ng beyond his own business interests and
personal appetites and ambitions. As a result, the people who did
not feel in the least inconvenienced by being no longer governed by
Nobodaddy soon found themselves very acutely inconvenienced by being
governed by fools and commercial adventurers. They had forgotten not
only God but Goldsmith, who had warned them that 'honor sinks where
commerce long prevails.'

The lieutenants of God are not always persons: some of them are
legal and parliamentary fictions. One of them is Public Opinion. The
pre-Darwinian statesmen and publicists were not restrained directly by
God; but they restrained themselves by setting up an image of a Public
Opinion which would not tolerate any attempt to tamper with British
liberties. Their favorite way of putting it was that any Government
which proposed such and such an infringement of such and such a British
liberty would be hurled from office in a week. This was not true: there
was no such public opinion, no limit to what the British people would
put up with in the abstract, and no hardship short of immediate and
sudden starvation that it would not and did not put up with in the
concrete. But this very helplessness of the people had forced their
rulers to pretend that they were not helpless, and that the certainty of
a sturdy and unconquerable popular resistance forbade any trifling with
Magna Carta or the Petition of Rights or the authority of parliament.
Now the reality behind this fiction was the divine sense that liberty
is a need vital to human growth. Accordingly, though it was difficult
enough to effect a political reform, yet, once parliament had passed it,
its wildest opponent had no hope that the Government would cancel it,
or shelve it, or be bought off from executing it. From Walpole to
Campbell-Bannerman there was no Prime Minister to whom such renagueing
or trafficking would ever have occurred, though there were plenty who
employed corruption unsparingly to procure the votes of members of
parliament for their policy.

POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM IN EXCELSIS

The moment Nobodaddy was slain by Darwin, Public Opinion, as divine
deputy, lost its sanctity. Politicians no longer told themselves that
the British public would never suffer this or that: they allowed
themselves to know that for their own personal purposes, which are
limited to their ten or twenty years on the front benches in parliament,
the British public can be humbugged and coe