the most towering and insane description in
the industrial and economic field. It may be devoured by modern
capitalism, perhaps the worst inequality that ever existed among men. Of
all that we shall speak later. But citizenship is still the American
ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that ideal; but there
is no ideal opposed to that ideal. American plutocracy has never got
itself respected like English aristocracy. Citizenship is the American
ideal; and it has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an
ideal that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect in an
Englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. In this vision of
moulding many peoples into the visible image of the citizen, he may see
a spiritual adventure which he can admire from the outside, at least as
much as he admires the valour of the Moslems and much more than he
admires the virtues of the Middle Ages. He need not set himself to
develop equality, but he need not set himself to misunderstand it. He
may at least understand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may
possibly find some assistance in this task by reading what they said. He
may realise that equality is not some crude fairy tale about all men
being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe
but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by
which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity
as intangible as death. He may at least be a philosopher and see that
equality is an idea; and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics
who, having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad champagne in
tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other twenty times over, with
unwearied iteration, that equality is an illusion.

In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme
disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of
changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and
distortions. We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find
him forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay.
It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men;
it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is when
men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborate
experiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death and
daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many. Nor