would find themselves best off under an aristocratic organization of society; but simply because the objective worth of mankind as a species can be brought to its highest stage of perfection only through an aristocracy. Thus Nietzsche has introduced into our spiritual development two ideas bearing on social philosophy that are of great breadth of application. He advocates an aristocratic organization of society, informed neither by the egoistic spirit that we find in a modern government by nobles nor by the spirit of altruism, the being a servant of the great, unthinking multitude, but one that is the necessary form or result of the realization of objective perfections, beauties, and deepenings of the human life. And he further teaches that the interests of the race do not coincide with those of society, as the men of today, living under the ægis of the social idea, have regarded as so unquestionably self-evident. The social interest, that is, the interest taken in a social group that has been developed historically, and especially in the lower classes of it, is only one of the possible forms or means to the evolution of the race, the elevation of the human type; and the latter may very well require for its attainment other means an interest in the qualities of men as things of objective worth, or in the individuals who are the bearers of this objective worth, who are the representatives of a higher mankind.

The social agitations and disturbances of the last decades have doubtless deepened and broadened the moral sense in many souls. In very many they have transformed the selfishness that arises from class feeling into a willingness to renounce, inwardly and outwardly; they have, even where they did not succeed in doing this, at least brought about a definite attitude toward these social demands, a theoretical recognition of these claims, and an uneasy conscience if they be not satisfied. But, besides all the value and importance of social ethics, overlooked or misunderstood by Nietzsche and his adherents, we must not fail to observe that the specifically spiritual deepening must suffer at the hands of this sharpened social consciousness. For, however optimistically one may regard the working class, its interests rest, on the one hand, on purely material considerations,—not only justly,

most justly, but with the claim that these material interests should become an ethical demand upon the higher classes; yet in the scale of spiritual values they always stand far down, and involve, from their very nature, an externalization of existence, in comparison with which Nietzsche's opposition represents the reaction of the purely spiritual life. On the other hand, the attempts of the laborer to obtain an education and to lift himself up to the realms of the ideal are in the highest degree worthy of recognition and of the greatest sympathy; but this sympathy, again, from its very nature, calls for an unquestionable descent on the part of the highly educated from their own level. Inasmuch as the cry for a leveling, for a reapproximation or the educational poles, is raised against that modern differentiation which drives intellectual strata ever farther apart, the tragic relation develops; that which elevates the lower groups lowers the higher. This conflict runs through the entire history of society, since that equality, which, shot through with differentiation, gives its plan to human existence, is no longer that naïve, organic equality peculiar to primitive social conditions, but an ethical demand that manifests itself as a reaction against the dismemberment of society, against the established division of labor, against the fundamental separation into groups and classes. To put it more generally the entirely distinct development of conditions and needs in the various divisions of society has as its final consequence this, that one and the same tendency and even common and universal interests, may require diametrically opposed measures.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

CONTEMPORARY FRANCE

WITH RESPECT TO AN ENGLISH WORKI*

ANDRÉ LEBON, Paris.

It is always difficult for a foreigner to comprehend thoroughly and to describe the conditions of the political life of a people to whom he is bound neither by descent nor by interest,-more difficult still when the foreigner is an Englishman, and when he has to speak of France; of the nation which certain historic differences of opinion, of several centuries' standing, and a radical difference in temperament and civilization keep as far removed as possible from his own people. Nevertheless Mr. Bodley has succeeded! From the inquiry which for more than eight years he has laboriously and impartially conducted both at Paris and in the provinces, and among all classes of the French people, a volume has resulted which, in the varied richness of its facts, in the accuracy of its information, and in the good sense and moderation of its appreciations, belongs among the best works that have been produced in the domain of contemporary political literature. No publicist who desires to study the details and secret mechanism of our institutions and their operation; no psychologist who intends to become initiated into the complexities of the French mind; no statesman who wishes to inquire into the

(1) T. E. C. Bodley, France, an Essay on the History and the Operation of French Political Institutions. Paris: Guillaumin, 1901.

* Translated by Mr. W. S. Hayes of the University of Vermont.

strength and the weakness of our political life, that part of it which is visible, as well as that which is invisible, at least at the first glance, can afford, henceforth, to neglect Mr. Bodley, when in search of the essential elements, and even the very groundwork, of his reasonings and his calculations.

Mr. Bodley is not merely exact; he is in sympathy with France, a well-wisher of the French people, and he does not endeavor to conceal his sentiments. Beneath the superficial turbulence of political parties he has perceived the solid, peaceful qualities of the race; under the revolutionary loquacity of demagogues and the defamatory excesses of the press he recognizes the profoundly conservative-if, indeed, they are not habitual-instincts of the masses of the electorate, and the mutual tolerance, closely akin to skeptical indifference, which prevails in individual relations. He is not backward in pointing out the primary failings of the French, how their conception of liberty consists chiefly in wishing to annoy those who do not think as they do; how their creed of equality is applied principally to the denial of hereditary privileges of all sorts, while it accommodates itself very readily to numerous and varied social distinctions and hierarchies; how they have not advanced toward the realization of their ideal of fraternity without an extraordinary series of excesses and of prescriptions,-ever since, indeed, the amelioration of manners suppressed the political guillotine and the disarmament of the national guard, immediately after the Communist insurrection of 1871, made popular revolts impossible. But, at the same time, Mr. Bodley knows right well how to put his countrymen on their guard, as often as the occasion arises, against their inborn tendency to Pharisaism or systematic disparagement. He does not hesitate to proclaim, for instance, that the multiplicity of officials is less burdensome in France than the "devastating scourge of lawyers" in England, that the fiscal system is less meddlesome and less vexatious at the east than at the west of the English Channel, and that, everything considered, the "most complex product of civilization on the surface of the globe," the "eldest daughter of the Church," though today a laic and anticlerical Republic, offers to

the attentive regard an example of one of the two or three best governed or, more exactly, best administered-countries in the universe.

Thus Mr. Bodley does not understand, and does not excuse, the pessimism that he has observed in the greater part of the writers and the orators in France who are interested in public affairs. He returns repeatedly to this subject, and is ever afflicted by it. "The critical spirit which caused the Revolution," he writes in his introduction, "has never ceased to be active in the nation; but under the Third Republic it took the shape of an acute and contagious pessimism." And, in another connection, after having justly remarked that this intellectual malady is blighting many other countries at the dawn of the twentieth century, he sees therein the indication that "there is some lack of equipoise in the government of the country." This "something which causes pessimism is," he adds farther on, "the combination of parliamentary government with administrative centralization," and, still farther on, he discovers another cause. It cannot, he declares, be otherwise in a country "where the indifference of the majority to political affairs is the salvation of the people."

In order to understand fully, in this particular, the slightly sibylline thought of Mr. Bodley, it is necessary to consider his work as a whole, and especially the master idea which dominates it. Like all attentive observers, he has been impressed by the multiplicity of purely political revolutions that France has had since 1789,-three Monarchies, two Empires, and three Republics, at the least,—and, by the survival, nevertheless, in strong contrast with these violent changes, of the administrative, financial, religious, and judicial institutions with which Napoleon I. endowed the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In common with the majority of the English of the present time, Mr. Bodley has conceived for the great Emperor an excessive retrospective admiration, and for the sole reason that a large part of Napoleon's work has endured; escaping not only the Restoration and the Monarchy of July, but also the return of the Republic, both