The Vanishing Gentleman

IN an earlier essay I attempted to describe the qualities that marked the gentleman according to the usages of near three thousand years. I spoke of his military service in time of war, his political service in time of peace, of his solicitude for manners, style, taste, modesty, privacy, and I suggested that the humanities had had a large share in fashioning him, for the humanities are the record of how in two great peoples, the Greeks and the Romans, the mind had struggled victoriously to overcome the body.

I am aware that many people much wiser than I, democrats, humanitarians, men of scientific attainments, take a different view — in fact, that there is a general consensus of opinion that the humanities should be poked away in our ancestral garret, and that the gentleman as he was conceived to be by hundreds of generations had better be poked away beside them. But, though full of respect for the judgment of the majority and the democratic doctrine that the vox populi is the vox Dei, I had the curiosity to wander here and there in the historical past for concrete examples of the personage that I had defined, and I rambled about from the time of Homer nearly till today.

I learned about the good that gentlemen had done and the evil that they had done, and — having in mind the criticisms of democrats, socialists, communists, humanitarians — I paid special regard to their cost to society, in their privileges, in their taking to their own use and for their own consumption a portion of the good things of life so much larger than the portions allotted to other men. And in the course of my historical peregrinations I felt the full force of the democratic criticism. There is a great deal to be said against the institution of the gentleman; and a great deal has been said, and so well said, that there is now a virtually unanimous democratic opinion which has answered the question, ‘Does the Guild of Gentlemen have such value to society at large as to repay society for the cost of the Guild’s privileges?’ in a decided negative.

It was idle for me, therefore, to attempt to make a brief on behalf of a defunct institution. My curiosity took another turn, and I pondered over the motives that induced democracy to reject the institution by so overwhelming a majority. These motives are clear enough. They appear to me to be of diverse origin and of different weight, but such as they are I will present them, not in the order of their importance, but according to convenience and a random habit of mind.

Science

Science prepared the ground for this rejection of traditional values. Her progress during the last half of the nineteenth century, and in the beginning of this, has been one triumphant march. And the past victories of science are but preparations for future victories. Fifty or sixty years ago, physics was reckoned as one science, chemistry was reckoned as one science; now they are divided and subdivided, and each of the derivative sciences is more wide-embracing than its original then was; and so of a dozen other subjects. Science discourses on what is in the heavens above and the earth beneath, on the habits of the stars and the customs of electrons; it runs its outstretched fingers over the vague convexity that shuts in the farthest reaches of the universe; it delves into nature’s secrets, and tells us what has happened and what will happen. Such magical success dominates the human imagination. Science has eclipsed her old competitors — religion and the humanities; she is the cynosure of all eyes; she seems to hold the destinies of mankind in her hand, and sits, without rival, on the intellectual throne.

All the world is shouting that science is modern and looks toward the future, that religion and the humanities are old and look toward the past; all the world clamors that science, which once was impeded and hindered by religion, has broken religion’s bands as Samson broke the green withes, that she has ousted the humanities from the front seats in colleges and schools, and that she has shaken tradition to the foundation. And, with the decline and fall of tradition, all institutions that depend on tradition must decline and fall, too, and one of these institutions is the Guild of Gentlemen.

There is no more talk of the conflict between religion and science; the Church of Rome, with blindfold eyes, goes on its stately way; the Protestant churches are metamorphosing themselves into humanitarian societies, striving to soften and sweeten the common lot, to render it possible for the laboring class to produce all the babies it likes and to employ its leisure agreeably.

Humanists fight gallantly; they contend that man is a creature apart, endowed with will and intellect, and has a law of his own, quite different from laws that rule in laboratories; but nobody pays much attention to them. Science does not turn her head; her position is so secure that she recks not that the Tree of Knowledge is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and proceeds upon her way, following the gleam of intellectual curiosity, regardless of what consequences may come to human society. Her discoveries have profoundly affected all our moral, mental, and material interests; she has changed the whole organization of society. It was inevitable that all former human values should be shaken, if not wholly overthrown; intellectual curiosity, attended by multitudinous creature comforts, makes such matters as manners, style, taste, modesty, love of privacy, look pale and lustreless. The scientific faculty has displaced the Guild of Gentlemen in the good thoughts of the world.

In short, science has made the way ready for those rearrangements of society that we have seen, and are seeing, take place.

