Democracy is the rising star, mounting clear and bright over falling kingdoms and toppling empires. Crowns are going cheap in the market to-day, and the divine right of kings is a broken weapon flung in the mud of the world’s scorn and picked up as a toy for _Punch_ to provoke laughter. The old nobility is losing its ancient charter to sit exclusive in the high places of honour, and the common people--the new caste--are coming into possession and power. The working-man must be tailored to the grand part he plays in history. He will feel uneasy perhaps wearing his first new dress suit--it will worry him like a misfit. But clothes add splendour to our common lot. With the salvation of the country dependent on his nod he must cast the stodgy cloth cap that clowns his head on bank holidays and nod heroically to the admirers who retinue his movements. Democracy is the unknown god it will be fashionable to worship when the war is over. Now we are all wasting ink and paper and taxing our small brains prophesying what the world will be like in the flowering-time of peace, when everybody will become deliriously happy, wise, and good. We shall move more cautiously then, like a cat stepping circumspectly over broken glass on top of the garden wall. We will make no mistakes, as we did in the feckless past, bringing us not only bleeding feet, but wounded hearts. There must be no party politics in the land as there used to be when politicians sold their country to buy their party into power, and sold themselves to keep the power which they had bought. Everyone will want to do good to his neighbour, and our neighbour will want to do good to himself, and so social reform now and henceforth is the compelling idea that holds the public fancy. But no two social reformers think alike or advance the same doctrines of reform, although the same idea dominates the mind of all the doctrinaires. An idea is an abstract, invisible, impalpable, thing that enters into the mind of man naked and unadorned. Before exposing this naked idea to public observation it must be clothed and attractively dressed. Confusion comes in with the clothes. Fashions in clothes differ so that the same idea differently dressed appears to be a different object. However, it is not. Ideas do not differ: it is the expression of them that differs. It is when you clothe your idea with words and deck it in literary plumage that the mischief stalks in and divergent opinions clash and confound us.