floor of the deep sea, or that now swarm in any pond, there shall be no two alike, holds accurately for the myriads of men who are born and pass away.  The type is the same; there are fixed resemblances, but exact similarity never.  The struggle for existence, no matter what direction it may take, always ends in the singling out of individuals who, in some respect or other, are worthy to survive, while the weak perish and the elements of their bodies go to form new individuals.  It soon becomes plain that the crazy cry for equality is really only a weak protest against the hardships of the battle for existence.  The brutes have not attained to our complexity of brain; ideas are only rudimentary with them, and they decide the question of superiority by rude methods.  Two lions fight until one is laid low; the lioness looks calmly on until the little problem of superiority is settled, and then she goes off with the victor.  The horses on the Pampas have their set battles until one has asserted his mastery over the herd, and then the defeated ones cower away abjectly, and submit themselves meekly to their lord.  All the male animals are given to issuing challenges in a very self-assertive manner, and the object is the same in every case.  But we are far above the brutes; we have that mysterious, immaterial ally of the body, and our struggles are settled amid bewildering refinements and subtleties and restrictions.  In one quarter, power of the soul gives its possessor dominion; in another, only the force of the body is of any avail.  If we observe the struggles of savages, we see that the idea of equality never occurs to half-developed men; the chief is the strong man, and his authority can be maintained only by strength or by the influence that strength gives.  As the brute dies out of man, the conditions of life’s warfare become so complex that no one living could frame a generalization without finding himself at once faced by a million of exceptions that seem to negative his rule.  Who was the most powerful man in England in Queen Anne’s day?  Marlborough was an unmatched fighter; Bolingbroke was an imaginative and masterful statesman; there were thousands of able and strong warriors; but the one who was the most respected and feared was that tiny cripple whose life was a long disease.  Alexander Pope was as frail a creature as ever managed to support existence; he rarely had a moment free from pain; he was so crooked and aborted that a good-hearted woman like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was surprised into a sudden fit of laughter when he proposed marriage to her.  Yet how he was feared!  The only one who could match him was that raging giant who wrote “Gulliver,” and the two men wielded an essential power greater than that of the First Minister.  The terrible Atossa, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, shrank from contact with Pope, while for a long time the ablest men of the political sets approached Swift like lackeys.  One power was made manifest by the waspish verse-maker and the powerful satirist, and each was acknowledged as a sort of monarch.