communal passion) among the Jesuits, it has been paid for by a
notable lack of spontaneity and wisdom; such inhuman devotion to an
arbitrary end has made these societies odious. We may say, therefore,
that a zeal sufficient to destroy selfishness is, as men are now
constituted, worse than selfishness itself. In pursuing prizes for
themselves people benefit their fellows more than in pursuing such
narrow and irrational ideals as alone seem to be powerful in the world.
To ambition, to the love of wealth and honour, to love of a liberty
which meant opportunity for experiment and adventure, we owe whatever
benefits we have derived from Greece and Rome, from Italy and England.
It is doubtful whether a society which offered no personal prizes would
inspire effort; and it is still more doubtful whether that effort, if
actually stimulated by education, would be beneficent. For an
indoctrinated and collective virtue turns easily to fanaticism; it
imposes irrational sacrifices prompted by some abstract principle or
habit once, perhaps, useful; but that convention soon becomes
superstitious and ceases to represent general human excellence.

[Sidenote: Public spirit the life of democracy.]

Now it is in the spirit of social democracy to offer no prizes. Office
in it, being the reward of no great distinction, brings no great honour,
and being meanly paid it brings no great profit, at least while honestly
administered. All wealth in a true democracy would be the fruit of
personal exertion and would come too late to be nobly enjoyed or to
teach the art of liberal living. It would be either accumulated
irrationally or given away outright. And if fortunes could not be
transmitted or used to found a great family they would lose their chief
imaginative charm. The pleasures a democratic society affords are vulgar
and not even by an amiable illusion can they become an aim in life. A
life of pleasure requires an aristocratic setting to make it interesting
or really conceivable. Intellectual and artistic greatness does not need
prizes, but it sorely needs sympathy and a propitious environment.
Genius, like goodness (which can stand alone), would arise in a
democratic society as frequently as elsewhere; but it might not be so
well fed or so well assimilated. There would at least be no artificial
and simulated merit; everybody would take his ease in his inn and sprawl
unbuttoned without respect for any finer judgment or performance than
that w