nment of the world, and the
only law of human society which we are able to extract from history, is
that the more intelligent and thoughtful of the race shall inherit the
earth and have the best time, and that all others shall find life on the
whole dull and unprofitable. Socialism is an attempt to contravene this
law and insure a good time to everybody, independently of character and
talents; but Nature will see that she is not frustrated or brought to
naught, and I do not think educated men should ever cease to call
attention to this fact; that is, ever cease to preach hopefulness, not
to everybody, but to good people. This is no bar to benevolence to bad
people or any people; but our first duty is loyalty to the great
qualities of our kind, to the great human virtues which raise the
civilized man above the savage.

There is probably no government in the world to-day as stable as that of
the United States. The chief advantage of democratic government is, in a
country like this, the enormous force it can command on an emergency. By
"emergency" I mean the suppression of an insurrection or the conduct of
a foreign war. But it is not equally strong in the ordinary work of
administration. A good many governments, by far inferior to it in
strength, fill the offices, collect the taxes, administer justice, and
do the work of legislation with much greater efficiency. One cause of
this inefficiency is that the popular standard in such matters is low,
and that it resents dissatisfaction as an assumption of superiority.
When a man says these and those things ought not to be, his neighbors,
who find no fault with them, naturally accuse him of giving himself
airs. It seems as if he thought he knew more than they did, and was
trying to impose his plans on them. The consequence is that in a land of
pure equality, as this is, critics are always an unpopular class, and
criticism is in some sense an odious work. The only condemnation passed
on the governmental acts or systems is apt to come from the opposite
party in the form of what is called "arraignment," which generally
consists in wholesale abuse of the party in power, treating all their
acts, small or great, as due to folly or depravity, and all their public
men as either fools or knaves. Of course this makes but small impression
on the public mind. It is taken to indicate not so much a desire to
improve the public service as to get hold of the offices, and has as a
general rule b