things; but when there is no will there is no way. My
nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of
a sow's ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and
universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level,
the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing
but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not
be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest
abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been
pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in
practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well
as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is
no hereditary "governing class" any more than a hereditary hooliganism.
We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy,
which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet
if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what
chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable
voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in
person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration,
can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in
others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where
are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has
produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full
stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and
too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being
cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being
sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and
morality.

Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome
and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem
et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and
melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and
hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down
to his pocket, our fingers go up to the brims of our hats by instinct.
Our ideal prosperity is not the prosperity of the industrial north, but
the prosperity of the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice
and Monte Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where
the workers a