quality that has neither gift nor disposition for "push," has a better
chance in Great Britain than in America. A sort of duty to help and
advance exceptional men is recognized at any rate, even if it is not
always efficiently discharged, by the privileged class in England,
while in America it is far more acutely felt, far more distinctly
impressed upon the young that they must "hustle" or perish.

It will be argued that this enumeration of American and British defects
is a mere expansion of that familiar proposition of the logic text-
books, "all men are mortal." You have here, says the objector, one of
two alternatives, either you must draw your administrators, your
legislators, your sources of honour and reward from a limited,
hereditary, and specially-trained class, who will hold power as a
right, or you must rely upon the popular choice exercised in the shop
and at the polling booth. What else can you have but inheritance or
election, or some blend of the two, blending their faults? Each system
has its disadvantages, and the disadvantages of each system may be
minimized by education; in particular by keeping the culture and code
of honour of your ruling class high in the former case and by keeping
your common schools efficient in the latter. But the essential evils of
each system are--essential evils, and one has to suffer them and
struggle against them, as one has to struggle perpetually with the
pathogenic bacteria that infest the world. The theory of monarchy is,
no doubt, inferior to the democratic theory in stimulus, but the latter
fails in qualitative effect, much more than the former. There, the
objector submits, lies the quintessence of the matter. Both systems
need watching, need criticism, the pruning knife and the stimulant, and
neither is bad enough to justify a revolutionary change to the other.
In some such conclusion as this most of the English people with whom
one can discuss this question have come to rest, and it is to this way