ctly individual
ideals of this or that person who happens to have the power to carry
them out. When these private principles are held by very rich people,
the result is often the blackest and most repulsive kind of despotism,
which is benevolent despotism. Obviously it is the public which ought
to have public spirit. But in this country and at this epoch this is
exactly what it has not got. We shall have a public washhouse and a
public kitchen long before we have a public spirit; in fact, if we had a
public spirit we might very probably do without the other things. But if
England were properly and naturally governed by the English, one of the
first results would probably be this: that our standard of excess or
defect in property would be changed from that of the plutocrat to that
of the moderately needy man. That is, that while property might be
strictly respected, everything that is necessary to a clerk would be
felt and considered on quite a different plane from anything which is a
very great luxury to a clerk. This sane distinction of sentiment is
not instinctive at present, because our standard of life is that of the
governing class, which is eternally turning luxuries into necessities
as fast as pork is turned into sausages; and which cannot remember the
beginning of its needs and cannot get to the end of its novelties.

Take, for the sake of argument, the case of the motor. Doubtless the
duke now feels it as necessary to have a motor as to have a roof, and in
a little while he may feel it equally necessary to have a flying ship.
But this does not prove (as the reactionary sceptics always argue) that
a motor really is just as necessary as a roof. It only proves that a man
can get used to an artificial life: it does not prove that there is no
natural life for him to get used to. In the broad bird's-eye view of
common sense there abides a huge disproportion between the need for a
roof and the need for an aeroplane; and no rush of inventions can ever
alter it. The only difference is that things are now judged by the
abnormal needs, when they might be judged merely by the normal needs.
The best aristocrat sees the situation from an aeroplane. The good
citizen, in his loftiest moments, goes no further than seeing it from
the roof.

It is not true that luxury is merely relative. It is not true that it
is only an expensive novelty which we may afterwards come to think a
necessity. Luxury has a firm philosophical meaning;