ey become equally frivolous. The case against the governing class of
modern England is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like, you
may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. The case
against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they
always omit themselves.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion, as is proved by our efforts
to "raise" the poor. We are undemocratic in our government, as is
proved by our innocent attempt to govern them well. But above all we
are undemocratic in our literature, as is proved by the torrent of
novels about the poor and serious studies of the poor which pour from
our publishers every month. And the more "modern" the book is the more
certain it is to be devoid of democratic sentiment.

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple
and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern
fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists
and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an
alligator. There is no more need to study the psychology of poverty
than to study the psychology of bad temper, or the psychology of
vanity, or the psychology of animal spirits. A man ought to know
something of the emotions of an insulted man, not by being insulted,
but simply by being a man. And he ought to know something of the
emotions of a poor man, not by being poor, but simply by being a man.
Therefore, in any writer who is describing poverty, my first objection
to him will be that he has studied his subject. A democrat would have
imagined it.

A great many hard things have been said about religious slumming and
political or social slumming, but surely the most despicable of all is
artistic slumming. The religious teacher is at least supposed to be
interested in the costermonger because he is a man; the politician is
in some dim and perverted sense interested in the costermonger because
he is a citizen; it is only the wretched writer who is interested in
the costermonger merely because he is a costermonger. Nevertheless, so
long as he is merely seeking impressions, or in other words copy, his
trade, though dull, is honest. But when he endeavours to represent that
he is describing the spiritual core of a costermonger, his dim vices
and his delicate virtues, then we must object that his claim is
preposterous; we must remind him that he is a journalist and nothing
else. He ha