“It isn’t any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere alternative whether we will be, how shall I put it?—­the bridegrooms of pleasure or the bridegrooms of duty.  It is infinitely vaster and more subtly moral than that.  There are a thousand good lives possible, of which we may have one, lives which are soundly good, or a thousand bad lives, if you like, lives which are thoroughly bad—­that’s the old and perpetual choice, that has always been—­but what is more evident to me and more remarkable and disconcerting is that there are nowadays ten thousand muddled lives lacking even so much moral definition, even so much consistency as is necessary for us to call them either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate lives, more and more of them, opening out as the possible lives before us, a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation, a wilderness so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the way to either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility.  Such planless indeterminate lives, plebeian lives, mere lives, fill the world, and the spectacle of whole nations, our whole civilization, seems to me to re-echo this planlessness, this indeterminate confusion of purpose.  Plain issues are harder and harder to find, it is as if they had disappeared.  Simple living is the countryman come to town.  We are deafened and jostled and perplexed.  There are so many things afoot that we get nothing. . . .

“That is what is in my mind when I tell you that we have to gather ourselves together much more than we think.  We have to clench ourselves upon a chosen end.  We have to gather ourselves together out of the swill of this brimming world.

“Or—­we are lost. . . .”

("Swill of this brimming world,” said White.  “Some of this sounds uncommonly like Prothero.”  He mused for a moment and then resumed his reading.)

“That is what I was getting at when, three years ago, I made an attack upon Democracy to the mother society of this society, an attack that I expressed ill and failed to drive home.  That is what I have come down now to do my best to make plainer.  This age of confusion is Democracy; it is all that Democracy can ever give us.  Democracy, if it means anything, means the rule of the planless man, the rule of the unkempt mind.  It means as a necessary consequence this vast boiling up of collectively meaningless things.

“What is the quality of the common man, I mean of the man that is common to all of us, the man who is the Standard for such men as Carnac, the man who seems to be the ideal of the Catholic Democrat?  He is the creature of a few fundamental impulses.  He begins in blind imitation of the life about him.  He lusts and takes a wife, he hungers and tills a field or toils in some other way to earn a living, a mere aimless living, he fears and so he does not wander, he is jealous and stays by his wife and his job, is fiercely yet often stupidly and injuriously