would be quite obvious that the
rich have it more than the poor. We are always ready to make a saint or
prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little
kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or
prophet was something quite different. The mediaeval saint or prophet
was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little
kindly advice to the educated. The old tyrants had enough insolence to
despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them.
It was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that
admonished the gentleman. And just as we are undemocratic in faith and
morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude in such matters,
undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics. It is a sufficient
proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are
always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats,
we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the
governing class is always saying to itself, "What laws shall we make?"
In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, "What laws can
we obey?" A purely democratic state perhaps there has never been. But
even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every
feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all
probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for
breaking a sumptuary law. His head might be cut off for high treason.
But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed
class, but not the governing. We have public-house licensing laws, but
not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity
and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and
hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy--that is,
against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a
rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge. But we have no laws
against heresy--that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the
whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be
likely to be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not that it
necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of
sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the
hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never
suffer. Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad,
th