one another, be considerate of one
another, understand one another. But, above all things, it is a promoter
of equality. It is by the humanity of their manners that men are made
equal. "A man thinks to show himself my equal," says Goethe, "by being
_grob_,--that is to say, coarse and rude; he does not show himself my
equal, he shows himself _grob_." But a community having humane manners
is a community of equals, and in such a community great social
inequalities have really no meaning, while they are at the same time a
menace and an embarrassment to perfect ease of social intercourse. A
community with the spirit of society is eminently, therefore, a
community with the spirit of equality. A nation with a genius for
society, like the French or the Athenians, is irresistibly drawn towards
equality. From the first moment when the French people, with its
congenital sense for the power of social intercourse and manners, came
into existence, it was on the road to equality. When it had once got a
high standard of social manners abundantly established, and at the same
time the natural, material necessity for the feudal inequality of
classes and property pressed upon it no longer, the French people
introduced equality and made the French Revolution. It was not the
spirit of philanthropy which mainly impelled the French to that
Revolution, neither was it the spirit of envy, neither was it the love
of abstract ideas, though all these did something towards it; but what
did most was the spirit of society.

The well-being of the many comes out more and more distinctly, in
proportion as time goes on, as the object we must pursue. An individual
or a class, concentrating their efforts upon their own well-being
exclusively, do but beget troubles both for others and for themselves
also. No individual life can be truly prosperous, passed, as Obermann
says, in the midst of men who suffer; _passee au milieu des generations
qui souffrent_. To the noble soul, it cannot be happy; to the ignoble,
it cannot be secure. Socialistic and communistic schemes have generally,
however, a fatal defect; they are content with too low and material a
standard of well-being. That instinct of perfection, which is the
master-power in humanity, always rebels at this, and frustrates the
work. Many are to be made partakers of well-being, true; but the ideal
of well-being is not to be, on that account, lowered and coarsened. M.
de Laveleye,[463] the political economis