The first requisite for solving this problem is that those who are designed by nature, so to speak, to form an aristocracy should come to an understanding of their own belief. There is a question to be faced boldly: What is the true aim of society? Does justice consist primarily in leveling the distribution of powers and benefits, or in proportioning them to the scale of character and intelligence? Is the main purpose of the machinery of government to raise the material welfare of the masses, or to create advantages for the upward striving of the exceptional? Is the state of humanity to be estimated by numbers, or is it a true saying of the old stoic poet: humanum paucis vivit genus? Shall our interest in mankind begin at the bottom and progress upward, or begin at the top and progress downward? To those who feel that the time has come for a reversion from certain present tendencies, the answer to this question cannot be doubtful. Before anything else is done we must purge our minds of the current cant of humanitarianism. This does not mean that we are to deny the individual appeals of pity, and introduce a wolfish egotism into human relations. On the contrary it is just the preaching of false humanitarian doctrines that practically results in weakening the response to rightful obligations and "turning men's duties into doubts," and thus throws the prizes of life to the hard grasping materialist and the coarse talker. In the end the happiness of the people also, in the wider sense, depends on the common recognition of the law of just subordination. But, whatever the ultimate effect of this sort may be, the need now is to counterbalance the excess of emotional humanitarianism, with an injection of the truth—even the contemptuous truth. Let us, in the name of a long-suffering God, put some bounds to the flood of talk about the wages of the bricklayer and the trainman, and talk a little more about the income of the artist and teacher and public censor who have taste and strength of character to remain in opposition to the tide. Let us have less cant about the great educative value of the theatre for the people and less humbug about the virtues of the nauseous problem play, and more consideration of what is clean and nourishing food for the larger minds. Let us forget for a while our absorbing desire to fit the schools to train boys for the shop and the counting-room, and concern ourselves more effectively with the dwindling of those disciplinary studies which lift men out of the crowd. Let us, in fine, not number ourselves among the traitors to their class who invidiæ metu non audeant dicere.
One hears a vast deal these days about class consciousness, and it is undoubtedly a potent social instrument. Why should there not be an outspoken class consciousness among those who are in the advance of civilization as well as among those who are in the rear? Such a compact of mutual sympathy and encouragement would draw the man of enlightenment out of his sterile seclusion, and make him efficient; it would strengthen the sense of obligation among those who hesitate to take sides, and would turn many despondent votaries of fatalism and many amateur dabblers in reform to a realization of the deeper needs of the day. Nor is this an appeal to idle sentiment. Much is said about the power of the masses and the irresistible spread of revolutionary ideas from the lower ranks upward. The facts of history point in quite the other direction. It was not the plebs who destroyed the Roman republic, but the corrupt factions of the Senate, and the treachery of such patricians as Catiline and Julius Cæsar. In like manner the French Revolution would never have had a beginning but for the teaching of the philosophers and the prevalence of equalitarian fallacies among the privileged classes themselves. The Vicomtesse de Noailles spoke from knowledge when she said: "La philosophie n'avait pas d'apôtres plus bienveillants que les grands seigneurs. L'horreur des abus, le mépris des distinctions héréditaires, tous ces sentiments dont les classes inférieures se sont emparées dans leur intérêt, ont dû leur premier éclat à l'enthousiasme des grands." And so to-day the real strength of socialistic doctrines is not in the discontent of the workingmen, but in the faint-hearted submission of those who by the natural division of society belong to the class that has everything to lose by revolution, and in the sentimental adherence of dilettante reformers. The real danger is after all not so much from the self-exposed demagogues as from the ignorant tamperers with explosive material. It is not so much from the loathsome machinations of the yellow press, dangerous as they are, as from the journals that are supposed to stand for higher things, yet in their interest in some particular reform, support whole-heartedly candidates who flirt with schemes subversive of property and constitutional checks; in their zeal for the brotherhood of man, deal loosely with facts; and in their clamor for some specious extension of the franchise, neglect the finer claims of justice. These men and these journals, betrayers of the trust, are the real menace. Without their aid and abetment there may be rumblings of discontent, wholesome enough as warnings against a selfish stagnation, but there can be no concerted drive of society towards radical revolution. For radical forces are by their nature incapable of any persistent harmony of action, and have only the semblance of cohesion from a constraining fear or hatred. The dynamic source of revolution must be in the perversion of those at the top, and anarchy comes with their defalcation. Against such perils when they show themselves, the proper safeguard is the arousing of a counter class consciousness.
It is a sound theorem of President Lowell's that popular government "may be said to consist of the control of political affairs by public opinion." Now there is to-day a vast organization for manipulating public opinion in favor of the workingman, and for deluding it in the interest of those who grow fat by pandering in the name of emancipation to the baser emotions of mankind; but of organization among those who suffer from the vulgarizing trend of democracy there is little or none. As a consequence we see the conditions of life growing year by year harder for those whose labor is not concerned immediately with the direction of material forces or with the supply of sensational pleasure; they are ground, so to speak, between the upper and the nether millstone. Perhaps organization is not the word to describe accurately what is desired among those who are fast becoming the silent members of society, for it implies a sharper discrimination into grades of taste and character than exists in nature; but there is nothing chimerical in looking for a certain conscious solidarity at the core of the aristocratical class (using "aristocratical" always in the Platonic sense), with a looser cohesion at the edges. Let that class become frankly convinced that the true aim of a State is, as in the magnificent theory of Aristotle, to make possible the high friendship of those who have raised themselves to a vision of the Supreme Good, let them adopt means to confirm one another in that faith, and their influence will spread outward through society, and leaven the whole range of public opinion.
