Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/131

Rh of human beings assumes the airs of ancient Egyptian or Indian caste, in the midst of our Caucasian humanity. It lays claim to titles which once signified certain offices, but today have no sense whatever. It paints, engraves and carves upon its carriages, residences and seals, unreasonable and absurd pictures, representing battle-shields, such as have not been used for several centuries, whose obstinate perpetuation affects us like the behavior of a man who should insist upon carrying a flint and steel around with him to strike a light, or one who should tattoo his face after the manner of the ancient Celts. Why should we not laugh when somebody calls himself a duke, which signifies a leader, a commander of the army, when he is some little dude, who has never led anything but a German, or when another boasts of his noble birth, and considers himself an important personage in the nation, when at the same time he is a humpback, with scrofulous tendencies perhaps, and intellectually below the level of any one of his own servants? Our civilization contains hardly any more absurd relic of ancient days than an aristocracy whose only claim to distinction is in empty titles and coats of arms.

I am far from asserting that equality of positions would be a more reasonable formation of society. Equality is a chimera of book-worms and visionaries who have never studied nature and humanity with their own eyes. The French Revolution thought it had condensed the thoughts of encyclopedists when it announced its motto to be: "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité". Liberty? Correct. If this word has any meaning at all, it can only be that the obstacles have been removed which had hindered or entirely prevented the free play of the natural powers of the individual and of society, obstacles usually in the form of laws which owed their existence to the