of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally
degraded. I have listened to scientific men (and there are still
scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor
healthier conditions vice and wrong will disappear. I have listened to
them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination. For it was
like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is
sitting on. If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would
strike democracy dead. If the poor are thus utterly demoralized, it may
or may not be practical to raise them. But it is certainly quite
practical to disfranchise them. If the man with a bad bedroom cannot
give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall
give no vote. The governing class may not unreasonably say, "It may take
us some time to reform his bedroom. But if he is the brute you say, it
will take him very little time to ruin our country. Therefore we will
take your hint and not give him the chance." It fills me with horrible
amusement to observe the way in which the earnest Socialist
industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy, expatiating
blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule. It is like
listening to somebody at an evening party apologising for entering
without evening dress, and explaining that he had recently been
intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off his clothes in the
street, and had, moreover, only just changed from prison uniform. At any
moment, one feels, the host might say that really, if it was as bad as
that, he need not come in at all. So it is when the ordinary Socialist,
with a beaming face, proves that the poor, after their smashing
experiences, cannot be really trustworthy. At any moment the rich may
say, "Very well, then, we won't trust them," and bang the door in his
face. On the basis of Mr. Blatchford's view of heredity and environment,
the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming. If clean homes and
clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at
any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better
conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should
not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them? On
the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest. The
comfortable class must be merely our vanguard in Utopia.

Is there any answer to the proposition that those wh