In reality the existing tendency toward social uniformity is far from solving the problem of social organization; it merely provides the material, the unorganized mass, which has to be informed by living spirits and ordered to some higher end. Without this, social uniformity can mean no more than a reversion to barbarism, and democracy nothing more than the rule of the herd.

Obviously there is no room in such a society for liberty, as it has been understood in the past. For liberty is not the right of the mass to power, but the right of the individual and the group to achieve the highest possible degree of self-development. Hence liberty has always been an aristocratic ideal and it is no accident that England, the home of parliamentary institutions and political liberties, should also have been the European state which possessed the strongest and most unbroken tradition of aristocratic government.

It is a survival of the vestiges of this aristocratic tradition which, in spite of the progress of democracy and social uniformity, renders English society so recalcitrant to totalitarian ideas. A pure democracy which sets equality above every other social value can adapt itself to a totalitarian organisation as easily as a pure autocracy; but a totalitarian aristocracy has never existed, and though the English state may well lose what remains of its aristocratic institutions, it cannot divest itself of the values and ideas that were developed by this political tradition without a loss of national character, in other words, without losing its own soul.