Democracy

Science, by its attention to practical matters, lifted democracy into the saddle, amid the cheers of the humanitarians, and democracy proclaimed the dogma of human equality. I am not scholarly enough to say whether democracy was primarily a factor in the dogma of equality, or the dogma of equality a factor in the rise of democracy. The two are closely linked together whether for good or ill, and presumably came to us hand in hand. It is obvious that under the government of a king, or of an oligarchy, there must have been discontent among the masses, who deemed that they had grievances; and as against a superior the dogma of equality is an excellent weapon — it is emotional, irrational, and simple.

Apart from the practical use of the dogma as a weapon against a superior class, some philosophers, in their wandering speculations, seem to have hit upon the idea that men were actually born equal. I am told that Locke said men are ’by nature free, equal, and independent.’ Other philosophers and men of liberal thought took it up, and made it the fashion; ambitious men found it an admirable tool for their purposes, and demagogues scattered it as the wind scatters thistledown. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Nothing, perhaps, shows better the working of fashion than the success of this dogma. Fashion is mimicry, and mimicry is the most valuable of the traits we have inherited from our ancestors. During the nineteenth century in America this dogma of human equality was accepted like the multiplication table — taught in schools, asserted in colleges, preached in churches, and shouted from the hustings.

Mr. Aldous Huxley says: ‘In the case of the theory of democracy the original assumptions are these: that reason is the same and entire in all men, and that all men are naturally equal. To these assumptions are attached several corollaries: that men are naturally good as well as naturally reasonable; that they are the product of their environment; and that they are indefinitely educable.’ But the fundamental assumption is that of equality, and this assumption, crystallized into dogma, went to work with a vengeance. It established political democracy, it is striving lustily for economic equality, and it has gone far toward social equality — at least it has got so far as to measure social values in terms of money, and therefore, when economic equality shall have been achieved, complete social equality will come. Of these three departments of equality, — political, economic, and social, — the economic, no doubt, is the primary, and that department is rapidly moving on.

If all this be so, how could it be that the Guild of Gentlemen should maintain itself? How, with this rage for equality, shall privilege hold a plea? For the Guild was the product of all the inequalities and superiorities that are detestable to the patriotic American; and in saying this I do not mean to attribute any vulgar meanness or envy to this attitude, for the American, bred upon the Declaration of Independence, holds that these inequalities and superiorities, being contrary to nature, are mere pretense, affectation, putting on airs, mere tinsel, sham, frippery. The action of the many against this privileged Guild has been all the stronger because the true democrat is superbly self-righteous, and believes that another man’s privilege is a personal injustice to him.

First of all, the gentleman’s political prerogatives were swept away. You may trace the process, for example, in the gradual decline in importance of the House of Lords; and a general decline in the political influence of the aristocratic class in England, France, and America has proceeded pari passu. Bagehot describes certain aspects of the operation of a democratic constitution in this regard, and adds: —

‘We have no room to notice the specific evils which would accrue from the adoption of an unmixedly democratic constitution. One, however, which has not been quite appreciated, follows naturally from the remarks we have made: there is a risk of vulgarizing the whole tone, method, and conduct of public business. We see how completely this has been done in America. . . . Nor must we imagine that this vulgarity of tone is a mere external expression, not affecting the substance of what is thought or interfering with the policy of the nation: no defect really eats away so soon the political ability of a nation. A vulgar tone of discussion disgusts cultivated minds with the subject of politics; they will not apply themselves to master a topic which, besides its natural difficulties, is encumbered with disgusting phrases, low arguments, and the undisguised language of coarse selfishness. . . . The inevitable consequence of vulgarizing our Parliament would be the deterioration of public opinion, not only in its more refined elements but in all the tangible benefits we derive from the application to politics of thoroughly cultivated minds.’

Bagehot dreads vulgarity, but he does injustice to democracy if he imagines that democracy has any rude fears; for democracy is as bold as a lion in confronting vulgarity, absolutely without fear, for indeed it sees in vulgarity only the friendly and familiar. But he is quite right to expect the masses, the valgus, to value their own standards and to act upon their own standards. Cicero says: ‘Non est consilium in vulgo, non ratio, non discrimen, non diligentia.‘ He thought that the people had not reason, or judgment, or persistency; that they voted from favor, yielding to emotional appeals and demagogic solicitations — in short, that the vulgus was vulgar. That was two thousand years ago, but human nature remains very much as it was.

