are unfit to
rule themselves. But no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this.
For like all virile cynicism it would have an element of humility; which
would not mix with the necessary element of hypocrisy. So we proceed,
just as the Americans do, to make a law for everybody and then evade it
for ourselves. We have not the honesty to say that the rich may bet
because they can afford it; so we forbid any man to bet in any place;
and then say that a place is not a place. It is exactly as if there were
an American law allowing a negro to be murdered because he is not a man
within the meaning of the Act. We have not the honesty to drive the poor
to school because they are ignorant; so we pretend to drive everybody;
and then send inspectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. We
apply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as undemocratic as
Western democracy. Nevertheless there is an element in the American case
which cannot be present in ours; and this chapter may well conclude upon
so important a change.

America can now say with pride that she has abolished the colour bar. In
this matter the white labourer and the black labourer have at last been
put upon an equal social footing. White labour is every bit as much
enslaved as black labour; and is actually enslaved by a method and a
model only intended for black labour. We might think it rather odd if
the exact regulations about flogging negroes were reproduced as a plan
for punishing strikers; or if industrial arbitration issued its reports
in the precise terminology of the Fugitive Slave Law. But this is in
essentials what has happened; and one could almost fancy some negro orgy
of triumph, with the beating of gongs and all the secret violence of
Voodoo, crying aloud to some ancestral Mumbo Jumbo that the Poor White
Trash was being treated according to its name.

_Fads and Public Opinion_

A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is
perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a
reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a
foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own
laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner
have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant
to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous
ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour is
gener