ts
of vital significance. It is not mere commerce. Papers could have
been sold in even greater numbers on the strength of the stupendous
political events of England and the Continent.

England is a democracy, but what is the virtue of a democracy which
languishes in ignorance? Of all countries Britain has now the broadest
basis of franchise. We can vote, but what is the use of voting when
you know nothing of the issues at stake, and when even the candidates
are ignorant of affairs and try to win by making sentimental popular
appeals to varying prejudices? England is low. It is a humiliating
platitude. England stands far lower to-day than the level of her
national sacrifices.

The civil service and army and police are carrying on the
administration of Great Britain and Ireland, and foreign and imperial
policy. Politicians and statesmen seem to be inferior in mind and
training to the civil servants who keep the machine going. The gifts
requisite for getting into power in England are not the same gifts
which are needed for wise government. What the undistinguished have
learned painfully at school our leaders somehow have missed. One could
forgive the politician if he understood the elements of political
economy. But the unforgiveable confronts us, and our new system of
government has admitted to power people capable of abrogating penny
post and abolishing penny-a-mile railway travel, and of raising
telephone charges because the more the subscribers the more the
expense. If they are capable of these elementary mistakes it is not
surprising that they should have failed to ward off the great trade
depression, and failed to help Europe to get together. The
accessibility of markets in Europe does not interest politicians except
in the most casual way.

A remarkable phenomenon of the time is the continuation of the grand
traffic in public honours which reached such dimensions during the war.
It cannot be thought that the party funds of the politicians in power
are so low that they have to be supplemented two or three times a year.
Yet on June 4th, for instance, behold once more new Barons, Baronets,
Knights, Orders of the Bath, and Privy Councillors in columns of names.
Over and above the heads of the ordinary English people a new
aristocracy, if one can call it so, is being built up from the ranks of
business men. The ordinary British citizen begins to feel in a vague
way that there are now many thousands of