However, I am not concerned here as much with democracy’s pushing the gentleman away from his ancient place in the forefront of politics as with democracy’s rejection of a gentleman’s standards in other matters.

Business

Another most potent solvent of the old order is business. How remote the economic structure of the eighteenth century looks! Quiet as cows in a Constable landscape. Business is the child of machinery, the grandchild of science; as one might say, Gargantua, son of Grandgousier, and so on. Science made the tools, and tools made business. In America, more than elsewhere, there was elbow room to use the tools. Prairies, mountains, rivers, seas, opened their arms, and business proved itself a jolly, thriving wooer. Business dangled on high a protean prize, and each man saw in it what he longed for most. The gambler heard the rattle of the dice, and the clatter of Fortune’s wheel. The romantic saw rosy gleams flushing the clouds, saw high emprise like a great ice mountain, scalable, if at all, by the skin of his teeth, and listened to the sweet croonings of danger. The avaricious man beheld bags of gold high piled in safe-deposit vaults; the glutton smelt the fumes of Haroun-al-Raschid’s kitchens; the lecher caught sight of feminine forms fresh from the salt sea foam; the socially-minded fingered the jingling keys that unlock aristocratic doors and bedizened clubrooms; those born in hardship lay on imaginary beds of luxury; and the ambitious man held his shoulders back and his head erect to carry more easily the heavy burden of power.

Up to the Great War, business uncurtained its window fronts so that every passer-by, in rags or top hat, might see the Genii of the Ring and of the Lamp ready to work for such as nature had endowed with the right mental formula. Over the whole gamut of life, from lust of bread to lust of power, business shimmered and shone as the giver of all good gifts. The man of reason delighted in the nice adjustments and prophetic vision necessary to success; the artistic man was enamored of the harmony in the processes and of the beauty of happy combinations of forces.

Inevitably business captured the imaginations of the young; and all the youth of America was on fire for material success. Those interested in the arts went to Europe, those that cared for literature withdrew from the heady current of national life. And the Guild of Gentlemen became like a onceglorious fire upon a hearth, which had licked and enveloped and devoured great logs of oak, of maple, of hickory, and now, for lack of fuel, dwindled and faded, to linger on as a faint glow among ashes.

The anti-Guild-of-Gentlemen influence of business in America was aggravated by a special circumstance, called by historians the Frontier. Along the western boundary line of that accumulation of usages and customs commonly called our civilization, bands of pioneers cleared forests, massacred Indians, ploughed fields, pastured cattle, in all the freedom of people ignorant of law and indisposed to self-restraint; conscious of an heroic element in their lives, they ignored other human values, and practised themselves, and handed on to the crowds following at their heels, a contempt of law, of covenants, of manners and other usages, that people enervated by tradition had been wont to observe. This heritage from the Frontier inoculated business with its spirit of enterprise, independence, heroic endeavor, and indifference to the usages and customs talked about in books on ethics. And there followed what persons out of sympathy with this economic development call the piracy of big business.

Let me quote Lowes Dickinson’s description of the American man of business, as he saw him: ‘Describe the average Western man and you describe the American; from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and always the same — masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, and at once goodnatured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if you do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity, intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, contemptuous of ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognizing nothing but the actual. . . . The impression America makes upon me is that the windows are blocked up.’

I mention these phenomena, without praise or blame, merely to explain how impossible it became for the Guild of Gentlemen, with its love of manners, of style, of taste, of privacy, of decency, of the humanities, to continue to be a social force under such circumstances.

Specialization

Another, but lesser, enemy of the Guild of Gentlemen is our modern device of specialization. This is a hybrid product of increased population and science; there are a great many more things to be done than there were a hundred years ago, and a great many more people to do them. Actual existing human wants are multitudinous, and potential wants, to be discovered as science shall more and more discover the means of satisfying them, will come to birth, turn into greedy appetites, and be more numerous still. The number of occupations keeps pace with the growth of wants, and each occupation demands labor of special kind, laborers of special aptitudes, and consequently workingmen are more and more divided and subdivided into groups, each group more and more concentrated upon its own task, and more and more ignorant of other occupations, even where such other occupations are necessary in the construction of a whole upon which all are at work.

