d be a
part of that hell which the creation too truly involves.

[Sidenote: Mutilation by crowding.]

The same curse of suffering vitiates Agrippa's ingenious parable and the
joyful humility of Dante's celestial friends, and renders both equally
irrelevant to human conditions. Nature may arrange her hierarchies as
she chooses and make her creatures instrumental to one another's life.
That interrelation is no injury to any part and an added beauty in the
whole. It would have been a truly admirable arrangement to have enabled
every living being, in attaining its own end, to make the attainments of
the others' ends possible to them also. An approach to such an
equilibrium has actually been reached in some respects by the rough
sifting of miscellaneous organisms until those that were compatible
alone remained. But nature, in her haste to be fertile, wants to produce
everything at once, and her distracted industry has brought about
terrible confusion and waste and terrible injustice. She has been led to
punish her ministers for the services they render and her favourites for
the honours they receive. She has imposed suffering on her creatures
together with life; she has defeated her own objects and vitiated her
bounty by letting every good do harm and bring evil in its train to some
unsuspecting creature.

This oppression is the moral stain that attaches to aristocracy and
makes it truly unjust. Every privilege that imposes suffering involves a
wrong. Not only does aristocracy lay on the world a tax in labour and
privation that its own splendours, intellectual and worldly, may arise,
but by so doing it infects intelligence and grandeur with inhumanity and
renders corrupt and odious that pre-eminence which should have been
divine. The lower classes, in submitting to the hardship and meanness of
their lives--which, to be sure, might have been harder and meaner had no
aristocracy existed--must upbraid their fellow-men for profiting by
their ill fortune and therefore having an interest in perpetuating it.
Instead of the brutal but innocent injustice of nature, what they suffer
from is the sly injustice of men; and though the suffering be less--for
the worst of men is human--the injury is more sensible. The
inclemencies and dangers men must endure in a savage state, in scourging
them, would not have profited by that cruelty. But suffering has an
added sting when it enables others to be exempt from care and to live
like the god