entrance of the facts of
life--at least, of the disagreeable facts of life. It is by a perfect
network of castles of this kind that so many feudal privileges have
been kept alive generations after anyone defends the idea of
feudalism. Against stupidity, it has been said, the gods themselves
fight in vain, and it is hardly to be wondered at that democracy also
falls back from the impassive walls of those old castles like a broken
tide. It is only fair to say, however, that again and again different
noble inmates--how suggestive a word--of the castles have refused to
shelter themselves behind the drawbridge of stupidity and have even
offered to lead the people in an assault on castles in general. It is
then usually discovered that the people, too, have their dear retreat
of stupidity to which they fly on the first hint of a raid upon
Utopia. The stupidity of the underfed is an even more desperate thing
than the stupidity of the overfed, and, when a castellan offers his
sword to their cause, they merely look at each other and ask darkly:
"What's he going to get out of it?" It is the popular stupidity which
led Mr Shaw the other day to observe that he had more hope of
converting a millionaire than a millionaire's chauffeur to Socialism.
Certainly it is the stupid in the back streets who make the stupid in
the castles secure. The latter see in the former, indeed, not only
their first line of defence, but their justification. They see their
justification, however, in everything and everybody. They wrap
themselves up in little comforting thoughts that the poor do not feel
things as the respectable do. I have heard a comfortable artist, for
instance, in winter, arguing that there was no need to pity a blind
beggar shivering at a street-corner. "Each of us is kept warm," he
declared, "by a little stove in his stomach, and you would be
surprised to know how little it takes to keep a man like that's stove
alight. You see, he's been training himself all his life to do with
very little food and very little clothing and to sit out in all kinds
of weather. A fall in the temperature that would paralyse you or me
would affect him hardly more than a fall in the price of champagne.
You see, he's learned to do without things." There was almost a note
of envy in his voice for the man who had learned to do without
things--without soap, and meat, and blankets, and clothes-brushes, and
servants, and fires, and sunshine. That seems to be one of