Page:National Life and Character.djvu/291

 felt to be warranted by a sane estimate of loss and gain.

If these changes ever come to pass, we shall get a world that is mostly secular in its tone, though with a minority who hold a spiritualised faith, and the family, as it loses its influence, will cease to transmit the tradition of a consecrated household life. It remains to be seen whether the new forces that are supplanting the Churches and the family can so elevate individual character as to give it a new reserve of strength in place of what it is losing. What the State does, and does admirably in its way, tends almost entirely to make its citizens more perfect parts of the political machine. Its school-training is bound to be more or less automatic or mechanical; the service in the ranks which it enforces will subdue the will even more than it develops the faculties; and if it organises labour, it is likely to do it on conditions of democratic equality that will maintain as far as possible a dead level among employees. The most that can be said is, that if aristocratic privilege is abolished, and the influence of wealth reduced to a minimum, society will attain to that ideal of the "career open to talents" which has been realised in some critical periods—as under Cromwell and the First Napoleon—with very brilliant results. The best observers of democratic society are, however, apt to accuse it of a jealousy that seems to belong to its very essence—the jealousy lest it should end in constituting an official aristocracy with excessive incomes and powers. It accordingly guards against this by, as far as may be, equalising salaries, distributing powers, and giving promotion by seniority, or by some rude form of rotation; such as the wholesale displacements that occur in America after every triumph of an Opposition. We know by the