ence is
not in the least necessary to explain so simple a matter; that our love
of inequality is really the vulgarity in us, and the brutality, admiring
and worshipping the splendid materiality.

Our present social organization, however, will and must endure until our
middle class is provided with some better ideal of life than it has now.
Our present organization has been an appointed stage in our growth; it
has been of good use, and has enabled us to do great things. But the use
is at an end, and the stage is over. Ask yourselves if you do not
sometimes feel in yourselves a sense, that in spite of the strenuous
efforts for good of so many excellent persons amongst us, we begin
somehow to flounder and to beat the air; that we seem to be finding
ourselves stopped on this line of advance and on that, and to be
threatened with a sort of standstill. It is that we are trying to live
on with a social organization of which the day is over. Certainly
equality will never of itself alone give us a perfect civilization. But,
with such inequality as ours, a perfect civilization is impossible.

To that conclusion, facts, and the stream itself of this discourse, do
seem, I think, to carry us irresistibly. We arrive at it because they so
choose, not because we so choose. Our tendencies are all the other way.
We are all of us politicians, and in one of two camps, the Liberal or
the Conservative. Liberals tend to accept the middle class as it is, and
to praise the nonconformists; while Conservatives tend to accept the
upper class as it is, and to praise the aristocracy. And yet here we are
at the conclusion, that whereas one of the great obstacles to our
civilization is, as I have often said, British nonconformity, another
main obstacle to our civilization is British aristocracy! And this while
we are yet forced to recognize excellent special qualities as well as
the general English energy and honesty, and a number of emergent humane
individuals, in both nonconformists and aristocracy. Clearly such a
conclusion can be none of our own seeking.

Then again, to remedy our inequality, there must be a change in the law
of bequest, as there has been in France; and the faults and
inconveniences of the present French law of bequest are obvious. It
tends to over-divide property; it is unequal in operation, and can be
eluded by people limiting their families; it makes the children, however
ill they may behave, independent of the parent. To be