he instinctive irony of our poor, and he said: "I don't
s'pose they're goin' on an 'oliday at the seaside with little spades
and pails." I was naturally delighted, and, pursuing the same vein of
literary invention, I suggested that perhaps dons were taken down to
Cambridge chained together like this. And as he lived in Cambridge, and
had seen several dons, he was pleased with such a scheme. Then when we
had ceased to laugh, we suddenly became quite silent; and the bleak,
grey eyes of the little man grew sadder and emptier than an open sea. I
knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same, because all
modern sophists are only sophists, and there is such a thing as mankind.
Then at last (and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tune
one is trying to remember) he said: "Well, I s'pose we 'ave to do it."
And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and his
second speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of the
English democracy, its profound sense of humour, its profound sense of
pathos, and its profound sense of helplessness.

.....

It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt
(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out. For every
practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a
tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party it
is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if
possible without bodily violence. Now people talk of democracy as
being coarse and turbulent: it is a self-evident error in mere history.
Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse and turbulent: for it
means appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy means appealing
to the different people. Democracy means getting those people to vote
who would never have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian
ethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have
not the cheek to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in my
friend in the train. The only two types we hear of in this argument
about crime and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types.

We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no
problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything: as if
one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in
bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For
if comfort gives men virtue, the c