guished not by a name, but a sign.
The whole system dates from a time when picture-writing still really
ruled the world. In those days few could read or write; they signed
their names with a pictorial symbol, a cross--and a cross is a great
improvement on most men's names.

Now, there is something to be said for the peculiar influence of
pictorial symbols on men's minds. All letters, we learn, were originally
pictorial and heraldic: thus the letter A is the portrait of an ox, but
the portrait is now reproduced in so impressionist a manner that but
little of the rural atmosphere can be absorbed by contemplating it. But
as long as some pictorial and poetic quality remains in the symbol, the
constant use of it must do something for the aesthetic education of
those employing it. Public-houses are now almost the only shops that use
the ancient signs, and the mysterious attraction which they exercise may
be (by the optimistic) explained in this manner. There are taverns with
names so dreamlike and exquisite that even Sir Wilfrid Lawson might
waver on the threshold for a moment, suffering the poet to struggle with
the moralist. So it was with the heraldic images. It is impossible to
believe that the red lion of Scotland acted upon those employing it
merely as a naked convenience like a number or a letter; it is
impossible to believe that the Kings of Scotland would have cheerfully
accepted the substitute of a pig or a frog. There are, as we say,
certain real advantages in pictorial symbols, and one of them is that
everything that is pictorial suggests, without naming or defining. There
is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the
intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never
dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the
spring.

Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial
symbolism of all the colours and degrees of aristocracy. When the great
trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made
one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this
pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours,
should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a
crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as
butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the
Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling
mistake-