nd honors in the social as well
as in the legal hierarchy, equally with the ministers of that cult which
was once the only one dominant or allowed

Similarly, in the civilian status, no inferiority or discredit must
legally attach to any condition whatever, either to plebeian, villager,
peasant or poor man as such, as formerly under the monarchy; nor to
noble, bourgeois, citizen, notable or rich man, as recently under the
Republic. Each of these two classes is relieved of its degradation; no
class is burdened by taxation or by the conscription beyond its due; all
persons and all property find in the government, in the administration,
in the tribunals, in the gendarme, the same reliable protection.--So
much for equity and the true spirit of equality.--Let us now turn
around and consider envy and the bad spirit of equality. The plebiscite,
undoubtedly, as well as the election of deputies to the Corps Legislatif
are simply comedies; but, in these comedies, one role is as good as
another and the duke of the old or new pattern, a mere figurant
among hundreds and thousands of others, votes only once like the
corner-grocer. Undoubtedly, the private individual of the commune
or department, in institutions of charity, worship or education, is
deprived of any independence, of any initiation, of any control, as the
State has confiscated for itself all collective action; but the classes
deprived of this are especially the upper classes, alone sufficiently
enlightened and wealthy to take the lead, form projects and provide for
expenditure: in this usurpation, the State has encroached upon and eaten
deeper into the large body of superior existences scattered about than
into the limited circle where humbler lives clamber and crawl along;
nearly the entire loss, all perceptible privation, is for the
large landed proprietor and not for his hired hands, for the large
manufacturer or city merchant and not for their workmen or clerks,[3307]
while the clerk, the workman, the journeyman, the handicraftsman, who
grumble at being the groundlings, find themselves less badly off since
their masters or patrons, fallen from a higher point, are where they are
and they can elbow them.

Now that men are born on the ground, all on the same level, and are
confined within universal and uniform limits, social life no longer
appears to them other than a competition, a rivalry instituted and
proclaimed by the State, and of which it is the umpire; for, thr