The sum of knowledge is enormous, and putting it piece by piece to the satisfaction of human wants more and more obliges each man to limit himself to the bit of knowledge necessary for his task. This is inevitable, and, if blameworthy, no individual is to be blamed; if praiseworthy, no individual is to be praised. And in like manner as these material occupations have been separated and each put into confinement, so it has been, in a measure, with the notes, or such of them as survive, that used to mark a gentleman; you will find one set of men employed in naval and military service, apart by themselves; another set engaged in political life off by themselves; men of fashion by themselves, men who value privacy by themselves, lovers of the humanities by themselves. The centrifugal forces of society, while leveling and equalizing, have completely broken up the old fraternity in which were united men of many interests, all of whom shared the qualities common to gentlemen, although each one, according to his tastes or the circumstances of his life, cultivated one occupation more than any other.

Specialization has done away with dilettanti. But dilettanti are not held in good repute; no more were earthworms before Charles Darwin revealed their uses. The dilettanti take in ideas crudely, turn them over in their minds, peel off obscurities, smooth rugosities, and pass the ideas on in a form more readily understandable to other dilettanti, who continue the process of peeling and smoothing, and finally hand on to the mass of the less educated, not the original ideas, but ideas, smeared with the commonplace and deformed by ready intelligibility, which nevertheless possess a quality that the original ideas did not have — the quality of awakening general curiosity. And some qualities, which I have specified as notes of the gentleman, — style, taste, and good manners, — the dilettante treats with great seriousness. In these matters, if not a profound critic, he is a stimulating virtuoso, if only by putting forth wrong explanations of theories concerning works of art, or national policies, or new biological hypotheses, and rousing the many to thinking at all about such things.

The dilettante, like an accomplished host, kept the Guild of Gentlemen together; he brought the whole company into mutual relations, into common sympathies and a common understanding; he reformulated their ideals and renovated their traditions. He maintained this consciousness of unity among them by a gay, sprightly insistence upon the transitoriness of things, and upon the essential value of transitoriness to the human soul; by doubts as to the knowability of the future, and a merry aloofness from every current philosophy; by preaching and teaching the value of sport, of the heroic, and of the useless; and by his debonair refusal to agree that the essence of existence is the grave matter that sad-eyed men declare it to be.

Specialization has, as we say, put the dilettante out of business; it loosed the cord that held the Guild of Gentlemen together, and so helped render it defenseless before the assaults of triumphant democracy.

Lesser Disapprobations

The old-fashioned notes that distinguished members of the Guild of Gentlemen — manners, style, modesty, taste, liking for privacy, making much of the humanities — are not, I repeat, in the good graces of democracy. Science opened the way, for science does not care for any of these qualities, any more than she cares for religion, or beauty, or the welfare of mankind, or human happiness; those things are not her affair. She has but one interest, the increase of knowledge. But, despite the irrelevancy of what science thinks of these matters, her prestige is so immense that her indifference to them is always an argument ready to hand for the lovers of equality, and a justification for turning up their noses at them as matters of no moment. Democracy is, perhaps, rather indifferent than hostile to the traits in question, for, like science, democracy has other interests, other duties, as she would express it; she must busy herself with the elementary wants of the masses, with housing, with feeding, with providing work, with shortening hours of labor and increasing pay, and providing amusement. She regards manners as Harry Hotspur did the fop. To democracy, manners are a pouncet box; she would merely ridicule them if all were well with the masses, but when she sees hunger, disease, want, misery, vice, despair, she becomes savage and unreasonable; she denounces the care of manners as so much time and attention stolen from pity and help. And, more than this, democracy is the expression of the wishes, the appetites, the tastes of the many, and naturally she is indifferent to the wishes, the appetites and tastes, of the few; she prefers her own ways, as an Englishman prefers his ways to a Frenchman’s. It is hard to strike a balance between the wants of the many and the tastes of the few; the shibboleth of the greatest good to the greatest number, preached by the utilitarians, is satisfactory to the greatest number but not to the few. Quality against quantity is a matter on which people differ. The aristocrat holds for quality, the democrat for quantity, and as, under a democracy, the many are the judges, the advocates of quantity have it. This brings us to another form of the question, Is civilization worth while? The Guild of Gentlemen maintained that manners added a value to life; that they made human intercourse pleasanter; that, like other arts, they enriched human experience — the birth, growth, and development of the arts are proofs of their value; that the persistence of the minority in prizing them, in spite of the indifference or antagonism of the majority, shows that they really are essential to the human soul.

