. There is no individual striving to rise nor fear to
fall. Consequently there can and must be entire freedom of mutual
conversation; the marquis with a revenue of half a million a year meets
as an equal his gardener who gets ten pounds a month, and the tailor
in his measuring-room offers a glass of sherry to his noble patron who
comes to him for a new coat. Each is at his ease, conscious that he
performs a use and fills a place which no one else can fill or perform,
and that nothing else matters. The population is a vast mutual-benefit
association, without envy on the one side or contempt on the other. And
social existence moves as smoothly as a well-oiled and adjusted machine.

This agreeable condition is impossible in a democracy--at all events, in
a democracy like ours, which is based upon the assumption that all men
are equal. Nevertheless, we are on the right track, and the English
are on the wrong one; for the agreeable English system obstructs the
insensible infiltration of fresh material into old forms, which is
essential to the continued health of the latter; while the democracy,
on the other hand, will gradually learn that it is just as honorable and
desirable to be a good shoemaker, for example, as a good millionaire;
that human life, in short, is a complex of countless different uses,
each one of which is as important on its own plane as any of the others.
But the intermediate period is undeniably irksome.

So my father noticed, not without a certain satisfaction, that even
beggars, in England, are not looked down upon, and that their rights,
such as they are, are recognized. In the steamboat waiting-room at Rock
Ferry, and in the boats themselves, he saw tramps and mendicants take
the best place at the fire or on the companion-way without rebuke and
without consciousness of presumption, and he saw the landlord of a
hotel, with a fortune of six hundred thousand pounds, wait at table
as deferentially as any footman in his employ. He was struck by the
contentment with which, in winter, women went barefoot in the streets,
and by the unpretentious composure with which the common herd, on
holidays, disported themselves in public, not seeking to disguise their
native vulgarity and shabbiness. At the same time, he could not help
a misgiving that the portentous inequality between rich and poor must
finally breed disaster; the secluded luxury of the rich was too strongly
contrasted with the desperate needs of the po