“There has to be an organisation of international affairs to prevent war, there has to be disarmament with security, world transport at standard charges, the re-establishment of a workable world currency, the development of education throughout the world----” “Things like that aren’t going to be done by Parliament,” said my friend. “They may be done behind the backs of the politicians--if there are interests and intelligences big enough to want them and organise them, but----Have you ever met the average voter?” “I know, I suppose, as many people as you do.” “But your head’s in the clouds....” My friend paused, and then remarked with malignant satisfaction, “The next big question for England is Prohibition.” “But it’s such a secondary matter!” “Exactly. That’s why it’s going to be primary. It’s trivial enough for a democracy to be really earnest about it. Take international settlements and war possibilities; these are infinitely more important things, I grant you. But what does the average voter know about them? There are possibilities of enslavement, of blood and death, of millions of the silly rabbits being scared and starved and mutilated and killed in international conflicts. But these voters of yours can’t grasp the complexity of that. They want peace, of course, but they don’t know what makes peace. So everybody puts peace on the party platform, peace and the League of Nations, or peace and conscription, ‘be prepared,’ or peace and isolation, peace and the dear old flag. It doesn’t matter. The poor mutts can’t grasp it at all. Talk of that kind of thing, argument about that kind of thing, only confuses and wearies them. It doesn’t count in politics. And then there’s currency and finance. Even the bankers don’t understand that--and most of them don’t want to. Prices go up and down and credit expands and contracts and the rabbits get suddenly well off and full of conceit, or they get out-of-work and starved and driven to suicide, but it’s all quite beyond them how it happens, and it gives them a headache and a vicious temper even to try to understand. Obviously they don’t know and obviously therefore they ought to be concerned for knowledge, but what is obvious to you or me isn’t obvious to them. What is the vote-catching value of spending money on scientific and social and political research? What is the vote-catching value of raising the school age to sixteen? That only makes the grown-up voter jealous of the next generation.