ld choose justice at the cost of greatness is
intelligible, nay it is inevitable; and that choice is the inner
meaning of democracy. But gentlemen should have had the insight to
see, and the courage to affirm, that the price was too great to pay.
They did not; and the penalty is that they are ceasing to exist. They
have sacrificed themselves to the attempt to establish equity. But in
that attempt I can take no interest. The society in which I believe is
an aristocratic one. I hold, with Plato and Aristotle, that the masses
ought to be treated as means, treated kindly, treated justly, so far as
the polity permits, but treated as subordinate always to a higher end.
But your feet are set on the other track. You are determined to
abolish classes; to level down in order to level up; to destroy
superiorities in order to raise the average. I do not say you will not
succeed. But if you do, you will realize comfort at the expense of
greatness, and your society will be one not of men but of ants and bees.

"For Democracy--note it well--destroys greatness in every kind, of
intellect, of perception, as well as of character. And especially it
destroys art, that reflection of life without which we cannot be said
to live. For the artist is the rarest, the most choice of men. His
senses, his perception, his intelligence have a natural and inborn
fineness and distinction. He belongs to a class, a very small, a very
exclusive one. And he needs a class to appreciate and support him. No
democracy has ever produced or understood art. The case of Athens is
wrongly adduced; for Athens was an aristocracy under the influence of
an aristocrat at the time the Parthenon was built. At all times Art
has been fostered by patrons, never by the people. How should they
foster it? Instinctively they hate it, as they hate all superiorities.
It was not Florence but the Medici and the Pope that employed
Michelangelo; not Milan but Ludovic the Moor that valued Leonardo. It
was the English nobles that patronized Reynolds and Gainsborough; the
darlings of our middle class are Herkomer and Collier. There have been
poets, it is true, who have been born of the people and loved of them;
and I do not despise poetry of that kind. But it is not the great
thing. The great thing is Sophocles and Virgil, a fine culture wedded
to a rich nature. And such a marriage is not accomplished in the
fields or the market-place. The literature loved by democr