INEQUALITY
the potential King Stork of a political or industrial society,
is more difficult than to guard against the half-wit, the
dodderer and the petty crook. Political and legal checks
to ambition, such as those contained in the American
Constitution, are effective up to a certain point, but only
up to a certain point. Legal checks and balances are merely
institutionalized mistrust; and mistrust, however elabor-
ately and ingeniously translated into terms of law, can
never be an adequate foundation for social life. If people
do not wish to play the political or industrial game accord-
ing to the prescribed rule§, no amount of surveillance will
keep tKem from taking unfair advantages whenever they
offer. * Over the mountains/ runs the old song, * and under
the graves*: avarice and the lust for power will 'find out
the way' even more surely than love. They will find out
the way for just so long as people are brought up to regard
ambition as a virtue and the accumulation of money as
men's most important business. At present, we choose to
organize our political and economic life and to educate our
children in such a way that we must inevitably suffer, as
time goes on, more and more severely and chronically
from the organized paranoia of dictatorship. But even if
reforms were carried out to-day their full effects would not
be felt until those brought up under the present dispensa-
tion had either died or sunk into impotent old age. Mean-
while, it may be asked, are there any changes in social
organization which would make it more difficult for the
ambitious men to impose their wills upon society?
An examination system would rid our business and our
politics of imbeciles and the more simple-minded types of
crook. . It would do little to keep out the individual of
consuming ambition, and nothing at all, when he had passed
his tests, to educate him into a more desirable, less greedily
Napoleonic frame of mind. Something more is needed
than examinations. Mere social machinery cannot give
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