fashionable society
going without any instruction in sociology.

The Cherry Orchard

The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort.
With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as
the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of
Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and
would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds.
Not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through
the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of
Votes for Everybody get into parliament if handicapped by a serious
modern cultural equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a
vacuum would have left them helpless end ineffective in public
affairs. Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even those who
lived within their incomes were really kept going by their solicitors
and agents, being unable to manage an estate or run a business without
continual prompting from those who have to learn how to do such things
or starve.

From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of things
could be hoped. It is said that every people has the Government
it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the
electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or
debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a
vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness.

Nature's Long Credits

Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not
one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She
demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls
us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common
domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly
and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil
consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two
generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and
then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh
air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for
plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the
city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital
gangrene, slaughtering right and left