e supported
and sustained among you by your class of gentlemen, while they deserved
the name. But by depriving them of power you have deprived them of
responsibility, which is the salt of privilege; and they are rotting
before your eyes, crumbling away and dropping into the ruck. Whether
the general level of your civilization is rising I do not pronounce. I
do not even think the question of importance; for any rise must be
almost imperceptible. The salient fact is that the pinnacles are
disappearing; that soon there will be nothing left that seeks the
stars. Your middle classes have no doubt many virtues; they are, I
will presume, sensible, capable, industrious, and respectable. But
they have no notion of greatness, nay, they have an instinctive hatred
of it. Whatever else they may have done, they have destroyed all
nobility. In art, in literature, in drama, in the building of palaces
or villas, _nihil tetigerunt quod non faedaverunt_. Such is the result
of entrusting power to men who make their own living, instead of to a
class set apart by hereditary privilege to govern and to realize the
good life. But, you may still urge, this is only a temporary stage.
We still have a parasitic class, the class of capitalists. It is only
when we have got rid of them, that the real equality will begin, and
with it will come all other excellence. Well, I think it possible that
you might establish, I will not say absolute equality, but an equality
far greater than the world has ever seen; that you might exact from
everybody some kind of productive work, in return for the guarantee of
a comfortable livelihood. But there is no presumption that in that way
you will produce the nobility of character which I hold to be the only
thing really good. For such nobility, as all history and experience
clearly shows, if we will interrogate it honestly, is the product of a
class-consciousness. Personal initiative, personal force, a freedom
from sordid cares, a sense of hereditary obligation based on hereditary
privilege, the consciousness of being set apart for high purposes, of
being one's own master and the master of others, all that and much more
goes to the building up of the gentleman; and all that is impossible in
a socialistic state. In the eternal order of this inexorable world it
is prescribed that greatness cannot grow except in the soil of
iniquity, and that justice can produce nothing but mediocrity. That
the masses shou