ant-Colonel
Balfour. If horses are to be bought for the British Army in India, no
specialist goes, but Lord Edward Cecil. These people of the governing
class do not understand there is such a thing as special knowledge or an
inexorable fact in the world; they have been educated at schools
conducted by amateur schoolmasters, whose real aim in life--if such
people can be described as having a real aim in life--is the episcopal
bench, and they have learnt little or nothing but the extraordinary
power of appearances in these democratic times. To look right and to be
of good report is to succeed. What else is there? The primarily
functional men are ignored in the ostensible political scheme, it
operates as though they did not exist, as though nothing, in fact,
existed but the irresponsible wealthy, and the manipulators of
irresponsible wealth, on the one hand, and a great, grey, politically
indifferent community on the other. Having regard only to the present
condition of political life, it would seem as though this state of
affairs must continue indefinitely, and develop only in accordance with
the laws of inter-action between our charlatan governing class on the
one hand, and the grey mass of governed on the other. There is no way
apparent in the existing political and social order, whereby the class
of really educated persons that the continually more complicated
mechanical fabric of social life is developing may be expected to come
in. And in a very great amount of current political speculation, the
development and final emergence of this class is ignored, and attention
is concentrated entirely upon the inherent process of development of the
political machine. And even in that it is very easy to exaggerate the
preponderance of one or other of what are really very evenly balanced
forces in the machine of democratic government.

There are two chief sets of parts in the machine that have a certain
antagonistic relation, that play against each other, and one's
conception of coming developments is necessarily determined by the
relative value one gives to these opposing elements. One may compare
these two groups to the Power and the Work, respectively, at the two
ends of a lever.[33] On the one hand there is that which pays for the
machine, which distributes salaries and rewards, subsidizes newspapers
and so forth--the central influence.[34] On the other hand, there is
the collectively grey voting mass, with certain prejudices