XXI.

At an inn in the north I once heard three men talking at their breakfast on the question of diet.  They agreed that most people ate too much meat, and one of them went so far as to declare that, for his part, he rather preferred vegetables and fruit.  “Why,” he said, “will you believe me that I sometimes make a breakfast of apples?” This announcement was received in silence; evidently the two listeners didn’t quite know what to think of it.  Thereupon the speaker, in rather a blustering tone, cried out, “Yes, I can make a very good breakfast on two or three pounds of apples.”

Wasn’t it amusing?  And wasn’t it characteristic?  This honest Briton had gone too far in frankness.  ’Tis all very well to like vegetables and fruits up to a certain point; but to breakfast on apples!  His companions’ silence proved that they were just a little ashamed of him; his confession savoured of poverty or meanness; to right himself in their opinion, nothing better occurred to the man than to protest that he ate apples, yes, but not merely one or two; he ate them largely, by the pound!  I laughed at the fellow, but I thoroughly understood him; so would every Englishman; for at the root of our being is a hatred of parsimony.  This manifests itself in all sorts of ludicrous or contemptible forms, but no less is it the source of our finest qualities.  An Englishman desires, above all, to live largely; on that account he not only dreads, but hates and despises, poverty.  His virtues are those of the free-handed and warm-hearted opulent man; his weaknesses come of the sense of inferiority (intensely painful and humiliating) which attaches in his mind to one who cannot spend and give; his vices, for the most part, originate in loss of self-respect due to loss of secure position.

XXII.

For a nation of this temper, the movement towards democracy is fraught with peculiar dangers.  Profoundly aristocratic in his sympathies, the Englishman has always seen in the patrician class not merely a social, but a moral, superiority; the man of blue blood was to him a living representative of those potencies and virtues which made his ideal of the worthy life.  Very significant is the cordial alliance from old time between nobles and people; free, proud homage on one side answering to gallant championship on the other; both classes working together in the cause of liberty.  However great the sacrifices of the common folk for the maintenance of aristocratic power and splendour, they were gladly made; this was the Englishman’s religion, his inborn pietas; in the depths of the dullest soul moved a perception of the ethic meaning attached to lordship.  Your Lord was the privileged being endowed by descent with generous instincts, and possessed of means to show them forth in act.  A poor noble was a contradiction in terms; if such a person existed, he could only be spoken of with wondering sadness, as though he were the victim of some freak of nature.  The Lord was Honourable, Right Honourable; his acts, his words virtually constituted the code of honour whereby the nation lived.