re admirable. Yet the legend of
the comic papers is profoundly true. It draws attention to the fact that
it is much harder to be a nice mother-in-law than to be nice in any
other conceivable relation of life. The caricatures have drawn the worst
mother-in-law a monster, by way of expressing the fact that the best
mother-in-law is a problem. The same is true of the perpetual jokes in
comic papers about shrewish wives and henpecked husbands. It is all a
frantic exaggeration, but it is an exaggeration of a truth; whereas all
the modern mouthings about oppressed women are the exaggerations of a
falsehood. If you read even the best of the intellectuals of to-day you
will find them saying that in the mass of the democracy the woman is the
chattel of her lord, like his bath or his bed. But if you read the comic
literature of the democracy you will find that the lord hides under the
bed to escape from the wrath of his chattel. This is not the fact, but
it is much nearer the truth. Every man who is married knows quite well,
not only that he does not regard his wife as a chattel, but that no man
can conceivably ever have done so. The joke stands for an ultimate
truth, and that is a subtle truth. It is one not very easy to state
correctly. It can, perhaps, be most correctly stated by saying that,
even if the man is the head of the house, he knows he is the figurehead.

But the vulgar comic papers are so subtle and true that they are even
prophetic. If you really want to know what is going to happen to the
future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological prophecies,
do not read even Mr. Wells's Utopias for this purpose, though you should
certainly read them if you are fond of good honesty and good English. If
you want to know what will happen, study the pages of _Snaps_ or
_Patchy Bits_ as if they were the dark tablets graven with the
oracles of the gods. For, mean and gross as they are, in all seriousness,
they contain what is entirely absent from all Utopias and all the
sociological conjectures of our time: they contain some hint of the
actual habits and manifest desires of the English people. If we are
really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself,
we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people,
but in the literature which the people studies.

I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was a
much better prophecy than the careful observations of the