspiration. It is not so much a theory as an instinct. It is, I believe, an instinctive perception of the fact that in the one thing of importance, namely, in moral freedom, men are equal. I say advisedly the one thing of importance. Nobody can read Matthew Arnold’s characterization of “ conduct ” as amounting to “ three fourths ” of life without being conscious, though dimly, perhaps, of some latent absurdity in the remark. The absurdity lies in comparing conduct on equal terms with anything else. It would hardly be more absurd to say that of the pleasure in living three fourths consisted in doing one’s duty, and the remaining fourth in drinking good old rum. Equality is the practical recognition of this fundamental truth that in the one thing of real importance, in the thing which chiefly distinguishes man from the brutes, in the thing which alone, despite of weakness and sin, gives a sublime aspect to human nature, namely, in moral freedom, all classes of men are alike. The ultimate equality, therefore, the equality instinctively sought after by the human race, is an equality in self-respect, because self-respect is founded solely upon moral freedom, and upon the right exercise of moral freedom. Self-respect has nothing to do with what a man possesses, nor even with his proficiency in any kind of human achievement, mental or physical. No man has self-respect because of what he knows, or of what he has, or of what he can do. These things may inspire him with pride or with vanity, but if he attempts to build self-respect upon them or to exact respect from others on account of them, his folly is obvious. Thus if a man plumes himself upon his wealth, we call him purse-proud ; if he prides himself upon his learning or cultivation, we call him pedant or prig, as the case may be ; if he is vain of his clothes, he is set down as a fop, if of his manners, as a coxcomb. Pride and vanity may rest upon these foundations, but self-respect depends ultimately on the fact that man is a free moral agent, and therefore it is, or might be, a universal possession. We cannot imagine a man so poor, so weak, so friendless, so ignorant, as, of necessity, to be lacking in self-respect. On the contrary, we often find self-respect in men who are conspicuously destitute.

I do not mean, of course, that one individual is equal to another individual, but that moral freedom is the possession of man as man, and is not the possession of any class or kind of men in particular. Equality lies in the recognition of this fact, and of all that it implies. The only explanation which we in the United States can give of ourselves politically and socially, the only ground upon which we can stand, is that here we undertook, as a people, to substitute for the principle of aristocracy the principle of democracy, and democracy in its social aspect is equality.

But we have not been faithful to this ideal. “ Our great crime,” as Mr. Howells once declared, " is that we have been false to the notion of equality.” What, then, are the hindrances to equality in the United States? The most obvious hindrance, and perhaps the most important, is the great and ever-increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth. One per cent of the families in the United States possess more property than is possessed by all the remaining ninetynine per cent.¹ The growth of a plutocracy among us would not be so bad if the plutocratic class exercised a good influence, but they exercise a bad influence. Their lives are spent, for the most part, in the pursuit of material pleasures, and they foster low ambitions in the public at large. What standards, what ideals, must be instilled in the mind of a young girl, the daughter of a mechanic, for instance, who reads the “ society ” news in the Sunday papers, and contemplates the " best ” people in the city as she sees them in the street, and perhaps at the theatre or in church now and then ! She must learn to think that the highest ambition of a young woman is not to be gentle, to be modest, to give pleasure to those around, and especially to those beneath her, but to be a conspicuous object at the horse show, to wear costly garments, to take part in costly entertainments, and finally to marry a foreign nobleman, and forsake her own country forever.

In short, if we may trust experience, great wealth in the hands of private persons is incompatible with equality. It is so for two reasons: first, because it makes a gap between those who have it and those who have it not; and, secondly, because its effect is, among people at large, to lower and confuse their ideals, to make a man respectable and respected, not for what he is, but for what he has. In a town or city like Newport, for example, young men stigmatized as “natives” may be observed, dressed usually in clothes of the “ shabby-genteel ” order, who bear upon their faces a look of conscious inferiority, painful enough for an American to see. They have this look because in the community in which they live false and tawdry notions, which they are not strong enough to resist, prevail; because in that community to have money and to be in “society” are regarded — consciously or unconsciously — as the foundations of self-respect and of respect for others. In a matter so delicate as the adjustment of human relations the differences between one man and another are far less important than the estimate which each man puts, and is aware that the other puts, upon those differences. Great inequality in wealth tends to establish the plutocratic spirit, and the essence of that spirit is to ignore the real, the underlying, the substantial equality between one man and another, and to magnify those inequalities which wealth directly and indirectly produces.

But there is another spirit which ignores the real inequalities between one man and another, and places equality upon a wrong basis. One cannot produce equality by asserting that it exists ; and if a man tries to make himself equal to his superior by asserting himself equal, the effect is exactly the opposite of what he intends. In the minds of a great many Americans equality means this : never, at least by outward word or act, to acknowledge their inferiority to anybody else. True, another man may have inherited culture, may have enjoyed better society, may have had and may have utilized far more opportunities for cultivation ; and yet they think that they are bound not to admit any kind of inferiority to him. They assert — perhaps only to themselves—that they are this man’s equals ; and if they really believed the assertion, such a belief would go far to create the equality which it assumes. But they are conscious, or partly conscious, that the assertion is false, and hence an element of insincerity is introduced, than which nothing is more vulgarizing. These evils come from ignoring the real, the essential equality, — the equality in moral freedom between one man and another, — and from attempting to achieve equality by denying obvious inequalities. It is an abandonment of the true ground of self-respect.

