ight defend itself on that ground.
Or the return might take the less positive form of opportunity, as it
does when an aristocratic society has a democratic government. Here the
people neither accept guidance nor require protection; but the existence
of a rich and irresponsible class offers them an ideal, such as it is,
in their ambitious struggles. For they too may grow rich, exercise
financial ascendancy, educate their sons like gentlemen, and launch
their daughters into fashionable society. Finally, if the only
aristocracy recognised were an aristocracy of achievement, and if public
rewards followed personal merit, the reversion to the people might take
the form of participation by them in the ideal interests of eminent men.
Holiness, genius, and knowledge can reverberate through all society. The
fruits of art and science are in themselves cheap and not to be
monopolised or consumed in enjoyment. On the contrary, their wider
diffusion stimulates their growth and makes their cultivation more
intense and successful. When an ideal interest is general the share
which falls to the private person is the more apt to be efficacious. The
saints have usually had companions, and artists and philosophers have
flourished in schools.

At the same time ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some training
and leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded by
popularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people
are able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this of
diffused ideal possessions has little application in a society
aristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the
less able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a great
mind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give such
things a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to
boast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of this
dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must
become mean. These alternatives can never be eluded until some purified
and high-bred race succeeds the promiscuous bipeds that now blacken the
planet.

[Sidenote: Man adds wrong to nature's injury.]

Aristocracy, like everything else, has no practical force save that
which mechanical causes endow it with. Its privileges are fruits of
inevitable advantages. Its oppressions are simply new forms and vehicles
for nature's primeval cruelty, while the b