nd biological
discovery that the fittest to survive do survive adduced again as an
argument against income-tax. When one remembers the long commercial
tyranny that followed the Napoleonic wars, the tyranny under which
money-making became the chief duty of man, under which Art foundered and
middle-class morality flourished, one grows uneasy. And if one cannot
forget the stragglers from the Age of Reason, the old, pre-Revolutionary
people who, in the reign of Louis XVIII, cackled obsolete liberalism,
blasphemed, and span wrinkled intrigues beneath the scandalized brows
of neo-Catholic grandchildren, one becomes exceedingly sorry for
oneself.

Even before the war we were not such fools as to suppose that a new
world would grow up in a night. First had to grow up a generation of
civilized men and women to desire and devise it. That was where the
intellectual dilettanti came in. Those pert and unpopular people who
floated about propounding unpleasant riddles and tweaking up the law
wherever it had been most solemnly laid down were, in fact, making
possible the New Age. Not only did they set chattering the rich and
gibbering with rage the less presentable revolutionaries, it was they
who poured out the ideas that filtered through to the trades-union
class; and, if that class was soon to create and direct a brand-new
State, it was high time that it should begin to handle the sort of ideas
these people had to offer. Doubtless the trade-unionists would have
developed a civilization sweeter and far more solid than that which
flitted so airily from _salon_ to studio, from Bloomsbury to Chelsea;
before long, I dare say, they would have dismissed our theories as
heartless and dry and absurd to boot; in the end, perhaps, they would
have had our heads off--but not, I think, until they had got some ideas
into their own. The war has ruined our little patch of civility as
thoroughly as a revolution could have done; but, so far as I can see,
the war offers nothing in exchange. That is why I take no further
interest in schemes for social reconstruction.

THE END

INDEX OF NAMES

Abbas, Shah, 163

Abbassi, Riza, 162

Abraham, Miss E., 13, 132

Adeney, 178

Aeschylus, 32

Alexander, 24

Alfieri, 33

Anet, Claude, 157, 159, 160

Angelo, Michael, 185

Archer, 29

Archibald, Raymond Clare, 82, 84

Archimedes, 242

Ariosto, 55

Aristophanes, 99-103, 106-111, 246

Aristotle, 25, 34

Arnold, Matthew, 86