r the powerful class is not likely to cease so
long as men are men; but they take an unworthy form so long as the
ambition is simply to attain privileges unconnected with or
disproportioned to the duties involved, and which therefore generate
hatred to the social structure. If a class could be simply an organ for
the discharge of certain functions, and each man in the whole body
politic able to fit himself for that class, the injustice, and
therefore the malignant variety of discontent, would disappear. Of
course, I am speaking only of justice. I do not attempt to define the
proper ends of society, or regard justice in itself as a sufficient
guarantee for all desirable results. Such justice may exist even in a
savage tribe or a low social type. There may be a just distribution of
food among a shipwrecked crew, but the attainment of such justice would
not satisfy all their wants. The abolition of misery, the elevation of
a degraded class to a higher stage is a good thing in itself, unless it
can be shown to involve some counterbalancing evil. I only argue that
the ideal society would have this, among other attributes, and,
therefore, that to secure such equality is a legitimate object of
aspiration.

I am speaking of "Utopia". The time is indefinitely distant when a man
will choose to be a sweep or a prime minister according to his
aptitudes, and be equally able to learn his trade whether he is the son
of a prime minister or a sweep. I only try to indicate the goal to
which our efforts should be directed. But the goal thus defined implies
methods different from that of some advocates of equality. They propose
at once to assume the non-existence of a disagreeable difficulty, and
to take men as equal in a sense in which they are not, in fact, equal.
To me the problem appears to be, not the instant introduction of a new
system, but a necessarily long and very gradual process of education
directed towards the distant goal of making men equal in the desirable
sense; and that problem, I add, is in the main a moral problem. It is
idle to make institutions without making the qualities by which they
must be worked. I do not say--far from it--that we are not to propose
what may roughly be called external changes: new regulations and new
forms of association, and so forth. On the contrary, I believe, as I
have intimated, that this method corresponds to the normal order of
development. The new institution protects and stimulates the