ranks and
belong in education and habits to the same class as all the others.

[Sidenote: Dangers to current civilisation.]

Under such circumstances the first virtue which a democratic society
would have to possess would be enthusiastic diligence. The motives for
work which have hitherto prevailed in the world have been want,
ambition, and love of occupation: in a social democracy, after the first
was eliminated, the last alone would remain efficacious. Love of
occupation, although it occasionally accompanies and cheers every sort
of labour, could never induce men originally to undertake arduous and
uninteresting tasks, nor to persevere in them if by chance or
waywardness such tasks had been once undertaken. Inclination can never
be the general motive for the work now imposed on the masses. Before
labour can be its own reward it must become less continuous, more
varied, more responsive to individual temperament and capacity.
Otherwise it would not cease to repress and warp human faculties.

A state composed exclusively of such workmen and peasants as make up the
bulk of modern nations would be an utterly barbarous state. Every
liberal tradition would perish in it; and the rational and historic
essence of patriotism itself would be lost. The emotion of it, no doubt,
would endure, for it is not generosity that the people lack. They
possess every impulse; it is experience that they cannot gather, for in
gathering it they would be constituting those higher organs that make up
an aristocratic society. Civilisation has hitherto consisted in
diffusion and dilution of habits arising in privileged centres. It has
not sprung from the people; it has arisen in their midst by a variation
from them, and it has afterward imposed itself on them from above. All
its founders in antiquity passed for demi-gods or were at least inspired
by an oracle or a nymph. The vital genius thus bursting forth and
speaking with authority gained a certain ascendency in the world; it
mitigated barbarism without removing it. This is one fault, among
others, which current civilisation has; it is artificial. If social
democracy could breed a new civilisation out of the people, this new
civilisation would be profounder than ours and more pervasive. But it
doubtless cannot. What we have rests on conquest and conversion, on
leadership and imitation, on mastership and service. To abolish
aristocracy, in the sense of social privilege and sanctified authority