It is power and opportunity enjoyed without being earned which help to damage the individual--both the individuals who benefit and the individuals who consent--and which tend to loosen the ultimate social bond.

A democracy, no less than a monarchy or an aristocracy, must recognize political, economic, and social discriminations, but it must also manage to withdraw its consent whenever these discriminations show any tendency to excessive endurance.
The essential wholeness of the community depends absolutely on the ceaseless creation of a political, economic, and social aristocracy and their equally incessant replacement.
Both in its organization and in its policy a democratic state has consequently to seek two different but supplementary objects.

It is the function of such a state to represent the whole community; and the whole community includes the individual as well as the mass, the many as well as the few.

The individual is merged in the mass, unless he is enabled to exercise efficiently and independently his own private and special purposes.

He must not only be permitted, he must be encouraged to earn distinction; and the best way in which he can be encouraged to earn distinction is to reward distinction both by abundant opportunity and cordial appreciation.