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 economist, who is a Belgian and a Protestant, and whose testimony, therefore, we may the more readily take about France, says that France, being the country of Europe where the soil is more divided than anywhere except in Switzerland and Norway, is at the same time the country where material well-being is most widely spread, where wealth has of late years increased most, and where population is least outrunning the limits, which, for the comfort and progress of the working classes themselves, seem necessary.  This may go for a good deal.  It supplies an answer to what Sir Erskine May[464] says about the bad effects of equality upon French prosperity.  But I will quote to you from Mr. Hamerton[465] what goes, I think, for yet more.  Mr. Hamerton is an excellent observer and reporter, and has lived for many years in France.  He says of the French peasantry that they are exceedingly ignorant.  So they are.  But he adds:  “They are at the same time full of intelligence; their manners are excellent, they have delicate perceptions, they have tact, they have a certain refinement which a brutalized peasantry could not possibly have.  If you talk to one of them at his own home, or in his field, he will enter into conversation with you quite easily, and sustain his part in a perfectly becoming way, with a pleasant combination of dignity and quiet humor.  The interval between him and a Kentish laborer is enormous.”