e impossibility of
freedom for the unfit, which were once applied to barbarians brought
from Africa are now applied to citizens born in America. It is argued
even by industrialists that industrialism has produced a class submerged
below the status of emancipated mankind. They imply that the Missing
Link is no longer missing, even from England or the Northern States, and
that the factories have manufactured their own monkeys. Scientific
hypotheses about the feeble-minded and the criminal type will supply the
masters of the modern world with more and more excuses for denying the
dogma of equality in the case of white labour as well as black. And any
man who knows the world knows perfectly well that to tell the
millionaires, or their servants, that they are disappointing the
sentiments of Thomas Jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in the
eighteenth century, will be about as effective as telling them that they
are not observing the creed of St. Athanasius or keeping the rule of St.
Benedict.

The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular order cannot make
secure any one of its own noble and natural conceptions of secular
perfection. That will be found, as time goes on, the ultimate argument
for a Church independent of the world and the secular order. What has
become of all those ideal figures from the Wise Man of the Stoics to the
democratic Deist of the eighteenth century? What has become of all that
purely human hierarchy of chivalry, with its punctilious pattern of the
good knight, its ardent ambition in the young squire? The very name of
knight has come to represent the petty triumph of a profiteer, and the
very word squire the petty tyranny of a landlord. What has become of all
that golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on the high
tablelands of the culture of Hellas the very balance of repose in beauty
that is most lacking in the modern world? The very Greek language that
they loved has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, and a
mere cock-shy for cheap and half-educated utilitarians, who make it a
symbol of superstition and reaction. We have lived to see a time when
the heroic legend of the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed to
Jefferson the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in its
turn. We cannot recover the earthly estate of knighthood, to which all
the colours and complications of heraldry seemed as fresh and natural as
flowers. We cannot re-enact the intellectua