knew that Mr. Balfour was
addicted to the plays of Bernard Shaw, that Anatole France had been
entertained at the Savoy, and that Cunninghame Graham--a man who was
once sent to prison for rioting--sat down to dinner at the tables
of the nobility. It made them uneasy and irritable; it also made
them fancy that they, too, should keep abreast of the times. So
they let their wives subscribe to some advanced fashion-paper with
Beardsleyesque-Brunelleschi drawings and felt, quite rightly, that it
was rather nasty. The heart of England was sound. All over the country
were homes in which ladies were permitted neither to smoke cigarettes
nor read the plays of Ibsen nor pronounce, without a shudder, the name
of Mr. Lloyd George. By the majority the use of cosmetics was still
reckoned a sin, Wagner a good joke, and Kipling a good poet. The
_Spectator_ was still read. Nevertheless, the student of paulo-pre-war
England will have to recognize that for a few delirious years a part of
the ruling faction--cosmopolitan plutocrats and some of the brisker
peeresses--listened more willingly to the clever than to the good. There
was a veneer of culture or, as I have hinted, of intellectual
_snobisme_.

Heaven may delude those whom it wills to destroy, but the very
infirmities of its favourites it shapes to their proper advantage. The
governing classes of Europe effectually upset the apple-carts of their
fanciful friends by getting into a war. When that happened these
dream-pedlars surely should have perceived that the game was up. They
had always known that only by devoting its first half to the
accumulation of wealth and culture could the twentieth century hope in
its second to make good some part of its utopic vision. Wealth was the
first and absolute necessity: Socialism without money is a nightmare. To
live well man must be able to buy some leisure, finery, and elbow-room.
Anything is better than a poverty-stricken communism in which no one can
afford to be lazy or unpractical.

If, as seems probable, the energies of Europe during the next fifty
years must be devoted to re-amassing the capital that Europe has
squandered, the concentration on business will be as fatal to the hopes
of social reformers as the poverty that provokes it. One foresees the
hard, unimaginative view of life regaining the ascendancy, laborious
insensibility re-crowned queen of the virtues, "Self-help" by Smiles
again given as a prize for good conduct, and the gra