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Rh He broke from Mary presently, strove to interest Sir Walter, and succeeded.

"A benevolent autocracy is the ideal government, my friend—the ideal of all supreme thinkers—a Machiavelli, a Nietzsche, a Stendhal, a Gobineau. Liberty and equality are terms mutually destructive, they cannot exist together; for, given liberty, the strong instantly look to it that equality shall perish. And rightly so. Equality is a war cry for fools—a negation of nature, an abortion. The very ants know better. Doubtless you view with considerable distrust the growing spirit of democracy, or what is called by that name?"

"I do," admitted Sir Walter.

"Your monarch and mine are a little bitten by this tarantula. I am concerned for them. We must not pander to the mob's leaders, for they are not, and never have been, the many-headed thing itself. They, not the mob, are 'out to kill,' as you say. But that State will soon perish that thinks to prosper under the rule of the proletariat. Such a constitution would be opposed to natural law and, therefore, contain the seeds of its own dissolution. And its death would be inconceivably horrible; for the death of huge, coarse organisms is always horrible. Only distinguished creatures are beautiful in death, or know how to die like gentlemen."

"Who are on your side to-day, signor?" asked Henry Lennox.

"More than I know, I hope. Gobineau is my lighthouse in the storm. You must read him, if