name, and to get a title. For
instance, we all read with earnestness and patience the pages of the
'Daily Mail', and there are times when we feel moved to cry, "Bring to
us the man who thought these strange thoughts! Pursue him, capture
him, take great care of him. Bring him back to us tenderly, like some
precious bale of silk, that we may look upon the face of the man who
desires such things to be printed. Let us know his name; his social
and medical pedigree." But in the modern muddle (it might be said)
how little should we gain if those frankly fatuous sheets were indeed
subscribed by the man who had inspired them. Suppose that after every
article stating that the Premier is a piratical Socialist there were
printed the simple word "Northcliffe." What does that simple word
suggest to the simple soul? To my simple soul (uninstructed otherwise)
it suggests a lofty and lonely crag somewhere in the wintry seas towards
the Orkheys or Norway; and barely clinging to the top of this crag the
fortress of some forgotten chieftain. As it happens, of course, I
know that the word does not mean this; it means another Fleet Street
journalist like myself or only different from myself in so far as he has
sought to secure money while I have sought to secure a jolly time.

A title does not now even serve as a distinction: it does not
distinguish. A coronet is not merely an extinguisher: it is a
hiding-place.

But the really odd thing is this. This false quality in titles does not
merely apply to the new and vulgar titles, but to the old and historic
titles also. For hundreds of years titles in England have been
essentially unmeaning; void of that very weak and very human instinct in
which titles originated. In essential nonsense of application there is
nothing to choose between Northcliffe and Norfolk. The Duke of Norfolk
means (as my exquisite and laborious knowledge of Latin informs me) the
Leader of Norfolk. It is idle to talk against representative government
or for it. All government is representative government until it begins
to decay. Unfortunately (as is also evident) all government begins to
decay the instant it begins to govern. All aristocrats were first meant
as envoys of democracy; and most envoys of democracy lose no time in
becoming aristocrats. By the old essential human notion, the Duke of
Norfolk ought simply to be the first or most manifest of Norfolk men.

I see growing and filling out before me the image of an ac