lish, having lost America a century ago because they
preferred George III, were quite prepared to lose South Africa to-day
because they preferred aristocratic commanders to successful ones.
Horace Walpole, when the parliamentary recess came at a critical period
of the War of Independence, said that the Lords could not be expected
to lose their pheasant shooting for the sake of America. In the working
class, which, like all classes, has its own official aristocracy, there
is the same reluctance to discredit an institution or to "do a man out
of his job." At bottom, of course, this apparently shameless sacrifice
of great public interests to petty personal ones, is simply the
preference of the ordinary man for the things he can feel and
understand to the things that are beyond his capacity. It is stupidity,
not dishonesty.

Burgoyne fell a victim to this stupidity in two ways. Not only was he
thrown over, in spite of his high character and distinguished services,
to screen a court favorite who had actually been cashiered for
cowardice and misconduct in the field fifteen years before; but his
peculiar critical temperament and talent, artistic, satirical, rather
histrionic, and his fastidious delicacy of sentiment, his fine spirit
and humanity, were just the qualities to make him disliked by stupid
people because of their dread of ironic criticism. Long after his
death, Thackeray, who had an intense sense of human character, but was
typically stupid in valuing and interpreting it, instinctively sneered
at him and exulted in his defeat. That sneer represents the common
English attitude towards the Burgoyne type. Every instance in which the
critical genius is defeated, and the stupid genius (for both
temperaments have their genius) "muddles through all right," is popular
in England. But Burgoyne's failure was not the work of his own
temperament, but of the stupid temperament. What man could do under the
circumstances he did, and did handsomely and loftily. He fell, and his
ideal empire was dismembered, not through his own misconduct, but
because Sir George Germain overestimated the importance of his Kentish
holiday, and underestimated the difficulty of conquering those remote
and inferior creatures, the colonists. And King George and the rest of
the nation agreed, on the whole, with Germain. It is a significant
point that in America, where Burgoyne was an enemy and an invader, he
was admired and praised. The climate there is n