There are, of course, individuals who, without property, training, or privilege, have good manners. Emerson has much to say about nature’s gentlemen. Such cases are exceptional. Manners, like other customs, are taught; fine manners are an art; they consist in a number of conventions — how to stand, how to sit; how to address the old, the middle-aged, the young; how to handle knife and fork; how to begin a conversation with a shy young lady; how to enter a drawingroom; how to dress; how, before looking, to hand the dictionary to the other person when there is a disagreement concerning the spelling of a word. Civility, in the eyes of those who have never experienced it, is a matter of indifference, like a watch to a Hottentot, but, once become familiar, it is like salt — without it human intercourse loses a great part of the flavor. The democrat says, ’I live according to Nature, who made men free, equal, and independent.’ But how can we be sure that we should trust Nature in this matter? La Rochefoucauld says: ‘La plupart des jeunes gens croient être naturels lorsqu’ils ne sont que mal polis et grossiers’ — most young men think that they are behaving naturally when they are really uncivil and rude.

Style is but a specialization of manners in various fields, and is displeasing to democracy for the same reasons; it appears foppish, an assumption of superiority, a diversion of attention from the primary human interests to the minutiæ of preciosity. Democracy believes that equality does or should exist among all men, and that therefore style should be alike for all — natural motions of the body, putting one’s feet on the mantelpiece, unselected words proceeding from untrained throats, the vocabulary of the American reporter, the conversation of the smoking car, the civility of a taxi driver. Nothing troubles the democratic conscience so much as the exceptional, and style implies rampant individualism.

It is the same with taste. The classical theory was that taste, whether in matters of art or in ethical questions, is the trained judgment of a man of peculiar sensitiveness and education, or rather the collective judgment of men of peculiar sensitiveness and education. Aristotle made a clear distinction between the cultivated audience and the uncultivated audience: one derived pleasure from one sort of performance, the other from another. The distinction was one of taste. As the uncultivated majority is immensely larger than the cultivated minority, and the majority believes in equality, the standard of the majority becomes orthodox, and any divergence from that is discountenanced as part of the frippery of aristocratic theories.

As for modesty, the rights of the public are so dominating and domineering that any person who catches its attention is deemed public property by right of democratical eminent domain, and his life becomes as unveiled as a book by one of our physiological novelists ; he lives in a glass house, and the natural rights of other men include the right to stare at him. Privacy is the very finest brand of caviar to the general; it is Sanskrit to them; they have the right to see, to inspect, to photograph, to intrude wherever curiosity may lead them. The man who would be alone, who does not care to rub elbows with the crowd, who finds the mass of his fellow men unsympathetic and unattractive, is a monster. How the whirligig of time has brought in its revenges! How distasteful it is for us to read of Coriolanus addressing his fellow citizens: —

or to hear the Tribune Marullus say: —

whereas now our public men are always very polite to their fellow citizens and lard their speeches with praises of the industry, intelligence, good heart, sound sense, ungullibility, and other such qualities that we, the masses, happily believe we possess. If we, the masses, are always right in our collective judgments, we must be right to condemn those guilty of the social fault of loving privacy.

The humanities fare no better. Science here as elsewhere prepared the way; she displaced religion, she displaced the humanities. Scholars in vain contended that man as man has his own territory; that he is not to be dismissed as an aggregate of forces held together by some wayward whim of cohesion, as a quantity of neighborly atoms crowded into an ape-like mould; that he is sui generis; that his history is of primary importance to himself, and has never been told so vividly, so concisely, or so beautifully, as in Greek and Latin literature. Their arguments were of no avail. Chemists, physicists, biologists, have crowded professors and teachers of Greek and Latin out of college lecture halls and out of schoolrooms; and upon library shelves, public or private, in the place of Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Horace, Vergil, Cicero, and such, stand books by Einstein, Eddington, Jeans, Haldane, and other eminent men of science. Democracy approves the change; she can understand the practical advantages of applied science, of mass production, of facilities of locomotion, of the pleasures of the radio and the cinema, of cheaper food and less work, and she turns indignantly upon the humanists and asks what they have done for the masses: Will they give Greek poetry to factory hands? Will they give Latin prose to navvies, longshoremen, miners, stokers? The humanist can only urge that the man ‘who has assimilated the riches of tradition and is harmoniously developed and wise in himself’ is of necessity beneficial to his fellow men, and so back to the old argument that an exceptional cultivated class is of advantage to the community.

