study. This is
expensive, but this very expensiveness gives the children of the
well-to-do a practical monopoly of the opportunities which this
education brings. How are they to be brought to favor, and, since they
are the chief taxpayers, to _pay for_ the extension of these same
opportunities to ten times the number of children who now have them?

In the meanwhile Dr. Eliot himself seems to have become discouraged and
to have abandoned his own ideal, for only seven years after writing the
above he came to advocate the division of the whole national school
system into three classes: that for the upper class, that for the middle
class, and that for the masses of the people--and he even insisted that
this division is democratic if the elevation of the pupil from one class
to the other is made "easy."[87] Now democracy does not require that the
advance of the child of the poor be made what is termed _easy_, but that
he be given an _equal_ opportunity with the child of the rich as far as
all useful and necessary education is concerned. Democracy does not
tolerate that in education the children of the poor should be started in
at the bottom, while the children of the rich are started at the top.

Those few who do rise under such conditions only strengthen the position
of the upper classes as against that of the lower. Tolstoi was right
when he said that when an individual rises in this way he simply brings
another recruit to the rulers from the ruled, and that the fact that
this passage from one class to another does occasionally take place, and
is not absolutely forbidden by law and custom as in India, does not mean
that we have no castes.[88] Even in ancient Egypt, it was quite usual,
as in the case of Joseph, to elevate slaves to the highest positions.
This singling out and promotion of the very ablest among the lower
classes may indeed be called the basis of every lasting caste system.
All those societies that depended on a purely hereditary system have
either degenerated or were quickly destroyed. If then a ruling class
promotes from below a number sufficient only to provide for its own need
of new abilities and new blood, its power to oppress, to protect its
privileges, and to keep progress at the pace and in the direction that
suits it will only be augmented--and universal equality of opportunity
will be farther off than before. Doubtless the numbers "State Socialism"
will take up from the masses and equip for higher