magnificence can look, you will
discover--forgive the word!--a little _vulgar_....

Once you have seen that you will continue to see it. The _nouveau
riche_ of the new Plutocratic type comes thrusting among you,
demonstrating that sometimes quite obtrusively. You begin by feeling
sorry for his servants and then apologetic to your own. You cannot "go
it" as the rich Americans and the rich South Africans, or prosperous
book-makers or rich music-hall proprietors, "go it," their silver and
ivory and diamonds throw light on your own. And among other things you
discover you are not nearly so dependent on the numerous men in
livery, the spaces and enrichments, for your pride and comfort, as
these upstart people.

I trust also to the appeal of the intervening spaces. You cannot so
entirely close your world in from the greater world without that, in
transit at least, the other aspects do not intrude. Every time you
leave Charing Cross for the Continent, for example, there are all
those horrible slums on either side of the line. These things _are_,
you know, a part of your system, part of you; they are the reverse of
that splendid fabric and no separate thing, the wide rich tapestry of
your lives comes through on the other side, stitch for stitch in
stunted bodies, in children's deaths, in privation and anger. Your
grandmothers did not realize that. You do. You _know_. In that
recognition and a certain nobility I find in you, I put my hope, much
more than in any dreadful memories of 1789 and those vindictive pikes.
Your class is a strangely mixed assembly of new and old, of base and
fine. But through it all, in Great Britain and Western Europe
generally, soaks a tradition truly aristocratic, a tradition that
transcends property; you are aware, and at times uneasily aware, of
duty and a sort of honour. You cannot bilk cabmen nor cheat at cards;
there is something in your making forbids that as strongly as an
instinct. But what if it is made clear to you (and it is being made
clear to you) that the wealth you have is, all unwittingly on your
part, the outcome of a colossal--if unpremeditated--social bilking?

Moreover, though Socialism does ask you to abandon much space and
service, it offers you certain austere yet not altogether inadequate
compensations. If you will cease to have that admirable house in
Mayfair and the park in Kent and the moorlands and the Welsh castle,
yet you will have another ownership of a finer kind to