s in irresponsible ease; the inequality which would have
been innocent and even beautiful in a happy world becomes, in a painful
world, a bitter wrong, or at best a criminal beauty.

[Sidenote: A hint to optimists.]

It would be a happy relief to the aristocrat's conscience, when he
possesses one, could he learn from some yet bolder Descartes that common
people were nothing but _betes-machines_, and that only a groundless
prejudice had hitherto led us to suppose that life could exist where
evidently nothing good could be attained by living. If all unfortunate
people could be proved to be unconscious automata, what a brilliant
justification that would be for the ways of both God and man! Philosophy
would not lack arguments to support such an agreeable conclusion.
Beginning with the axiom that whatever is is right, a metaphysician
might adduce the truth that consciousness is something self-existent and
indubitably real; therefore, he would contend, it must be
self-justifying and indubitably good. And he might continue by saying
that a slave's life was not its own excuse for being, nor were the
labours of a million drudges otherwise justified than by the
conveniences which they supplied their masters with. _Ergo_, those
servile operations could come to consciousness only where they attained
their end, and the world could contain nothing but perfect and universal
happiness. A divine omniscience and joy, shared by finite minds in so
far as they might attain perfection, would be the only life in
existence, and the notion that such a thing as pain, sorrow, or hatred
could exist at all would forthwith vanish like the hideous and
ridiculous illusion that it was. This argument may be recommended to
apologetic writers as no weaker than those they commonly rely on, and
infinitely more consoling.

[Sidenote: How aristocracies might do good.]

But so long as people remain on what such an invaluable optimist might
call the low level of sensuous thought, and so long as we imagine that
we exist and suffer, an aristocratic regimen can only be justified by
radiating benefit and by proving that were less given to those above
less would be attained by those beneath them. Such reversion of benefit
might take a material form, as when, by commercial guidance and military
protection, a greater net product is secured to labour, even after all
needful taxes have been levied upon it to support greatness. An
industrial and political oligarchy m