classes.  Even if enjoyed with some equality in the beginning, they do not continue to be equally enjoyed, but make towards discriminations advantageous to a minority.  The state, as representing the common interest, is obliged to admit the inevitability of such classifications and divisions, and has itself no alternative but to exercise a decisive preference on behalf of one side or the other.  A well-governed state will use its power to promote edifying and desirable discriminations.  But if discriminations tend to divide the community, and the state itself cannot do more than select among the various possible cases of discrimination those which it has some reason to prefer, how is the solidarity of the community to be preserved?  And above all, how is a democratic community, which necessarily includes everybody in its benefits and responsibilities, to be kept well united?  Such a community must retain an ultimate bond of union which counteracts the divergent effect of the discriminations, yet which at the same time is not fundamentally hostile to individual liberties.

The clew to the best available solution of the problem is supplied by a consideration of the precise manner, in which the advantages derived from the efficient exercise of liberties become inimical to a wholesome social condition.  The hostility depends, not upon the existence of such advantageous discriminations for a time, but upon their persistence for too long a time.  When, either from natural or artificial causes, they are properly selected, they contribute at the time of their selection both to individual and to social efficiency.  They have been earned, and it is both just and edifying that, in so far as they have been earned, they should be freely enjoyed.  On the other hand, they should not, so far as possible, be allowed to outlast their own utility.  They must continue to be earned.  It is power and opportunity enjoyed without being earned which help to damage the individual—­both the individuals who benefit and the individuals who consent—­and which tend to loosen the ultimate social bond.  A democracy, no less than a monarchy or an aristocracy, must recognize political, economic, and social discriminations, but it must also manage to withdraw its consent whenever these discriminations show any tendency to excessive endurance.  The essential wholeness of the community depends absolutely on the ceaseless creation of a political, economic, and social aristocracy and their equally incessant replacement.

Both in its organization and in its policy a democratic state has consequently to seek two different but supplementary objects.  It is the function of such a state to represent the whole community; and the whole community includes the individual as well as the mass, the many as well as the few.  The individual is merged in the mass, unless he is enabled to exercise efficiently and independently his own private and special purposes.  He must not only be permitted, he must be encouraged