If a man lacks equality, if he is vulgar, the whole nation is in a conspiracy to keep him ignorant of the fact. Let us take as an example the case of commercial travelers or drummers. The comic papers have many jokes about them, about their “ cheek,” their impudence, their self-assertion ; and these jokes have a solid basis of fact. Nevertheless, no newspaper, no minister, no lecturer, no moralist, ever presumes to tell the drummers that their occupation is in most cases a degrading one. That it should be so is largely the fault of us who are not drummers. If we had good nature and good manners, it would not be necessary for drummers to have bad manners. And so of book, life insurance, and other peripatetic agents. An agent, or a mere peddler, it may be, comes to me to sell his wares, and I, being busy and ill-tempered, revile him. Two courses are then open to him : he can pocket the affront, as a means toward the selling of his wares, or he can revile me back ; and in neither case does he survive the encounter without a certain degradation. I do not say that an exceptional man might not go through the drummer’s or the book agent’s experience scathless, but for the ordinary man to do so is almost impossible. Nobody, however, tells the drummer this, and the community as a whole do not even perceive it. The result is that the typical drummer prides himself upon his worst faults. He considers that to be “ cheeky,” to call bar-tenders by their first names, to drink strong liquors and to smoke big cigars, to sit with his feet up, and to talk loudly in the office of a second-rate hotel, — to do these things, he considers, is to be an admirable man of the world. All that the drummer needs is a different ideal, a different standard ; what he needs is to respect himself as a man instead of as a drummer, to guard against the particular faults to which he is liable instead of cherishing them as virtues. But, as I say, we are all in a conspiracy to keep the drummer ignorant upon these vital points.

What is true of drummers as a class is true also, in varying degrees, of a great many other perfectly honest and reputable persons. It is commonly admitted that a man cannot be a dealer in secondhand clothes without having the liner susceptibilities of his nature somewhat blunted; and the same evil attaches to almost all forms of buying and selling. Trade, whether at wholesale or at retail, is, in modern times, almost inevitably degrading. A small success in trade can perhaps be made by one whose ambition is to buy at a fair price and to sell again at a fair price, taking only that profit which his services as a middleman are worth. But great success in trade depends upon buying cheaper and selling dearer than is for the advantage of the persons with whom one deals; it depends, in short, upon getting the better of other people, and surely that process cannot be an elevating or humanizing one. There are also incidental evils connected with trade as it is now pursued which tend to vulgarize. Such an evil is the excessive advertising and puffery which we see on every hand.

Several years ago, when it was announced that a son of the Duke of Argyll was going into trade, the intelligence was received in this country and in England too with a chorus of approbation. This defection was looked upon as a step toward breaking down an ancient and unwholesome prejudice. But it was a prejudice having some foundation in reason and experience ; and I am sure that a man can be a good American and a thorough believer in equality without shutting his eyes to the dangers — dangers to character and manners — which must be incurred by tradesmen and merchants. In regard to certain forms of trade, we all perceive these dangers. We perceive them, for instance, as I have suggested already, in respect to traffic in old clothes. Horse-dealers, again, are looked upon somewhat askance ; and there is a feeling abroad that plumbers, in order to remain honest men, must put a great constraint upon themselves. Most people, also, have a certain repulsion to undertakers. The undertaker’s employment is such that he must necessarily lose, in part at least, his sense of the awfulness of death and of the sacredness of the human body. The repulsion toward him is, therefore, a natural one ; it is at bottom the same instinct which, in an exaggerated and fanatical form, caused the Egyptian paraschistes to be despised and avoided. But to say this in public, to declare that anything which any American can lawfully do for a living is in any sense degrading, would be accounted a sort of treason, — a treason to the American idea of equality. This, however, would be a mistake. It is the men, not their employments, that are or might be equal. The case of the undertaker is an extreme one; but even the undertaker, if he were on his guard, if he endeavored to fortify his nature in those points where it is most endangered, might attain that equality which is our ideal.

The great thing is that we should be honest not only with ourselves, but with one another; that we should admit that all men do not have the same advantages of birth or training, and that all occupations are not equally civilizing and desirable. In short, instead of trying to ignore the various inequalities between one man and another, we should frankly acknowledge them ; and having done so, we can give due and practical weight to the essential equality between one man and another, — to their equality in moral freedom.

What will be the ultimate result — whether Plutocracy will crush out equality in the United States, or whether the democratic ideal will triumph, and equality will be established upon a large scale for the first time in the history of the world — can hardly be conjectured. Some philosophers hold, De Tocqueville and Mr. Bryce among them, that if equality should prevail, the result would be to raise the average of human intellect and character, but to prevent the production of really notable persons. There would be no more Sir Philip Sidneys ; there would be no more of that spirit expressed by the maxim Noblesse oblige. This view is a plausible one, and yet it does not sufficiently take into account the extreme elasticity of human nature. In a nation of MacGahans, we may be sure that some ideal of character and manners would be developed, — different perhaps from the feudal ideal, but not the less fine or admirable. There is a profound remark made by Coleridge which has a bearing upon the subject of equality : “We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly on the differences of man from man, not on their commonnesses, which are infinitely greater.”The theory of equality is founded upon the “ commonnesses ” of human nature. It would seem, therefore, to be founded upon justice; and if that be true, there need be no anxiety as to its ultimate effects.

Henry Childs Merwin.