, and honest bagmen.

As for the tradesman, he is no longer an expert any more than the critic
or the impressario is. No longer a merchant, no longer a shop-keeper
even, he is to-day a universal provider. Fifty years ago the nice
housewife still prided herself on knowing the right place for
everything. There was a little man in a back street who imported just
the coffee she wanted, another who blended tea to perfection, a third
who could smoke a ham as a ham should be smoked. All have vanished now;
and the housewife betakes herself to the stores. We no longer insist on
getting what we like, we like what we get. The March Hare's paradox has
ceased to be paradoxical. For five years Europe has been doing what it
was told to do; for five years our experts have subjected their critical
sense to a sense of patriotism and a desire to keep in with the
majority; at last the producers themselves have lost their sense of
values and can no longer test the quality of their own productions.
There are no standards.

Let no one imagine that standards are, like police regulations, things
that can be imposed by authority. Standards exist in the mind, where
they grow out of that personal sense of values which is one of the twin
pillars on which civilization rests. All that authority can do is to
stimulate and sharpen that sense by subtle education and absolute
sincerity. The critic can put good things in another man's way and
present them in a sympathetic light; also, he can resolutely refuse ever
to pretend that he likes what he does not like. Standards are imposed
from above in the sense that people who have the ability and leisure to
cultivate their sense of values will, if they take advantage of their
opportunities, inevitably influence those less favourably placed. In the
fine arts, certainly, taste is bound to be very much directed by people
blest with peculiar gifts and armed with special equipment. But, besides
taste in the fine arts, there is such a thing as taste in life; a power
of discerning and choosing for one's self in life's minor matters; and
on this taste in life, this sense of the smaller values, is apt to
flourish that subtler and more precious aesthetic sense. Without this
taste no civilization can exist; for want of it European civilization is
seemingly about to perish.

Take the thing at its lowest. A rich, good-humoured fellow, replete
with a fabulously expensive but distressingly ill-chosen dinner in a
magnific