So we discover what would naturally appear the desirable way out of some of our worst confusions to anybody who saw clear and thought straight. But there is little likelihood, probably, of any such way being soon perceived and followed by our community here. And why is this? Because, as a community, we have so little lucidity, we so little see clear and think straight. And why, again, is this? Because our community is so little homogeneous. The lower class has yet to show what it will do in politics. Rising politicians are already beginning to flatter it with servile assiduity, but their praise is as yet premature, the lower class is too little known. The upper class and the middle class we know. They have each their own supposed interests, and these are very different from the true interests of the community. Our very classes make us dim-seeing. In a modern time, we are living with a system of classes so intense, a society of such unnatural complication, that the whole action of our minds is hampered and falsened by it. I return to my old thesis: inequality is our bane. The great impediments in our way of progress are aristocracy and Protestant dissent. People think this is an epigram; alas, it is much rather a truism! An aristocratical society like ours is often said to be the society from which artists and men of letters have most to gain. But an institution is to be judged, not by what one can oneself gain from it, but by the ideal which it sets up. And aristocracy—if I may once more repeat words which, however often repeated, have still a value from their truth—aristocracy now sets up in our country a false ideal, which materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, brutalises our lower class. It misleads the young, makes the worldly more worldly, the limited more limited, the stationary more stationary. Even to the imaginative, whom Lord John Manners thinks its sure friend, it is more a hindrance than a help. Johnson says well: “Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.” But what is a Duke of Norfolk or an Earl Warwick, dressed in broadcloth and tweed, and going about his business or pleasure in hansom cabs and railways like the rest of us? Imagination herself would entreat him to take himself out of the way, and to leave us to the Norfolks and Warwicks of history.