special knowledge.

There is no department of

public affairs (if we except Indian and colonial affairs) in which the general level of knowledge is so low. There is none in which popular passions. are so violent, so ill-instructed, or so likely to produce incalculable mischief. The intensity of the ignorance of the great mass of English people about France and Germany could only be equalled by the fierce excitement and unruly and irrational state of sympathy into which they were thrown by the progress of the war. In reference, however, to foreign affairs, what is required is rather the acquisition of knowledge than either administrative or legislative activity. The organization of a diplomatic service, which might be, so to speak, the eyes of the nation as regarded foreign affairs, might often make the difference between peace and war, and might even enable us to avert invasion.

As to financial affairs, of course popular consent, given in some distinct and substantial form, is essential to taxation, and this is the historical explanation of the gradual assumption of sovereignty by the House of Commons. This consideration, no doubt, must always limit the extent to which government by a well-instructed few could be carried, and it is perhaps the most obvious and conclusive of the many obvious and conclusive reasons why no great change in the principles of the machinery of government can be expected by any reasonable man, I do not for a moment suggest that we can be governed

otherwise than we are. I fully admit that for practical purposes the best course is to get out of our tools such work as is to be got out of them. I merely wish to refer to the fact that there are two sides to the account, and to excuse myself for not sharing in the general enthusiasm on the subject of our institutions. stitutions are or have been much better. The folly, the weakness, the ignorance of men leave deep marks on all human institutions, and they are quite as legible here and now as in any other time or place.

I do not say that any other in

Equality, like liberty, appears to me to be a big name for a small thing. The enthusiasm about it in recent times seems to me to have been due principally to two circumstances: the invidious position of the French privileged classes before the Revolution, and the enormous development of wealth in the United States. The first of these was, no doubt, a case in which distinctions had been maintained long after they had ceased to have any meaning whatever or to be of any sort of use. Such cases are very common. Men have a passion for pluming themselves upon anything which distinguishes them from their neighbours, and exaggeration on one side is met by passion on the other. The case of the French privileged classes certainly was as gross a case of a distinction without a difference as has ever occurred in the world, and the French were just in the mood to become rhetor

ical about it, and to make it the subject not of rational quiet alteration, but of outbursts of pathetic and other nonsense, the effects of which will long be felt in the world. Few things in history seem to me so beggarly as the degree to which the French allowed themselves to be excited about such things.

It was

shameful to permit them to grow, and more shameful not to be able to put them down in a quiet way without fireworks and theatrical illusions.

The success of equality in America is due, I think, mainly to the circumstance that a large number of people, who were substantially equal in all the more important matters, recognized that fact and did not set up unfounded distinctions. How far they actually are equal now, and how long they will continue to be equal when the population becomes dense, is quite another question. It is also a question, which I cannot do more than glance at in two words in this place, whether the enormous development of equality in America, the rapid production of an immense multitude of commonplace, self-satisfied, and essentially slight people is an exploit which the whole world need fall down and worship.

Upon the whole, I think that what little can be truly said of equality is that as a fact human beings are not equal; that in their dealings with each other they ought to recognize real inequalities where they exist as much as substantial equality where it exists. That they are equally prone to exaggerate real distinctions, which is vanity, and to deny their exis

tence, which is envy. Each of these exaggerations is a fault, the latter being a peculiarly mean and cowardly one, the fault of the weak and discontented. The recognition of substantial equality where it exists is merely the avoidance of an error. It does not in itself affect the value of the things recognized as equals, and that recognition is usually a step towards the development of inherent inequalities. If all equally are forbidden to commit crime, and are bound to keep their contracts, the sober, the far-seeing, and the judicious win, and the flighty, the self-indulgent, and the foolish lose. Equality, therefore, if not like liberty, a word of negation, is a word of relation. It tells us nothing

definite unless we know what two or more things are affirmed to be equal and what they are in themselves, and when we are informed upon these points we get only statements about matters of fact, true or false, important or not, as it may be.

CHAPTER VI.

FRATERNITY.

I NOW come to examine the last of the three doctrines of the Democratic creed-Fraternity. That upon some terms and to some extent it is desirable that men should wish well to and should help each other is common ground to every one. At the same time I cannot but think that many persons must share the feeling of disgust with which I for one have often read and listened to expressions of general philanthropy. Such love is frequently an insulting intrusion. Lord Macaulay congratulated England on having been hated by Barère. To hate England was, he observed, the one small service which Barère could do to the country. I know hardly anything in literature so nauseous as Rousseau's expressions of love for mankind when read in the light of his confessions. Keep your love to yourself, and do not daub me or mine with it,' is the criticism which his books always suggest to me. So far from joining in Mr. Swinburne's odd address to France, 'Therefore thy sins which are many are forgiven thee because thou hast loved much,' it appears to me that the French way of