So much for the question of administration. We come now to a second need in the modern state if it is to get the best result from the citizens born into it, and that is the need of honours and privileges to reward and enhance services and exceptional personal qualities and so to stir and ennoble that emulation which is, under proper direction, the most useful to the constructive statesman of all human motives. In the United States titles are prohibited by the constitution, in Great Britain they go by prescription. But it is possible to imagine titles and privileges that are not hereditary, and that would be real symbols of human worth entirely in accordance with the Republican Idea. It is one of the stock charges against Republicanism that success in America is either political or financial. In England, in addition, success is also social, and there is, one must admit, a sort of recognition accorded to intellectual achievement, which some American scientific men have found reason to envy. In America, of course, just as in Great Britain, there exists that very enviable distinction, the honorary degree of a university; but in America it is tainted by the freedom with which bogus universities can be organized, and by the unchallenged assumptions of quacks. In Great Britain the honorary degree of a university, in spite of the fact that it goes almost as a matter of course to every casual Prince, is a highly desirable recognition of public services. Beyond this there are certain British distinctions that might very advantageously be paralleled in America, the Fellowship of the Royal Society, for example, and that really very fine honour, as yet untainted by the class of men who tout for baronetcies and peerages, the Privy Council.
There are certain points in this question that are too often overlooked. In the first place, honours and titles need not be hereditary; in the second, they need not be conferred by the political administration; and, in the third, they are not only—as the French Legion of Honour shows—entirely compatible with, but they are a necessary complement to the Republican Idea.