It is in democratic politics, however, that privacy is most neglected, most difficult, and most necessary. In America all observers are agreed as to the danger which results from looking on a politician as an abstract personification of the will of the people, to whom all citizens have an equal and inalienable right of access, and from whom every one ought to receive an equally warm and sincere welcome. In England our comparatively aristocratic tradition as to the relation between a representative and his constituents has done something to preserve customs corresponding more closely to the actual nature of man. A tired English statesman at a big reception is still allowed to spend his time rather in chaffing with a few friends in a distant corner of the room than in shaking hands and exchanging effusive commonplaces with innumerable unknown guests. But there is a real danger lest this tradition of privacy may be abolished in English democracy, simply because of its connection with aristocratic manners. A young labour politician is expected to live in more than American conditions of intimate publicity. Having, perhaps, just left the working bench, and having to adjust his nerves and his bodily health to the difficult requirements of mental work, he is expected to receive every caller at any hour of the day or night with the same hearty good will, and to be always ready to share or excite the enthusiasm of his followers. After a year or two, in the case of a man of sensitive nervous organisation, the task is found to be impossible. The signs of nervous fatigue are at first accepted by him and his friends as proofs of his sincerity. He begins to suffer from the curate's disease, the bright-eyed, hysterical condition in which a man talks all day long to a succession of sympathetic hearers about his own overwork, and drifts into actual ill-health, though he is not making an hour's continuous exertion in the day. I knew a young agitator in that state who thought that he could not make a propagandist speech unless the deeply admiring pitman, in whose cottage he was staying, played the Marseillaise on a harmonium before he started. Often such a man takes to drink. In any case he is liable, as the East End clergymen who try to live the same life are liable, to the most pitiable forms of moral collapse. Such men, however, are those who being unfit for a life without privacy, do not survive. Greater political danger comes perhaps from those who are comparatively fit. Any one who has been in America, who has stood among the crowd in a Philadelphian law-court during the trial of a political case, or has seen the thousands of cartoons in a contest in which Tammany is concerned, will find that he has a picture in his mind of one type at least of those who do survive.