At any particular time or in any particular case, the improvement of the smaller classes may conflict with that of the larger class, but the conflict becomes permanent and irreconcilable only when it is intensified by the lack of a really binding and edifying public policy, and by the consequent stimulation of class and factional prejudices and purposes.

A policy, intelligently informed by the desire to maintain a joint process of individual and social amelioration, should be able to keep a democracy sound and whole both in sentiment and in idea.

Such a democracy would not be dedicated either to liberty or to equality in their abstract expressions, but to liberty and equality, in so far as they made for human brotherhood.

As M.Faguet says in the introduction to his "Politiques et Moralistes du Dix-Neuvieme Siecle," from which I have already quoted: "Liberte et Egalite sont donc contradictoires et exclusives l'une et l'autre; mais la Fraternite les concilierait.

La Fraternite non seulement concilierait la Liberte et l'Egalite, mais elle les ferait generatrices l'une et l'autre." The two subordinate principles, that is, one representing the individual and the other the social interest, can by their subordination to the principle of human brotherhood, be made in the long run mutually helpful.
The foregoing definition of the democratic purpose is the only one which can entitle democracy to an essential superiority to other forms of political organization.