"Platonic guardians" are to be found, and its
weekly disparagement of democracy do not offer much promise that it will
soon turn in the radical direction. On the contrary it predicts that the
firm possession of political power by the wealthy classes is foredoomed
to result, as in the Roman Empire, in the creation of two main classes,
each of which must become corrupt, "the one by wealth and the other by
poverty," and that finally the latter must become incapable of corporate
resistance. The familiar and scientifically demonstrated fact of the
physical and moral degeneration of a considerable part of the British
working people doubtless suggests to many persons such pessimistic
conclusions. "It is hopeless in our view," the _New Age_ concludes, "to
expect that the poor and ignorant, however desperate and however
numerous, will ever succeed in displacing their wealthy rulers. No slave
revolt in the history of the world has ever succeeded by its own power.
In these days, moreover, the chances of success are even smaller. One
machine gun is equal to a mob."[139]

Indeed the distrust of democracy is so universal among British
Socialists that Belloc, Chesterton and other Liberals accuse them
plausibly, but unjustly, of actually representing an aristocratic
standpoint. In an article entitled "Why I Am Not A Socialist," Mr.
Chesterton expresses a belief, which he says is almost unknown among the
Socialists of England, namely, a belief "in the masses of the common
people."[140] Mr. Belloc, in a debate against Bernard Shaw, predicted
that Socialism, if it comes in England, will probably be simply "another
of the infinite and perpetually renewed dodges of the English
aristocracy."

It may be well doubted if any of the more important of the world's
conservative, aristocratic, or reactionary forces (except the
doctrinaire Liberals) are opposed to Socialism as defined by the Fabian
Society, _i.e._ a gradual movement in the direction of collectivism. Not
only Czar and Kaiser but even the Catholic Church may be claimed as
Socialistic by this standard. Mr. Hubert Bland, one of the original
Fabian Essayists and a very influential member of the Society, himself a
Catholic, actually asserts that the Church never has attacked Fabian or
true Socialism. In view of the fact that the Church is at war with the
Socialist Parties of Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, the
United States, and every country where both the Church and the
Soci