rced into believing and
suffering everything that it pays to impose on them, and that any false
excuse for an unpopular step will serve if it can be kept in countenance
for a fortnight: that is, until the terms of the excuse are forgotten.
The people, untaught or mistaught, are so ignorant and incapable
politically that this in itself would not greatly matter; for a
statesman who told them the truth would not be understood, and would in
effect mislead them more completely than if he dealt with them according
to their blindness instead of to his own wisdom. But though there is no
difference in this respect between the best demagogue and the worst,
both of them having to present their cases equally in terms of
melodrama, there is all the difference in the world between the
statesman who is humbugging the people into allowing him to do the
will of God, in whatever disguise it may come to him, and one who is
humbugging them into furthering his personal ambition and the commercial
interests of the plutocrats who own the newspapers and support him on
reciprocal terms. And there is almost as great a difference between
the statesman who does this naively and automatically, or even does it
telling himself that he is ambitious and selfish and unscrupulous, and
the one who does it on principle, believing that if everyone takes the
line of least material resistance the result will be the survival of the
fittest in a perfectly harmonious universe. Once produce an atmosphere
of fatalism on principle, and it matters little what the opinions or
superstitions of the individual statesmen concerned may be. A Kaiser
who is a devout reader of sermons, a Prime Minister who is an emotional
singer of hymns, and a General who is a bigoted Roman Catholic may be
the executants of the policy; but the policy itself will be one of
unprincipled opportunism; and all the Governments will be like the tramp
who walks always with the wind and ends as a pauper, or the stone that
rolls down the hill and ends as an avalanche: their way is the way to
destruction.

THE BETRAYAL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Within sixty years from the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species
political opportunism had brought parliaments into contempt; created
a popular demand for direct action by the organized industries
('Syndicalism'); and wrecked the centre of Europe in a paroxysm of that
chronic terror of one another, that cowardice of the irreligious, which,
masked in the