Humanitarianism

The cult of the genus Homo derives from altruism, and altruism is, as I believe, a far too sweeping deduction from the history of mankind. A man is a social animal, I admit; and more than that, he is the product of the society in which he is born. He receives his words, his usages, his habits of eating, dressing, talking, thinking, from the people about him. The baby is dependent upon its mother, the child upon its nurse, the boy upon his masters, the youth upon his father, and everybody gets his education from all the people with whom he comes into contact. The individual receives from society almost everything. Moralists assert that it is a man’s duty to do everything possible for society, give labor, time, thought, affection, even his life, to his fellow men, grouped into a family, a city, a tribe, a nation, or wherever found. There is no such duty to animals in general, merely to the human species. And, in truth, man does give as much as he receives; he is obliged to. The shoemaker will not part with his shoes unless he is paid, and paid the full equivalent, and so it is for whatever a man gets; he pays back in dollars, in thanks, in affection, in barter or exchange. But this is not altruism; altruism means that a man shall give something for nothing.

This social system has been so necessary for man that humanitarians assume, with charming enthusiasm, that a man should do everything for society, and that society should do everything for man. The theory passes rapidly from the realm of reason to that of emotion; it is so much pleasanter and more comfortable to float down on the current of emotion than to climb the steep hill of reason. Even philosophers become humanitarian. And the general cry is that altruism is virtue. And yet nothing is simpler than to perceive that this is an emotional fallacy. An altruist is one who does things for another person; an egotist is one who does things for himself. In Dreamland Avenue, a suburb of Utopia, live James and John, two altruists, who live according to their creed. The day begins badly, for they cannot wake each other up; but they do the best they can, for one wakes the other in turn, day by day. Once they are up, however, altruism is steadily practised. No Unitarian humanitarian could do better. John washes James and brushes James’s teeth; James washes John and brushes John’s teeth; after the bath they dry one another. At breakfast James feeds John his egg, John does the same for James. They simultaneously pour coffee into each other’s mouths. This required much practice, and it was necessary to administer the coffee by spoonfuls — One! two! three! open! swallow! — before they even attempted pouring from the cup directly down each other’s throat. Putting on, each upon the other, coat, hat, rubbers, and gloves was a gratifying ceremony. Unfortunately each had to walk on his own legs to the train. Once downtown, each did the other’s job, and so on, each feeding the other at lunch and at dinner, and putting each other to bed. James and John are altruists. Opposite them live two fellows, Andrew and Peter, and each one does the various activities I have enumerated for himself; they are egotists.

From this I infer that although man is a social animal, and is the product of society, there comes a point at which altruism should stop and a man should think for himself and act for himself. If moralists think that egotism means self-indulgence, it need not. The task of the egotist — if he cares for duty, for stoicism, for effort, and ideal ends, as some do — is not easy. He may develop his body so that it shall be adequate for all sorts of labor, exercising at hard and dangerous games, — a task rarely performed by altruists, although they often build gymnasiums for others, — eating for health and not for pleasure, early to bed and early to rise. He may develop his mind by hard thinking, laboring over mathematics, philosophy, chemical formulæ, physical hypotheses, or over Lucretius and Thucydides. He may observe all the rules of Fortitudo, Temperantia, Justitia, and Prudentia, and tread, never overstepping, the golden mean.

As you see, the Guild of Gentlemen have always inclined to the doctrines of the egotist; they have striven after the virtues of the egotist, and they have fallen into the faults of the egotist — arrogance, self-indulgence, hardness of heart. The altruists, humanitarians, are products of the herd instinct, and love the herd; and the herd, with its passion for sameness, is steadily striving to establish universal conformity, and abolish all nonconformist bodies, and so it has been one of the active factors in the suppression of the Guild of Gentlemen.

There are, of course, other influences at work, which I need not enumerate. The reader will readily discover these for himself and interpret according to his personal equation; but all will agree that, whatever those destructive influences may be, they have done their job admirably, and that democracy, apart from its other successes, — for peace, for prosperity, for international amity, — should receive our respectful congratulations.