the average heart answered?

No. It replies: "Heritable or not, what do we care? We are out for
equality. Distinctions in culture are a kind of aristocracy."

Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself. What was the meaning of
your everlasting talk about the ladder for the rise of capacity? I
shall tell you. The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as
you permit him, namely, till you can possess yourselves of the fruits
of his labour: then he is to be thrust down, and the loudest mouth is
to rule. You are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither am I,
so we are quits.

For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to
speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human
dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in
externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham
equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to
his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the
one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every
accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But
if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in
duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind,
in will and in heart--let him begin by altering Nature!

In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of
conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an
unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or
remission of work. Work of the highest class, creative and
intellectual work--the most self-sacrificing that is known to man
because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life,
including his hours of leisure and recreation--this work demands
extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from
disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or occupations, and
contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic
point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If
mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed under the same
specific conditions, under which the highest standard of output is to
be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an
equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different.
Starting from a subsistence minimum it must for intellectual work be
graded two stages upward, one for the output,[32] and one for the
grade of