quite naturally, for political services, because they are given by
politicians too absorbed to be aware of men outside the political
world. In Great Britain the process is modified rather than improved by
what one knows as court influence. And in spite of the real and
sustained efficiency of the Royal Society in distinguishing meritorious
scientific workers, the French Academy, which has long been captured by
aristocratic dilettanti, and the English Royal Academy of Arts,
demonstrate the essential defects and dangers of a body which fills its
own gaps. But there is no reason why a national system of honours and
titles should not be worked upon a quite new basis, suggested by these
various considerations. Let us, simply for tangibleness, put the thing
as a concrete plan for the reader's consideration.

There might, for example, be a lowest stage which would include--as the
English knighthood once included--almost every citizen capable of
initiative, all the university graduates, all the men qualified to
practice the responsible professions, all qualified teachers, all the
men in the Army and Navy promoted to a certain rank, all seamen
qualified to navigate a vessel, all the ministers recognized by
properly organized religious bodies, all public officials exercising
command; quasi-public organizations might nominate a certain proportion
of their staffs, and organized trade-unions with any claim to skill, a
certain proportion of their men, their "decent" men, and every artist
or writer who could submit a passable diploma work; it would be, in
fact, a mark set upon every man or woman who was qualified to do
something or who had done something, as distinguished from the man who
had done nothing in the world, the mere common unenterprising esurient
man. It might carry many little privileges in public matters--for
instance, it might qualify for certain electoral juries. And from this
class the next rank might easily be drawn in a variety of ways. _In a