hat have
come to birth out of ignorance and self-love.... And in all this there
is no judgment, only an implacable comprehension, as of one outside
nature, to whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and
civilization, are equal and indifferent...."[3]

Obviously, no Englishman! No need to explain (with something akin to
apology) that his name is really not Joseph Conrad at all, but Teodor
Josef Konrad Karzeniowski, and that he is a Pole of noble lineage, with
a vague touch of the Asiatic in him. The Anglo-Saxon mind, in these
later days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole point of view.
Put into plain language, his doctrine can only fill it with wonder and
fury. That mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing, certain,
indignant; it is as incapable of skepticism, save as a passing coryza of
the spirit, as it is of wit, which is skepticism's daughter. Time was
when this was not true, as Congreve, Pope, Wycherley and even Thackeray
show, but that time was before the Reform Bill of 1832, the great
intellectual levelling, the emancipation of the _chandala_. In these our
days the Englishman is an incurable foe of distinction, and being so he
must needs take in with his mother's milk the delusions which go with
that enmity, and particularly the master delusion that all human
problems, in the last analysis, are readily soluble, and that all that
is required for their solution is to take counsel freely, to listen to
wizards, to count votes, to agree upon legislation. This is the prime
and immovable doctrine of the _mobile vulgus_ set free; it is the
loveliest of all the fruits of its defective powers of observation and
reasoning, and above all, of its defective knowledge of demonstrated
facts, especially in history. Take away this notion that there is some
mysterious infallibility in the sense of the majority, this theory that
the consensus of opinion is inspired, and the idea of equality begins to
wither; in fact, it ceases to have any intelligibility at all. But the
notion is not taken away; it is nourished; it flourishes on its own
effluvia. And out of it spring the two rules which give direction to all
popular thinking, the first being that no concept in politics or conduct
is valid (or more accurately respectable), which rises above the
comprehension of the great masses of men, or which violates any of their
inherent prejudices or superstitions, and the second being that the
articulate individual in t