The instrument by which this control of public opinion is effected is primarily the imagination; and here we meet with a real difficulty. It was the advantage of such a union of aristocracy and inherited oligarchy as Burke advocated that it gave something visible and definite for the imagination to work upon, whereas the democratic aristocracy of character must always be comparatively vague. But we are not left wholly without the means of giving to the imagination a certain sureness of range, while remaining within the forms of popular government. The opportunity is in the hands of our higher institutions of learning, and it is towards recalling these to their duty that the first efforts of reform should be directed. It is not my intention here to enter into the precise nature of this reform, for the subject is so large as to demand a separate essay. In brief, the need is to restore to their predominance in the curriculum those studies that train the imagination, not, be it said, the imagination in its purely æsthetic function, though that aspect of it also has been sadly neglected, but the imagination in its power of grasping in a single firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history, and of distinguishing what is essential therein from what is ephemeral. The enormous preponderance of studies that deal with the immediate questions of economics and government, inevitably results in isolating the student from the great inheritance of the past; the frequent habit of dragging him through the slums of sociology, instead of making him at home in the society of the noble dead, debauches his mind with a flabby, or inflames it with a fanatic, humanitarianism. He comes out of college, if he has learnt anything, a nouveau intellectuel, bearing the same relation to the man of genuine education as the nouveau riche to the man of inherited manners; he is narrow and unbalanced, a prey to the prevailing passion of the hour, with no feeling for the majestic claims of that within us which is unchanged from the beginning. In place of this excessive contemporaneity we shall give a larger share of time and honor to the hoarded lessons of antiquity. There is truth in the Hobbian maxim that "imagination and memory are but one thing"; by their union in education alone shall a man acquire the uninvidious equivalent in character of those broadening influences which came to the oligarch through prescription—he is moulded indeed into the true aristocrat. And with the assertion of what may be called an inner prescription he will find among those over whom he is set as leader and guide a measure of respect which springs from something in the human breast more stable and honorable and more conformable to reason than the mere stolidity of an unreflecting prejudice. For, when everything is said, there could be no civilized society were it not that deep in our hearts, beneath all the turbulences of greed and vanity, abides the instinct of obedience to what is noble and of good repute. It awaits only the clear call from above.
THE RIGHT TO BE AMUSED
Recent ideas of social justice have been marked by a vast extension of the category of human rights. While these new rights are most various they may all be covered by the general principle that wages may be of right more than what the wage taker earns for his employer, and that in all exchanges of any sort between the poor and the rich the poor has the right to take more than he gives. To follow the applications of this new doctrine of rights would be instructive. We should find that an employer is financially responsible for accidents occurring through an employee's recklessness. If my gardener gets drunk and drowns himself in the cistern, I must pay roundly to his estate. Nor have I the satisfaction, if it be such, of regarding this contribution as a compulsory beneficence. It is my gardener's right. The odd part is that if I, being a professor, get drunk and drown myself in the campus fountain, the corporation is in no way bound to assuage my widow's financial need. If the corporation should, by way of embalming my memory, grant her a pension, it would be a case not of her rights but of their charity. This perfectly possible instance reveals an odd reversal of all earlier doctrines of rights. It used to be supposed that rights increased with capacity. Now the more incapable a person may be, the more completely the state invests him with rights. Ability and power must be carefully hemmed in with duties. Weakness on the contrary is freed from duties and must be privileged.
Into what moral gulf we are thus cheerfully staggering it would be a high public service to inquire. But my theme is not so ambitious. I wish merely to suggest in a particular instance the somewhat woeful reaction of this new doctrine of rights upon a certain class of the weak—to wit, ill balanced and discontented women. I have witnessed many cases of personal unhappiness among women, some of domestic shipwreck, owing to a wife's moral confusion, some of women hounded by unreasonable discontent into public careers for which they have no capacity, and perhaps the most pitiful cases of all, women pursued by an aimless restiveness which finds no stated expression, but colors atrociously their every act. Peace and clear thinking wither as those women pass. They are mostly victims of a false theory that a woman has the innate right to be amused, and that for such amusement she need not pay. It will be seen that I have described what foreign neurologists call la maladie Américaine. And as a matter of fact the fallacy that a right to be amused exists, is more prevalent in America than elsewhere. Let us admit that Mrs. Wharton's Undine Spragg is overdrawn, she still retains high symbolic value. As Americans we may doubt her in parts, but we cannot disown her as a whole. She is the bright archangel of the dogma that while a woman must be amused, she need not pay.
At the outset we must discriminate sharply the right to be amused, from the ordinary pursuit of pleasure. The most reckless or voluptuous programme of life assumes in contrast a certain dignity and morality, from the fact that the pleasure seeker is prepared to take all risks and pay all prices. That is the man's code the world over, and in most countries it has imposed itself upon the community generally. It is a poor code enough as compared with self control and social service, but at least it has glimmerings of generosity and justice. The strong at all times have managed to live pretty satisfactorily by it. The weak have not suffered unduly under the rule of he who breaks must pay. Quite apart from the Epicurean programme, all sensible people work on a theory of reciprocity in service and in pleasure. I can't expect nice people to seek me unless I now and then seek them. If I am habitually silent or merely garrulous, I have no claim upon the good talker; he will properly flee my approach. So for the person who is not amusing there can be no right to be amused, and if he succeeds nevertheless in extorting amusement from the world, it is at somebody else's expense, and at the cost of his own soul.