Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/241

the inferior races, and among the families who composed the constitutive groups of the same race, those who could claim the most illustrious ancestry assumed power over the others. Heroes took pleasure, before they engaged in any contest, in extolling the glory of their blood. Even cities based their rights of domination upon their genealogical trees. Aristotle believed, in common with the rest of antiquity, that some men were born with the right to command, and were endowed with the necessary qualities for so doing; and that they received both that right and these qualities by hereditary transmission. Correlative with this general belief was the universal belief that there existed among nations cursed and disinherited races, who were incapable of transmitting through generation any quality or any right; and were forever condemned to legitimate and perpetual slavery. The democracy of Athens was nothing but an insolent and turbulent aristocracy, to whom an enslaved multitude were subjected. The Iliad of Homer, an encyclopedian monument of pagan wisdom, is the genealogical book of the gods and heroes, and, considered under this aspect, is only the most splendid of all the nobiliaries. This idea of solidarity was disastrous among the ancients only because it was incomplete. The various social, political, and domestic solidarities not being hierarchically subordinate among themselves, through the human solidarity which has ordained them all and placed them within limits, because it includes them all, could only produce wars, confusion, conflagrations, and catastrophes. Mankind had, under the sway of pagan solidarity, fallen into a state of universal and permanent war; and antiquity presents no other spectacle than