changed our system from Aristocracy to Democracy without
considering that we were at the same time changing, as
regards our governing class, from Selection to Promiscuity.
Those who have taken a practical part in modern politics
best know how farcical the result is.

The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth
century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion, law and
order in all directions, and establishing in their place the unfettered
action of Humanity doing exactly what it likes, and producing order
instead of confusion thereby because it likes to do what is necessary
for the good of the race. This conception, already incipient in Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations, was certain at last to reach some great
artist, and be embodied by him in a masterpiece. It was also certain
that if that master happened to be a German, he should take delight
in describing his hero as the Freewiller of Necessity, thereby beyond
measure exasperating Englishmen with a congenital incapacity for
metaphysics.

PANACEA QUACKERY, OTHERWISE IDEALISM

Unfortunately, human enlightenment does not progress by nicer and nicer
adjustments, but by violent corrective reactions which invariably send
us clean over our saddle and would bring us to the ground on the other
side if the next reaction did not send us back again with equally
excessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism and Constitutionalism send us one way,
Protestantism and Anarchism the other; Order rescues us from confusion
and lands us in Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and is
presently found to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically
balanced application of these forces, theoretically possible, is
practically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have the same
weakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured of running after
panaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere of morals, ideals. One
generation sets up duty, renunciation, self-sacrifice as a panacea. The
next generation, especially the women, wake up at the age of forty or
thereabouts to the fact that their lives have been wasted in the worship
of this ideal, and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who
imposed it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments
in the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at the
mouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the alternative panacea
of love, their depriv