Collectivist has a perfect right to think it the only sound scheme; but it is not the only plausible or possible scheme.  We might have peasant proprietorship; we might have the compromise of Henry George; we might have a number of tiny communes; we might have co-operation; we might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred things.  I am not saying that any of these are right, though I cannot imagine that any of them could be worse than the present social madhouse, with its top-heavy rich and its tortured poor; but I say that it is an evidence of the stiff and narrow alternative offered to the civic mind, that the civic mind is not, generally speaking, conscious of these other possibilities.  The civic mind is not free or alert enough to feel how much it has the world before it.  There are at least ten solutions of the Education question, and no one knows which Englishmen really want.  For Englishmen are only allowed to vote about the two which are at that moment offered by the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition.  There are ten solutions of the drink question; and no one knows which the democracy wants; for the democracy is only allowed to fight about one Licensing Bill at a time.

So that the situation comes to this:  The democracy has a right to answer questions, but it has no right to ask them.  It is still the political aristocracy that asks the questions.  And we shall not be unreasonably cynical if we suppose that the political aristocracy will always be rather careful what questions it asks.  And if the dangerous comfort and self-flattery of modern England continues much longer there will be less democratic value in an English election than in a Roman saturnalia of slaves.  For the powerful class will choose two courses of action, both of them safe for itself, and then give the democracy the gratification of taking one course or the other.  The lord will take two things so much alike that he would not mind choosing from them blindfold—­and then for a great jest he will allow the slaves to choose.

THE MAD OFFICIAL

Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world.  I have very nearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly all my friends, born under the general doom of mortals, but especially of moderns; I mean the doom that makes a man come almost to the end of thinking before he comes to the first chance of living.

But the process of going mad is dull, for the simple reason that a man does not know that it is going on.  Routine and literalism and a certain dry-throated earnestness and mental thirst, these are the very atmosphere of morbidity.  If once the man could become conscious of his madness, he would cease to be man.  He studies certain texts in Daniel or cryptograms in Shakespeare through monstrously magnifying spectacles, which are on his nose night and day.  If once he could take off the spectacles he would smash them.  He deduces all his fantasies about the Sixth Seal or the Anglo-Saxon Race from one unexamined and invisible first principle.  If he could once see the first principle, he would see that it is not there.