But I am not arguing here that any such things ought to happen; I am merely calling attention to the fact that, under democracy, it is becoming increasingly difficult for officers to be gentlemen, as the term is commonly understood in the world, and perhaps also increasingly improbable. We are, it would appear, passing through a time of changing values, and what was considered decent by our fathers will lose that quality to-morrow. The lower orders of men, having attained to political power, now proceed to force their ideas upon their betters, and some of those ideas naturally have to do with decorum. It is already unlawful in America to take a bottle of wine to a sick friend; in a few years it may also be indelicate. And simultaneously, it may become quite proper to go to the police with anything that is said or done in a friend’s house. Personally, I am inclined to oppose such changes, if only in sheer hunkerousness, but I am surely under no illusion that opposing them will stop them. They flow naturally out of the character of the common man, now in the saddle, and are thus irresistible. He is extremely and even excessively moral, but the concept of what is called honor is beyond him. If, for example, he aspires to public office, he believes that it is entirely proper to abandon one conviction and take on its opposite in order to get votes. And, having got into office, he believes that it is entirely proper to hold on at any cost, even at the cost of common decency. There is a familiar example. I allude to the Cathcart case. In that case a high officer of State found himself confronting an uncomfortable dilemma. On the one hand he was bound by an outrageous law to engage in a public and obscene chase of a woman taken in adultery. On the other hand he was bound by the code of all civilized men to refuse and refrain. What was the way out for him? The way out, obviously, was for him to resign his office--in other words, to decline flatly to perform any such ignoble and disgusting duty, and to spurn as insults the honors and emoluments offered for doing it. But, as far as I can make out, he never so much as thought of that. Instead he played the bounder--and kept his dirty job. His conduct, I believe, seemed quite proper to the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. The newspapers, in discussing it, never once suggested that a man of honor, in his boots, would resign forthwith. Instead, they simply denounced him for doing his plain duty under the law--that is, they proposed that he get out of his dilemma by violating his oath of office. The device is characteristically American. Anything is fair and decent that keeps a man his job. That has been the settled American doctrine since Jackson’s time.