ESSAY-REVIEWS 255 



will be each to do his own, and, so far as may be, leave his 

 fellow alone. As a matter of fact, the Roman Consulship 

 worked ! 



We shall never equalise ability ; the effort to do so is the 

 chimera of dreamy fanatics. But we might go a long way 

 towards equalising opportunity. If we put people into places 

 suited to their bent and capacity, and then gave them a free 

 hand and a decent subsistence, we should have accomplished 

 more perhaps than we can even guess, until we try the ex- 

 periment and see it at work. 



Since the possession of wealth is a species of power, we 

 need in our modern Plutocracies, more probably in England 

 and America than in France, to perceive the greater threat to 

 freedom of thought and activity inherent in the silent insidious 

 pressure of diffused riches than in any rewards of a wealthy 

 autocrat. The plutocracy gains this power through seats on 

 public bodies, and by its private methods of so-called philan- 

 thropy : it is an undiagnosed and increasing danger to indi- 

 vidual liberty and independence. Faguet dwells on the State- 

 aspect of the peril. Possibly, this is the end of the mischief 

 in France. But it is not the beginning nor the centre in Eng- 

 land, where we still permit wit and brilliance in our statesmen, 

 even if we try to relegate them to the Upper House, when they 

 scintillate beyond bearing in " another place." In England, 

 this threat to liberty centres in the numerous non-political 

 bodies which we encourage and the French eschew, this power 

 residing in municipalities, councils, and great commercial com- 

 binations. Faguet sets over against the enslaved salaried 

 official " a barrister, a solicitor, a doctor, a business-man, a 

 manufacturer, a writer, no one of these is State-paid." If 

 there be a class whose freedom from sordid influences is vital 

 to the State, it is the teaching profession, which he excludes 

 from his "free-list," and who tend indeed more and more 

 towards salaried officialism. Doubtless their freedom should 

 have limitations. As Juvenal, not an over-particular person, 

 observed, " Great reverence is due to the child." Further, no 

 man, teacher or otherwise, is, as Mill said, free to preach 

 violent counsels to an inflamed mob, nor, as some of us think 

 nowadays, " pacifism " to a country fighting for freedom and 

 existence. Such limitations of common sense and decency 

 being admitted, the teacher need only remember further that 



