This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn oppressive is the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory of progress to allow.  It must always be on the look out for every privilege being abused, for every working right becoming a wrong.  In this matter I am entirely on the side of the revolutionists.  They are really right to be always suspecting human institutions; they are right not to put their trust in princes nor in any child of man.  The chieftain chosen to be the friend of the people becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told.  Here, I say, I felt that I was really at last on the side of the revolutionary.  And then I caught my breath again:  for I remembered that I was once again on the side of the orthodox.

Christianity spoke again and said:  “I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings.  This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress.  If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin.  You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is—­the Fall.”

I have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a sword; here I confess it came in like a battle-axe.  For really (when I came to think of it) Christianity is the only thing left that has any real right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred.  I have listened often enough to Socialists, or even to democrats, saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally degraded.  I have listened to scientific men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions vice and wrong will disappear.  I have listened to them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination.  For it was like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on.  If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike democracy dead.  If the poor are thus utterly demoralized, it may or may not be practical to raise them.  But it is certainly quite practical to disfranchise them.  If the man with a bad bedroom cannot give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall give no vote.  The governing class may not unreasonably say:  “It may take us some time to reform his bedroom.  But if he is the brute you say, it will take him very little time to ruin our country.  Therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance.”  It fills me with horrible amusement to observe the way in which the earnest Socialist industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy, expatiating blandly upon the evident