THE GREAT LEVELLER

"Democracy," someone has said, "is a sublime fallacy." However that may be, this sublimity, in various aspects at least, is gradually suffusing the globe, until, in the not too far distant future, one may perhaps hope to see the whole world bathed in the refulgent, mellow glow of golden unanimity.

Already more than the first step has been taken; the great have been made a little less inspiring, and humanity at large has, in some instances at least, been able to beam with the tingling glow of self-esteem and congratulate itself that after all Plato and Aristotle, Napoleon and Bismarck are governed by the same laws, the same loves and hates as it is.

No one has done more to show that the pedestals of the great are sandstone rather than granite, no one has been more active in lowering the portraits of emperors and potentates so that the public may first gape and then conclude that man is created equal after all, than Dr. Emil Ludwig. Napoleon, Bismarck, William H. Lenin, Washington, Wilson and so forth have all been exhibited on the point of Dr. Ludwig's free-flowing pen, and the world has admired, marveled, and pondered a few historical inaccuracies.

Yet it seems, from what Dr. Ludwig himself feels, that in the near future, provided his production remains up to the mark, he will be hard put to it to find a subject for biographical portrait painting. For with the spread of democracy, says Dr. Ludwig, there will no longer be any first class geniuses. Genius will be, so to speak, a community chest from which the expenses of progress will be paid, taking the burden off the individual, and spreading it about upon the shoulders of humanity at large.

It is scarcely for the present generation to judge of the advantages which this community singing will have over the good old tradition of individual stars, but at least it will be safe to say that the job of the biographer will have added difficulties.