256 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



liberty differs from licence. In our public life, certainly in 

 England, probably in France, we all should realise increasingly 

 that work in itself requires protection, whatever sort of work 

 it be, for the State, for knowledge, for commerce, or what 

 not ; and that a man's claim to security and consideration is 

 not his ability to kotow to this superior, or take the fancy of 

 that colleague, but efficiency to do his work. In many de- 

 partments of life the Cult of Incompetence has brought us 

 to the verge of extreme fatuity, and nowhere nearer than by 

 the attempt to reduce the conditions of work to the amenities 

 of club life. That incompetence should be, as Pestalozzi long 

 ago declared it, and as some of us have seen it to be, the direct 

 outcome of a faulty educational system is regrettable enough : 

 but that France can be accused of raising it to a national aim, 

 fostered by a definite State policy, and that England, true to 

 type, should be drifting into rather than steering for it, is a 

 disaster of the first magnitude. If the method be identical, the 

 use differs ; France practising it deliberately, we vaguely, un- 

 consciously, therefore more dangerously. M. Faguet names it 

 ostracism. Democracy, he writes, " can systematically pre- 

 vent any man who betrays any superiority whatever, either of 

 birth, fortune, virtue, or talent, from obtaining any authority 

 or social responsibility. . . . Ostracism is . . . still feeling its 

 way. . . . This will continue till it has been reduced to a 

 science, when it will contrive to level, by one method or an- 

 other, every individual eminence, great or small, that dares 

 to vary by the merest fraction from the regulation standards. 

 This is ostracism, and ostracism, so to speak, is a physiological 

 organ of democracy. Democracy by using it mutilates the 

 nation, without it democracy would mutilate itself." 



But it is a mistake to attribute this condition wholly to 

 political causes ; our moral condition, engendered by the suc- 

 cessful pursuit of knowledge for mechanical purposes, of 

 wealth at whatever cost, of power no matter how won, must 

 answer for much. Ostracism is the logical issue of politics 

 coloured by materialistic ethics, since originality, variety, and 

 spontaneity are even more taboo under the Prussian autocracy 

 than in the French Republic or our constitutional monarchy. 



Whatever its environment, there is the deadly thing — ■ 

 ostracism of originality, the triumph of the commonplace. In 

 his wittiest chapter, M. Faguet attributes the ruin of originality 



