the poor to rule.  It is like listening to somebody at an evening party apologising for entering without evening dress, and explaining that he had recently been intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off his clothes in the street, and had, moreover, only just changed from prison uniform.  At any moment, one feels, the host might say that really, if it was as bad as that, he need not come in at all.  So it is when the ordinary Socialist, with a beaming face, proves that the poor, after their smashing experiences, cannot be really trustworthy.  At any moment the rich may say, “Very well, then, we won’t trust them,” and bang the door in his face.  On the basis of Mr. Blatchford’s view of heredity and environment, the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming.  If clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air?  If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them?  On the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest.  The comfortable class must be merely our vanguard in Utopia.

Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides?  Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul?  As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer is Christianity.  Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich.  For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man.  Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment.  I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle.  I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel.  But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest—­if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this—­that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy.  Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.  The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world.  For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable.  You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed.  The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already.  That is why he is