of better if their popular
ministers were not experts in the art of dodging popular enthusiasms and
duping popular ignorance. The politician who once had to learn how to
flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug,
frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate; and though in
advanced modern States, where the artizan is better educated than the
King, it takes a much bigger man to be a successful demagogue than to be
a successful courtier, yet he who holds popular convictions with
prodigious energy is the man for the mob, whilst the frailer sceptic who
is cautiously feeling his way towards the next century has no chance
unless he happens by accident to have the specific artistic talent of
the mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he
catches votes, and not as a meliorist. Consequently the demagogue,
though he professes (and fails) to readjust matters in the interests of
the majority of the electors, yet stereotypes mediocrity, organizes
intolerance, disparages exhibitions of uncommon qualities, and glorifies
conspicuous exhibitions of common ones. He manages a small job well: he
muddles rhetorically through a large one. When a great political
movement takes place, it is not consciously led nor organized: the
unconscious self in mankind breaks its way through the problem as an
elephant breaks through a jungle; and the politicians make speeches
about whatever happens in the process, which, with the best intentions,
they do all in their power to prevent. Finally, when social aggregation
arrives at a point demanding international organization before the
demagogues and electorates have learnt how to manage even a country
parish properly much less internationalize Constantinople, the whole
political business goes to smash; and presently we have Ruins of
Empires, New Zealanders sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, and
so forth.

To that recurrent catastrophe we shall certainly come again unless we
can have a Democracy of Supermen; and the production of such a Democracy
is the only change that is now hopeful enough to nerve us to the effort
that Revolution demands.

VI

PRUDERY EXPLAINED

Why the bees should pamper their mothers whilst we pamper only our
operatic prima donnas is a question worth reflecting on. Our notion of
treating a mother is, not to increase her supply of food, but to cut it
off by forbidding her to work in a factory for a month af